Is Squid Game: The Challenge Smart or Stupid?

Netflix's spin-off to the highly touted South Korean show Squid Game is interesting, to say the least. It tries to recreate the magic of the thing and turn it into, well, Big Brother. What's branded as the streaming giant's "biggest social experiment" is a reality show that is entirely its own. And Squid Game: The Challenge is all the more fascinating (and controversial) because of it, really.

Around 450 people are competing for a $4.56 million prize and they're actually putting their lives on the line. Literally. Sounds like your typical reality television show, right? Well, the challenges themselves aren't. Most of them are the same challenges from the Netflix banger. The infamous Red Light, Green Light, Sugar Honeycombs, and Hopscotch are all part of it. Minus the blood, of course.

It's interesting to see the show get its version of the Stanford prison experiment. Squid Game: The Challenge is kind of meant to inflict as much physical and emotional damage as it can without it being... illegal. (What did we really expect from a Big Brother type? To murder contestants for money?) It's also had its fair share of controversy, as well. Some competitors apparently chided the show for its working conditions, according to a report by Variety. For instance, they were said to have been made to film in zero-degree weather. One contestant even said that they had played Red Light Green Light. Others say that fellow competitors fainted, hit their heads, and were just straight-up not having a good time (well, what did they really expect, eh?)

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The entire point of the original Squid Game was about addressing issues about wealth inequality, debt, and survival in late-stage capitalism. It just helped that it had a compelling storyline and the characters to boot. The visual appeal of it all wasn't too bad either. To replicate all that with some influencers-to-be would never compare.

Surely, however, Squid Game: The Challenge is good television by reality TV standards. That part of the game where the contestants have to cut a cookie with a pin is a fresh kind of hell. While it snaps blood for fiction and (bad) vibes, the show does replicate some of that fear, just in much smaller doses.

The editing is decent, too, we'd like to think. The drama is there (like that old Marty Scorsese American Express commercial pointed out in one of the photos) and the contestants are pretty interesting in their own weird ways. There's the dude who is sick and tired of the corporate world, the mother and son, and more. In the aftermath of elimination, each person gets to also talk in that purgatory thing where they speak about other contestants as if they were really "unalived." We can't look away.

Would we say that it's a different reality show? Not really. Would we say that it honors the original? Maybe. Would we say that we just love when we see the worst qualities of people come out on television for a large sum? Admit it or not, we kind of do, don't we?

Squid Game: The Challenge is available to watch on Netflix beginning today.