Beast Games Season 2 Review – This mindless, edgy reality show is like Squid Game meets Love Island | TV and radio

TThe first season of Beast Games — the big-money reality challenge masterminded and hosted by Internet personality Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast — led to a lawsuit. Five anonymous contestants filed a lawsuit against both the production companies behind the series and Donaldson himself, alleging that they remained “undernourished and overworked,” and claiming that the environment was unsafe on the set of the Gladiators-ish, Squid Game-esque series (allegations, of course, vehemently denied by all parties). While participants claimed they were being “shamelessly exploited” in the name of entertainment, this did little to derail the success of Beast Games, which became the most-watched unscripted series ever on Amazon, amassing 50 million viewers in the month following its release.

You may come to Beast Games feeling that this is a bit of a mystical endeavor, and that the $5 million grand prize (“generational wealth!!!!” as Donaldson says) distracts from the potential ethical issues lurking just beneath the surface. But strangely enough, moral issues may be the least of viewers’ concerns. More than ever, in its second series, Beast Games comes across as mindless, lifeless television, full of Squiddy’s sadism but also borrowing heavily from Love Island’s playbook. As they stay up until the wee hours of the night building unexpectedly tall towers out of foam blocks or playing complex games of dodgeball, contestants pair up, clash and even seek revenge on fallen players. Take Louisitin, who plays to defend his wife’s honor from the first series, by slandering her former rival Karim, to anyone who will listen (“He and his brother set my wife on fire on TV!”) People say things like “Be careful who you trust!” “It’s a boy carrying a backpack… his girlfriend is carrying him to the finish line.” You won’t get that kind of hostility in Ninja Warrior, that’s for sure.

As usual, the contestants are shamelessly exploited for their personal tragedies. Within minutes, we learned that one of the participants wanted to use the prize money to treat a relative’s cancer; Later, we hear about people wanting a better life for their families, or looking for money to help treat rare diseases. But in reality, Beast Games seems no more obscure than any other series of its kind, or indeed Donaldson’s own online efforts to help amputees walk again, or cure 1,000 people of blindness. But strangely enough, there’s an immaturity going through it that quickly reminds me of my teenage years. The two players, Jim and Monica, immediately become an item (“Should we make it official?!”), while Luisitin makes it his mission to get another player to start the show as quickly as possible, by having the others ignore him during a challenge called Bluff, in which players have to figure out which colored disc they’ve pinned to the back of their head. At first, I thought Beast City—the show’s brightly lit location, where 200 contestants live and compete—is a bit like a prison, albeit with prisons having their own branches. For a 24-hour Starbucks, I realize it’s like high school.

This season, MrBeast and his friends split the contestants into two teams, tough and smart, and once again play into a teenager’s perspective of the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the challenges become more physical, more of the “smart” team members (among them Trina, who – we’re told – has the same IQ as Einstein) begin to fail. What this chapter is supposed to prove is anyone’s guess (people who choose themselves as strong are better at athletic challenges?!), though the goal in Beast City may simply be to divide and conquer. Players are offered cash bribes to leave the game, which is all well and good until you realize that they may also get other people kicked out in the process.

MrBeast attracts a lot of attention for his questionable online antics: This is a guy who made his name by doing things like locking people in isolation for 100 days. For this reason, Beast Games is not particularly controversial. However, he is amazingly childish. In addition to Rictus’ smile, Donaldson wears a jacket over a hoodie for the duration of the series, which is very unflattering and also a metaphor for his rivalry. As much as Beast Games hopes to improve its performance, it feels like the television equivalent of a sad Christmas fair where a sick horse is given some antlers and told to look lively. It’s a bit harsh, sure, but it’s also incredibly bloated – and that might be worse.