After nine months of hype, controversy, and hyped controversy, MrBeast and Amazon’s Beast Games has begun, the first two episodes of ten added to Amazon Prime today. The reportedly $100 million deal to secure the world’s most popular YouTuber has resulted in a game show that combines Squid Game with, er, Squid Game: The Challenge as its 1000 players compete for “the largest prize in entertainment history,” $5,000,000.
It’s fine? It’s not good, it’s pretty obnoxious, and it’s wildly derivative, but more than anything else—despite the actual enormous scale—it feels small.
Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson is extraordinarily good at doing what he does, no matter how little you may think of what that is. After years of battling against Indian music channel T-Series, Donaldson’s YouTube channel is now not only the most subscribed on the service, but ahead by over 50 million people. It’s at 337 million subscribers—a number that’s higher than the current population of the United States. His mastery has never been delivering unmissable entertainment, but rather working the algorithm like a savant. The result is an extraordinary combination of ruthless cynicism and widely appealing, unchallenging…stuff. It might be Donaldson and his small group of friends visiting the world’s most expensive hotels, or challenging 100 people to stand inside a red circle, or giving away cars to strangers, but its faux-crude editing disguises meticulous craftmanship that maximizes “engagement.”
Which is all to say, you can hate him, his videos, his revolting commercialism, the way he tricks children into thinking the solution to large-scale environmental crises is to engage in performative nothingness, his stupid side-parting, whatever—none of it changes the fact that he’s very, very good at it.
Screenshot: Amazon Prime / Kotaku
Which is what makes Beast Games’ peculiar flatness so bizarre. The formula matches that in a lot of his recent videos, which—ever since the astonishing success of his permission-free rip-off of Squid Game—have frequently featured competitive events: “Every Country On Earth Fights For $250,000,” “Survive 100 Days In A Nuclear Bunker, Win $500,000,” “100 Kids Vs 100 Adults For $500,000.” Each is astonishingly brief given the scale and time they take to film, those three running 18, 15, and 17 minutes respectively. It’s merciless, exhausting viewing, designed to capture its audience for the whole run, commercials not interrupting viewing but breathlessly crammed into the relentless footage, like a tennis ball machine rapid-firing images into your face.
Beast Games, on the other hand, feels like a reality TV competition. Not a good reality TV competition. Not something visually beautiful and exquisitely edited, like Survivor, or something that demands the audience get invested in solving a central mystery, like The Mole, but just some events occurring one after another, while Donaldson endlessly shouts about how much money they’re giving away. It looks so oddly cheap, despite the ludicrous expense, like something filmed on a studio’s back lot.
Oh, and it so blatantly lifts from Squid Game as to just be weird. Sure, the comparison is unavoidable since Netflix remade the Korean drama as a U.S.-made reality show (albeit without murdering its contestants), but why on Earth did Amazon dress up the anonymous stage crew in hooded suits with emblem-blazoned face masks? Why deliberately force that association? Let alone have contestants sleep in rows and rows of bunk beds, all wearing costumes with their number written on their chests and backs. But cheap-looking versions. It’s like trolling, but where Beast Games is the victim of its own troll.
Screenshot: Amazon Prime / Kotaku
Like a lot of 2000s game shows in the wake of The Weakest Link, Beast Games relies heavily on forcing people or groups of people into making selfish decisions, here in order to proceed from the starting 1,000, as the numbers are whittled down. And, to be fair, these are often interesting dilemmas. In the first episode, the 1,000 players are stood on 1,000 podiums in a vast studio, and some CG trickery gives the impression there are vast drops between them (it turns out there are big drops between them, as eliminated players fall through trapdoors in their podium that presumably drop them into sponge pits—and there’s no getting away from how incredible it was to watch that happen to a hundred people, falling a split-second after the last). Donaldson then brings out “bribes,” his trademark briefcases filled with $10,000, and if anyone chooses to eliminate themselves from the game in exchange for the sums, their entire row is eliminated too.
This same formula is then beaten half to death over the first two episodes that were released today, although, again, it can be compelling. Primarily because you get to scream at your TV, “It’s IRRESPONSIBLE not to just take the money!” and then talk among yourselves about how a guaranteed $100,000 now is the correct, perhaps even moral choice, over a one-in-a-thousand chance at $5 million after multiple, unpredictable events, which you already know are more likely to see you eliminated based on someone else’s actions rather than your own failings.
