Beast Games review – one of the most undignified spectacles ever shown on TV | Television and radio

TThe new Amazon game show 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 named restaurants, chocolates, toys, clothes and Nerf guns. His fame among young people is truly unfathomable. In short, he needs television much less than television needs him.

Since the show went into production, however, 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 “severe emotional distressincluding suffering, anxiety, fright, horror, nervousness, anxiety, (…) worry, shock, humiliation and/or shame”. As such, Beast Games arrived yesterday under a cloud of hell.

The thing about this, though, is that a show can withstand a scandal if it’s popular. Everyone forgot e.g. The Strictly Come Dancing bullying accusations the moment the dance started. More pertinently, contestants on last year’s reality show Squid Game: The Challenge claimed they had been treated so badly they suffered hypothermia. But all the controversy disappeared as soon as the show debuted because it got good reviews and decent numbers. So really, the big question is this: are 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 churns out for his YouTube channel, then this will be catnip. Beast Games is basically YouTube on steroids. One thousand people all compete for $5 million in a series of big stunts ranging from pulling monster trucks to answering trivia questions. On the other hand, if you’re new to MrBeast, you might wonder why anyone made a TV show about a screaming, hideous-looking man who seems grimly determined to rip off the Squid Game.

Make no mistake, this show could not exist if it wasn’t for the Squid Game. The parallels are right there on the screen, almost to the point of outright copyright infringement. Beast Games is a reality competition where a huge amount of numbered contestants live in close proximity to each other and compete in various ridiculous challenges to win a huge sum of money, which is 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, one must assume that he didn’t get the satire.

There is a cruel ruthlessness to Beast Games that is truly distasteful. Overwhelmingly, the majority of challenges take the form of self-sacrifice, where groups of contestants are told that they cannot advance to the next round unless one of them willingly gives up their chance at the prize and leaves the show. The ugliness of these challenges is overbearing. There’s endless pleading and crying and full-blown adult tantrums, and anything for a jackpot is statistically unlikely to win. Hand on heart, I can’t remember seeing a more undignified spectacle.

Worse, the contestants all seem to make a virtue of the kind of whiny, snotty sob stories that punctuated the worst moments of The X Factor all those years ago. Participant after participant exhausts himself and makes hysterical cases to himself. They need the money because they want to help homeless children. They need it to escape poverty. A guy is trying to stir up unnecessary emotions from his desire to use the $5 million to help him earn passive income for the rest of his life. It’s enough to make you wish the grand prize was a dose of basic human perspective.

But that’s not good television, so instead we’re left with the unedifying sight of 1,000 attention-seekers embarrassing themselves at the whims of not just one YouTuber, but a YouTuber willing to shout things like, “Everybody has a price!” , as if he were a discount supermarket’s own brand Joker.

True, there’s something strangely compelling about Beast Games, but it’s compelling in the same way that picking a scab is. It exists solely to show us the worst of the human condition, as unpleasantly as possible. In other words, it probably wasn’t worth being sued for.