Beast Games Review: It’s No Squid Game

The first two episodes of Beast Games are streaming on Prime Video.

Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson didn’t become the biggest YouTuber in the world because of charisma, cleverness or creativity. The new Prime Video series Beast Games makes it abundantly clear that he has none of these qualities. The creator is trying to translate the style, stunts and slapstick generosity of his YouTube channel into a longer project, but the results — which involve him vamping along while 1,000 contestants compete in half-assed games for a $5 million grand prize — prove that his near-ubiquity online is merely a triumph of spectacle. Beast Games is similar to a MrBeast video in how it relies on constant reminders that what you’re seeing is “wild” when in reality it’s almost entirely tiresome.

The MrBeast formula involves frying attention spans by throwing lots of annoyingly loud, yet empty, escalations at the viewer. The same goes for the way Beast Games hits you over the head with refreshers on what’s unfolding right before your eyes as contestants gather to shoot a ball into a giant cup. The first two episodes are completely averse to the kind of tension that better reality shows serve by, say, letting us get to know their contestants and/or not jumping from shot to shot and scene to scene with the energy of a teenager who breaks down their first. Red Bull. One of Donaldson’s YouTube breakthroughs involved a 17-hour marathon in which he recited the name “Logan Paul” 100,000 times, establishing a pattern that carries over to Beast Games: Doing the most in terms of volume while doing the least, when it comes to actual entertainment value.

It all feels eerily similar to when Donaldson recreated Netflix’s Play octopus for a 2021 video that misses the whole point of the dystopian series and instead positions the prospect of desperate people standing up to each other as something aspirational. But as he assures us ad nauseam, Beast Games takes this concept and blows it up to a huge scale, tastelessly allowing us to see a larger number of real people crying over the millions of dollars they’re losing. It’s a shallow series best suited to existing MrBeast fans, reality show completists, or people looking for background noise while scrolling on their phones.

And yet something sinister lurks beneath the surface of this distraction. While some of this, yes, has to do with the allegations of sexual harassment, chronic abuse and more that cast a shadow over the series (Donaldson has said this is “blown out of proportion” and claimed he has yet to release footage to prove it) it also has to do with what made it into the final. Donaldson often intervenes to encourage his viewers to scan a QR code for a chance to win what he says is a $4.2 million giveaway. critics and consumer advocates have already warned could trap the participants in a fraudulent fraudulent loan. In addition to the ethical nightmare of someone with such a largely, predominantly young fanbase shilling for such a widespread company, Beast Games’ partnership with MoneyLion stops everything in the show. Ad readings are par for the course for MrBeast; they often drop right in the middle of the action in his YouTube videos. But what’s awkward is even more awkward on a show that’s apparently a bigger, more serious project from the creator. As is often the case with online celebrities who operate in such fraudulent ways, it’s about getting the bag at any cost.

But Beast Games isn’t just surprisingly boring. It is also almost completely devoid of anything to invest in. Although future episodes may delve deeper into the contestants’ personalities and motivations—the bread and butter of any reality show—once their ranks are cut, the beginning of the series is so impatiently hectic. that we are barely introduced to any of them. Some of this again carries over from YouTube, where MrBeast’s output often feels like a bunch of TikTok videos crammed together for fear you’ll get bored unless something new is thrown in your face right this second. But Beast Games is uniquely out of its depth. The range of games is huge – they include contestants trying to convince their teammates to eliminate themselves and a block-stacking challenge – but they all prioritize breadth over depth. Those that could be more psychologically tense carry no weight, passing at breakneck speed so we can get to the next and then the next and so on. They all feel like they were made up in five minutes, and there’s nothing memorable about them, other than how they steal the iconography and callousness of Squid Game.

An ongoing TV series requires more than a YouTuber who overwhelms his audience with reminders of what’s at stake. Even when Beast Games stumbles into a potentially fun challenge – like a trivia game where we briefly see the players’ personalities shine through – every sequence is so edited to pieces that you don’t actually feel any of its impact. It’s headache-inducing rather than anything close to harrowing or humorous. When Donaldson jumps in to brag via voiceover how they have thousands of cameras on set (a weird flex if ever there was one), it made me wish he had fewer. An editor who could have built some breathing room into the matter would have been nice too.

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This brings us back to Beast Games’ biggest problem: MrBeast himself. Donaldson’s whole persona and approach to creating “content” may have cracked the code to generate record-setting YouTube views, but that doesn’t translate to TV. He’s just not funny enough to carry a show like this; everything he does and says sounds like he’s trying to sell you something instead of genuinely entertaining you. If there was someone else at the center of Beast Games, it might be more engaging. Instead, what we have is a weird, woefully overwrought recreation of his YouTube videos and Donaldson chiming in with what he seems to think is witty commentary. In reality, it pretty much boils down to endless variations of “Can you believe that just happened?”

MrBeast, when it comes down to it, is a hype man for himself, his brand and his content. He just wants us to keep watching, and Beast Games is another part of that. The show, like the man behind it, isn’t inventive, thought provoking or even entertaining. But it’s there, and there’s a lot of it—seven more episodes are set to debut in February. It’s a show that matches the crooked finance company Donaldson hawks throughout: corrosive to the culture, but possibly too big to fail.