However, by the second episode’s cliffhanger you will witness gobsmacking stupidity in a vastly larger version of the above. “How can I betray these people I’ve grown to love like family over the last three hours for a paltry life-changing amount of money?” these ridiculous people ponder, when the alternative is…carrying on playing in an attempt to beat them to winning the money so they won’t.
There are other oddities, like the moment you see a massive Feastables banner in the “city” they built for the event, as if $100,000,000 wasn’t enough money that Donaldson didn’t demand product placement. (Lunchables are entirely absent.) Or indeed the existence of that “city,” a smattering of buildings and some pretend sidewalks and lawns where the contestants spent an entirely unexplained and un-shown 24 hours between the two episodes. (The first episode ends with a 24-hour timer on a massive screen, and the second begins with it ticking to 0. Huh?)
Screenshot: Amazon Prime / Kotaku
But among all these Squid Game antics and mock-ethical dilemmas, there’s something that’s entirely missing: any sense of this being MrBeast.
Donaldson isn’t one of life’s great TV presenters, but he’s not incompetent, either. He says his lines (albeit in a whiplash-inducing combination of live and ADR), and while it’s fair to level him with the observation that he reacts like a bemused scientist on an alien planet whenever he directly interacts with the contestants, so do most TV game show hosts. But the result of this is that he feels like most other game show hosts, not MrBeast.
Also on the team are his usual YouTube cohorts including Karl Jacobs, Nolan Hansen, Tareq Salameh, and Chandler Hallow. Ava Kris Tyson is notably absent, having been in the middle of what proved to be a series of false accusations during filming, and is seemingly no longer a part of the crew. But, again, their roles on YouTube are to run around screaming and being childlike, which is deeply irritating to adults, and an absolute joy to children. Here, they seem to be intended to offer commentary on the scene, but each gets perhaps two lines over the two episodes. Karl, for whom I have a deep hatred due to hearing his unacceptable laugh so bloody often from my son’s tablet, delivers the best line throughout (as contestants fall through their podiums he notes, “The fall’s only scary for the first two minutes.”), but is otherwise mute.
The editing feels like TV. The camera work feels like TV. The presentation, the events, the obligatory confessionals with individual players, all just TV. TV presented by low-scale personalities, with low-scale production. And this should have been something else! It should have been that god-awful energy of YouTube!
Screenshot: Amazon Prime / Kotaku
It might seem an odd complaint, that the show didn’t feel irritating enough, but if it’s not what MrBeast delivers, then what’s it all for? It’s certainly going to pull in an audience because of the name, but I’m not convinced it’ll keep it. Not least with the show being released weekly now, which is not how kids watch anything.
It’s notable that alongside the launch of the show, the MrBeast YouTube channel also uploaded a 24-minute video that shows his lo-fi means of reducing the number of players from 2,000 to the 1,000 that start the show. It’s designed to be a gateway, the YouTube video literally ending as the Prime show begins, imploring its audience to jump over and enjoy the first episode for free. And, like a thousand internet outlets are unashamedly also promoting today when “reporting” on the program, you’re supposed to pick up that 30-day free trial to carry on.
I think that’ll work at first, but I also think that silly, scrappy YouTube video was far more entertaining for the intended audience than the blandly tidied up and flattened Amazon show. (It also doesn’t hide that some people just walked off, fed up, during filming, and shows how easily people would have been injured during frantic events.)
And so, Beast Games, despite the number of players, the size of the sets, and the enormous prize, feels so strangely small. It feels minor, unimportant, uneventful.
I began by observing how good Donaldson is at what he does, no matter how much I, personally, find it deeply problematic. (My son loves him, and believes in his sticking-plaster philanthropy, and I struggle between letting him love a thing and sometimes feeling it’s necessary to say that he’s doing harm.) Beast Games isn’t what Donaldson’s good at, and that’s really strange. The result is something that’s…fine? Small, unimportant, but fine. Just not what it could or should have been, no matter how little I’d have wanted to watch that.
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