Well, fuck, here we go. Squid Game: The Challenge is getting a second season. Of course, Netflix would renew the inauthentic, messy, and boring reality series instead of devoting resources to TV shows it recently canceled, including Shadow & Bone (and its potential Six Of Crows spin-off), Lockwood & Co., Freeridge, Farzar, and Glamorous. Why cultivate and promote original stories when regurgitating morally bankrupt stuff in the name of “reality” is an option?
The Challenge takes all the wrong lessons from the South Korean drama that inspired it. Squid Game offered a brutal commentary on the dystopian effects of capitalism. Over its first season, The Challenge is just cringeworthy and sad. It doesn’t seem to understand or care about why Squid Game resonated globally. In fact, the reality show’s producer Tim Harcourt publicly and voluntarily declared his inability to grasp what Squid Game is actually about.
In The Challenge’s first season, 456 participants start by living in a set that looks like the perfect replica of SG. They play childhood games as seen in the original, from “Red Light, Green Light” to the Dalgona cookie challenge, with losers getting eliminated (not dying, don’t worry). The contestants, selected from around the world, indulge in plenty of scheming, gossiping, backbiting, and general seething. Hello, it is a genre trope, after all. Plus, here they’re getting emotionally and physically tested to win a $4.56 million prize.
The finale, which drops on December 6 at 9 p.m. ET, will reveal who wins the grand amount after having gone through what feels like miserable filming experiences. In the past year, reports have been floating of the harrowing behind-the-scenes situations. Freezing temperatures, on-set injuries, accusations of the games being rigged, and interpersonal drama. Is anyone surprised? No. But everyone watched anyway because The Challenge was Netflix’s number-one trending series for the past two weeks.
No wonder the show got renewed so the streaming platform can gain more from this chaos. And now, you can be part of it too if you so desire. The casting for season two is open at SquidGameCasting.com—click at your own risk.