Korean Netflix drama became one of the biggest shows ever made

How did Play octopusa Korean-language drama about a series of murderous schoolyard pranks ends up being one of the greatest TV shows ever made? Launched on Netflix in September 2019 this unannounced, barely promoted version of a The Hunger Gamestheme quickly became the streaming giant’s most watched series ever. More than 142 million households spent 1.65 billion hours watching it in the first month.

These are characters that are almost incomprehensible, but creator and director Hwang Dong Hyuk has a simple explanation for his show’s runaway success: “It’s because it’s simple. Also in season 1 I always wanted to keep it simple. It could be the games or it could be the symbols, I just wanted them to be very simple.”

By “the games,” Hwang refers to Play octopus‘s central competition. In the first season, the story begins with a man in a suit signing up the debt-laden and desperate for a tournament on a mysterious island where one of them could win a huge sum of money.

That tournament consisted of a series of six children’s games, from red light, green light to tug-of-war. But in these games, which it turned out were run by a group of rich VIPs for their own entertainment, losing meant death.

The set-up was not new – not only The Hunger Gamesbut film from Rollerball to Hard target has molded people like quarries – but it was the aesthetics. Bright tracksuits for the participants, soldiers in masks, hard candy kits and symbols like squares and triangles everywhere all spoke to Hwang’s overarching philosophy.

“The circles, the Xs, the soldiers in those masks … we thought about different versions of all of them. But I wanted the simplest kind, the simplest symbol that could transcend all barriers. I try to stick to that in the season as well thaw.”

Play octopus stripped storytelling back to basics. When I visited the set of Play octopus earlier this year for the filming of season two (the one filmed in a huge studio complex in South Korea’s Daejeon district, an hour south of Seoul by bullet train), what was most striking was the clarity of ideas.

The pastel block “Maze Stairs” set where players travel between the different games and their lodgings is bigger than last time, but still pretty much the same. The dormitory set, with its stacks of beds (which decrease throughout the series as players are killed) is again a tiled space that feels a bit like a freeway tunnel.

“The themes of the show are reflected in the spaces,” says production designer Chae Kyoung-sun, who won an Emmy for his work on season 1. “I thought of the college when I was driving in a road tunnel. No end, no beginning, a feeling of being trapped.”

It all points to how the second series of Play octopus will in some ways be a repeat of the first. Lead actor Lee Jung-jae, who plays the audience’s eyes in the form of putting on all Gi-hun, says, “There is a scene where I open my eyes in the new set this season. To film that scene, I had to to step foot on set again after so long filming there for Season 1. When I took my first step on set, I was like, ‘Wow, seriously? I’m back here?'”

As the trailers suggest, Gi-hun, who claimed the 45.6 billion Korean won ($49.8 million) prize in Season 1 and was ready to board a plane to see her daughter, is instead returning to the fighting for to get revenge on the organizers. Director Hwang is, as you might expect, tight-lipped about which children’s games will get the win-or-die treatment this time, but as we tour the set, he points to a box of Os and Xs in the costume department that sitting next to the shine and shine of the show’s famous green tracksuits.

This, he explains, is part of a new voting mechanism. At the end of each round, the players (those who haven’t died) will vote on whether or not the games will continue – a kind of twisted democracy, like turkeys voting for Christmas. If season one was about class differences – the rich playing with the poor – then season two, says Hwang, is about polarization and division.

“If you watch the news around the globe,” he says, “we have different conflicts in smaller regions, and then we also have larger wars. So we have these divisions, and it all starts with people siding with people and draws that line between you and others. I wanted to bring that in the form of a symbol in season two.”

It’s a stark capitalist critique that offers yet another reason why Season 1 may have struck such a chord in 2020. Lee Jung-jae says that Play octopus has succeeded because it has always come with an explicit message.

“To ensure that the audience enjoys the entire series, we need more than just entertainment. There must be an overarching theme. Only when that happens can people resonate with the whole narrative and themes, and that’s the only way we can really communicate with the audience.”

Hwang’s overarching theme in both series of Play octopus is capitalism and its discontents: “I lost my father at the age of five,” he says, “and so our family was not the most prosperous to say the least, and my mother had to go through a lot to bring up her children. I think I can safely say that I had a lot of experience making ends meet. Throughout my life, I just thought a lot about political messages and the theme of capitalism. That kind of background has led me to become a filmmaker, there is drawn to the issues of global inequality and capitalism.”

Hwang appreciates the irony that the first season of Play octopus was quickly co-opted by Netflix into a reality show.

“When it comes to reality shows, it doesn’t really have to contain a serious message, as I intended with my series. And I think the way it’s replicated and reproduced and consumed, it all actually makes sense within the mechanism of capitalism… which is what I intended to reflect in Play octopus. So I think if you look at it in the bigger picture, everything is understandable.”

Understandable, perhaps, but still, he admits, surprising. Hwang says he barely noticed the reality show – Play octopus has taken over his life ever since the moment viewers around the world first heard the eerie music and became immersed in the bizarre iconography.

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“Honestly, I’ve just been working nonstop, preparing for this next season and creating it. I’ve been living and breathing Play octopus the world for the last five years, since 2019. So I didn’t really have time or space to experience much else.”

But he has, he says, witnessed the aftershocks of his creation.

“The biggest surprise for me was how quickly and widely the show has reached all over the world. I saw a YouTube video of African children playing Red Light, Green Light – despite this being a series (R-rated ), which kids can’t see. It really let me know how fast and wide and complex content affects us all—and how far and fast it travels.”

Squid Game: Season 2 will be shown on Netflix from December 26 at 19 AEDT.