Beast Games season two review – this mindless, vibeless reality show is like Squid Game meets Love Island
The first season of Beast Games – the big-money reality challenge masterminded and hosted by internet personality Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast – prompted a lawsuit. Five anonymous contestants sued both the production companies behind the series and Donaldson himself, claiming that they had been kept “underfed and overtired”, and alleging an unsafe environment on the set of the Gladiators-ish, Squid Game-esque series (claims, of course, firmly denied by all parties). While the participants claimed they had been “shamelessly exploited” in the name of entertainment, this did little to impede the success of Beast Games, which went on to become Amazon’s most-watched unscripted series ever, garnering 50 million viewers in the month after its release.
You may well come to Beast Games with a sense that this is a slightly murky, mercenary endeavour, the $5m grand prize (“generational wealth!!!!” says Donaldson) distracting from potential ethical issues just below the surface. Weirdly, though, moral issues will probably be the least of viewers’ concerns. More than ever, in its second series Beast Games also happens to be mindless, vibeless television, flecked with Squiddy sadism but also borrowing heavily from the Love Island playbook. As they stay up into the wee hours building improbably high towers from foam blocks or playing convoluted games of dodgeball, the contestants couple up, crash out and even seek to avenge fallen players. Take Luisitin, playing to defend the honour of his wife from series one, by badmouthing her former nemesis, Karim, to anyone who will listen (“he and his brother gaslit my wife on television!”) People say things like “be careful who you trust!” and “he’s backpack boy … his girlfriend is carrying him over the finish line”. You don’t get this sort of feuding on Ninja Warrior, that’s for sure.
As is de rigueur, contestants are shamelessly milked for their personal tragedies. Within minutes, we learn that one participant wishes to use the prize money for a relative’s cancer treatment; later, we hear of people wanting a better life for their families, or looking for funds to help cure rare diseases. But, really, Beast Games doesn’t feel any more cloying than any other series of its ilk, or indeed Donaldson’s own online efforts to help amputees walk again, or cure 1,000 people’s blindness. Strangely, though, it has an immaturity running through it that quickly reminds me of my teenage years. Two players, Jim and Monika, immediately become an item (“shall we make it official?!”), while Luisitin makes it his mission to get another player kicked off the show as quickly as possible, by getting the others to ignore him during a challenge called Bluff, where players have to work out what colour disc they have attached to the backs of their heads. Initially, I thought that Beast City – the show’s heavily floodlit set, where the 200 contestants live and compete – is a bit like a prison, albeit if prisons had their own 24-hour branches of Starbucks. Slowly, I realise it is more like high school.
This season, MrBeast and friends have split the contestants up into two teams, Strong and Smart, playing once again into an adolescent view of the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the challenges become more physical, more of the “smart” team (among them, Trina, who – we are told – has the same IQ as Einstein) begin to fail. What this segregation is supposed to prove is anyone’s guess (people who self-select as strong are better at athletic challenges?!), although in Beast City the aim may simply be to divide and conquer. Players are offered cash bribes to leave the game, which is all well and good until you realise that they may also be getting other people booted out in the process.
MrBeast attracts a lot of attention for his questionable online antics: this is a man who made his name doing things like locking people in isolation for 100 days. By that token, Beast Games isn’t particularly controversial. It is, however, prodigiously childish. As well as a rictus grin, Donaldson sports a blazer over a hoodie for the duration of the series, which is deeply unflattering and also a metaphor for his contest. As much as it hopes to smarten up its act, Beast Games feels like the TV equivalent of the sad Christmas fair where an ailing horse is given some antlers and told to look lively. It is fairly cruel, sure, but it’s also incredibly turgid – and maybe that’s worse.
Beast Games is on Prime Video now.
