The new Amazon gameshow Beast Games comes with an awful lot of baggage. At the age of 26, MrBeast has more YouTube subscribers than anyone alive. He is the third most followed person on TikTok. He has put his name to restaurants, chocolates, toys, clothes and Nerf guns. His fame among young people is genuinely unfathomable. In short, he needs television a lot less than television needs him.
However, since the show went into production, the wheels have fallen off somewhat. In September, five Beast Games contestants filed a 54-page class action lawsuit against MrBeast’s production company and Amazon, alleging widespread mistreatment, , inadequate compensation and “serious emotional distress, including suffering, anguish, fright, horror, nervousness, anxiety, […] worry, shock, humiliation, and/or shame”. As such, Beast Games arrived yesterday under a hell of a cloud.
The thing about this, though, is that a show can withstand a scandal if it is popular. Everyone forgot about the Strictly Come Dancing bullying allegations the moment the dancing started, for instance. More pertinently, contestants on last year’s reality show Squid Game: The Challenge claimed they had been treated so poorly that they caught hypothermia. But all the controversy evaporated as soon as the show debuted, because it got good reviews and did decent numbers. So, really, the big question is this: is Beast Games good enough to make people forget about the lawsuit?
The answer to that probably depends on how much you like MrBeast. If you do, and you enjoy the ostentatious displays of wealth he regularly wheels out for his YouTube channel, then this will be catnip. Beast Games is basically YouTube on steroids. A thousand people all compete for $5m, in a series of grand stunts that range from pulling monster trucks to answering trivia questions. One the other hand, if MrBeast is new to you, you might wonder why someone has made a TV show about a shouting, weaselly-looking man who seems grimly determined to rip off Squid Game.
Make no mistake, this show could not exist if it were not for Squid Game. The parallels are right there on screen, almost to the point of outright copyright infringement. Beast Games is a reality competition where a vast amount of numbered contestants live in close quarters and compete in various ridiculous challenges to win a huge sum of money, which sits in a big pile in the middle of the room. The only difference between Beast Games and Squid Game is that when you saw Squid Game, you saw a dystopian satire about wealthy people wringing entertainment from the suffering of the needy. When MrBeast saw it, however, you have to assume that he didn’t get the satire.
There is a cruel ruthlessness to Beast Games that is truly unpalatable. Overwhelmingly, the bulk of the challenges take the form of self-sacrifice, where groups of contestants are told that they can’t progress to the next round unless one of them willingly gives up their shot at the prize and leaves the show. The ugliness of these challenges is overbearing. There is endless pleading and crying and full-blown adult tantrums, and all for a jackpot they are statistically unlikely to win. Hand on heart, I can’t remember seeing a more undignified spectacle.
Worse still, the participants all seem to make a virtue of the sort of wailing, snot-nosed sob stories that characterised the worst moments of The X Factor all those years ago. Contestant after contestant exhausts themselves making hysterical cases for themselves. They need the money because they want to help homeless kids. They need it to escape poverty. One guy tries to wring undue emotion from his desire to use the $5m to help him earn passive income for the rest of his life. It’s enough to make you wish that the grand prize was a dose of basic human perspective.
But that doesn’t make good television, so instead we are left with the unedifying sight of a 1,000 attention seekers embarrassing themselves for the whims of not only a YouTuber, but a YouTuber given to shouting things like, “Everybody has a price!”, as if he were a discount supermarket own-brand Joker.
True, there is something weirdly compelling about Beast Games, but it is compelling in the same way that picking a scab is. It exists solely to show us the worst of the human condition, as obnoxiously as possible. In other words, it probably wasn’t worth getting sued for.
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