The 2021 Korean series “Squid Game,” a global phenomenon as a suspenseful satire on late-stage capitalism strung on the framework of an elimination – literally elimination – competition show, in which characters in financial distress were gulled into participating in murderous versions of children’s games for a giant cash prize.
It’s a horror movie premise, dignified by thoughtful writing and performances. It won six Emmys, including ones for director Hwang Dong-hyuk, who also wrote the series, and actors Lee Jung-Jae and Lee You-mi.
While the world waits for a second season – one is reportedly coming – Netflix, which streamed the original here, filled the gap with “Squid Game: The Challenge,” transmuting Hwang’s fictional game into a real one, minus the executions.
"The Challenge," which premiered Wednesday, replicates “Squid Game’s” sets and costumes and borrows some games from the series but invents some of its own.
The first episode offers, as it must, the original series’ signature game, “Red Light, Green Light,” in which 456 starting players advance across a killing field; if they fail to freeze when a big doll stops singing, they are shot. Explosive squibs identify the losers who fall “dead.” The game is arranged to get to a single winner within a set number of episodes, so a lot of winnowing will happen.
As in the series, contestants are housed in a giant dormitory, over which hangs a big translucent sphere filled with money and more money as contestants go home. They are fed food none of them like, which makes better food a reward.
Alliances form and are undone by events or the crafty maneuvering of crafty maneuvers. As the show goes on, the game takes on its own, increasingly less fun reality; going home is a kind of death, after all – of hope, anyway, to come away with life-changing gobs of money.
Even its fans know that reality television is, like, 80% fiction, wrangling a range of more or less predictable possibilities within parameters set by the producers. At the same time, their true-life subjects supply the details and the dialogue that will be massaged into something like a story. Out of a largely anonymous crowd, “The Challenge” focuses on a handful of players who emerge as characters – or the semblance of characters, being quickly sketched.
We watch them from afar, security camera style, or close-up in conversations that are obviously staged for the camera. If nothing else, the show demonstrates that the world is full of people who are not you but have their own ways of seeing and doing things, their own histories to overcome and fates to work out, and that’s always a lesson worth relearning.
In “Squid Game,” the cruelty – as they say of certain modern politicians and parties – was the point, and a degree of that has been imported into “The Challenge.” Along with the usual tension of the ticking clock, the tough task, and the difficult decision – all very effective – participants are made uncomfortable on a moral level; one might be called upon to choose between acting nobly and metaphorically assassinating a competitor in front of the crowd. They may be forced to face themselves. It’s clever that way.
The not-so-shocking revelation of the original “Squid Game” was that these poor schmoes were being toyed and done away with for the entertainment of the jaded rich. It’s not an entirely novel concept – or an arbitrary one, given how the real world works. It was a series about an audience, with an audience, which gave a viewer some cover, some distance, even as he might be enjoying the awfulness.
But in “Squid Game: The Challenge,” the only audience is, you know, the audience, make of us what you will.
