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      Netflix Builds a ‘Squid Game’ Universe as It Awaits a Second Season

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      A reality show and a live experience are two ways of keeping the dystopian series in the public eye. Is the original’s bleak message being diluted?On the same soundstage where Bob Barker lorded over “The Price Is Right,” “Squid Game” is coming to life.On Wednesday, Netflix will unveil its latest live experience, based on the dystopian hit show in which desperate South Koreans competed in a brutal contest of simple schoolyard games for a prize of 45.6 billion won (around $38 million). Winners moved closer to the money. Losers died. The live attraction mimics both the popular iconography of the series — the massive piggy bank filled with cash, a giant animatronic doll named Young-hee, the sterile white dormitory — and the childish games.For $30, fans of “Squid Game” will compete in some 70 minutes of play, with moral twists and turns and six group activities, including the schoolyard race Red Light, Green Light and a nonlethal version of the series’ terrifying Glass Bridge challenge, which forced contestants to choose between two clear squares for each step across a bridge. If they chose incorrectly, they descended hundreds of feet to their death.To feel even more like a character on the show, customers can buy a tracksuit for $50 and wear it during the experience. There is also a $100 V.I.P. ticket option: In a nod to the original, you can watch the unfortunate masses compete in the games while you sip cocktails in a swanky lounge.“It’s all the fun without the death,” said Greg Lombardo, Netflix’s head of live experiences.A game called Harvest Festival at Netflix’s live experience, which is scheduled to open to the public on Wednesday.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesNetflix plans to expand the live experience into other cities, but no additional locations have been confirmed. It’s one of several “Squid Game” adaptations that Netflix has planned in the hope of keeping viewers engaged during the long gap between the show’s first season, which debuted in September 2021, and its second, which is filming in South Korea and will come out next year.One is an unscripted English-language competition show, “Squid Game: The Challenge.” Its first five episodes debuted on Nov. 22, and a second batch became available on Wednesday; the final episode will arrive Wednesday.Also coming soon is a video game in which players will be able to compete with characters from the series. A virtual reality game is already available, and in Brazil, Burger King has been offering “Squid Game”-themed food combos in four cities. (Care for an umbrella-shaped onion ring to go with that shake?)The brand offshoots follow a formula that Netflix has employed successfully for other popular shows, like “Bridgerton” and “Stranger Things.” A “Stranger Things” play that the streaming service helped develop will open in London’s West End on Dec. 14.The expansion of intellectual property like the “Squid Game” brand, however, is getting more scrutiny in Hollywood. In recent years, the closest an entertainment studio could get to a sure thing was a franchise spun from a popular piece of intellectual property: A film begets a sequel begets a theme park ride begets a line of consumer products. Now a certain amount of audience fatigue has set in.Marvel films like “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Marvels” struggled at the box office. The recent Harry Potter spinoff, “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,” and the D.C. Comics film “The Flash” also underperformed. The industry has been forced to ask: What deserves franchise-building attention, and when is it too much?“I’d say in general when you have I.P., if you just do too much of something, that can dilute what it is,” Netflix’s chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, said in an interview. “The other thing we look at is, are you being true to the DNA of the show and why people loved it but expanding that connection?”Losing competitors are marked off at Squid Game: The Trials. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesThe reasons that Netflix is trying to expand “Squid Game” are obvious. Not only is it the most-watched show on the platform but unsanctioned merchandise from the game, including tracksuits and Young-hee dolls, began selling almost immediately after its debut. Netflix now works with two global partners to meet the demand for the green athletic wear, especially around Halloween.Influencers have also capitalized on the show’s popularity. Last year, the YouTube star MrBeast enlisted 456 contestants to compete for $456,000 by playing tug of war and Red Light, Green Light. The video of the content generated 112 million views in the first five days online.With that kind of interest in an outside version of a real-life “Squid Game,” Netflix decided the time was right to try to capitalize with a reality show of its own, but in English, so as not to confuse audiences.“I was very curious how people would react to those games, the situations, the moral dilemmas,” said Minyoung Kim, Netflix’s head of Asian content, who was responsible for bringing the South Korean show to the service.The contests inspired by “Squid Game,” which is shooting its second season in South Korea, include Red Light, Green Light. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesStill, some question whether a reality show based on the South Korean filmmaker Hwang Dong-hyuk’s bleak view of his country’s class struggles and the global inequities of modern-day capitalism should exist at all.While “Squid Game: The Challenge” debuted at the top of Netflix’s English-language TV list with 20.1 million views and the original show vaulted back into the Top 10, reviews of the reality series have been scathing. Most criticized the 10-episode season for missing the broader critique of capitalist culture that is at the heart of the nihilistic series.A scene from “Squid Game: The Challenge,” a Netflix reality show, displaying an interim cash prize.NetflixThe show drew 20.1 million views when it premiered.Netflix“I see it obviously as an attempt to expand and monetize a franchise, but it seems particularly absurd given the anticapitalist message of the show,” said Miranda Banks, the chair of Loyola Marymount University’s film, television and media studies department.“‘Squid Game’ was a South Korean series, and it’s inflected with the politics of South Korean culture,” she added. “So part of this is not just a translation of the genre, but it’s also a translation of a nation. And in doing that, it is not surprising — and it’s arguably quite hilarious — that it becomes a pro-capitalist dream fulfilled.”The producers of the reality show are aware of the irony. But they said that by hewing as close to the original as possible — the same number of contestants (456) and a life-changing amount of prize money ($4.56 million) — they felt they could create compelling television despite the lower stakes.The live attraction is just one prong of Netflix’s campaign to expand the “Squid Game” brand.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times“This was a drama that was so much about the fact that people who were eliminated were killed,” the producer Stephen Lambert said. “We were obviously never going to do that, but having such a big prize pot meant that when you were eliminated, your dreams died, and they were really big dreams that people had.”(The filming of the reality show has generated its own drama, with complaints from several contestants about “inhumane” conditions. When asked about the complaints, the producers said in a statement that they “take the welfare of our contestants extremely seriously.”)Still, does allowing fans to play along with a social satire cheapen its integrity?Ms. Banks doesn’t believe so.“I think that you probably have the fans who are there for the social commentary and the drama and the state of the game,” she said. “And then you have the people who love to play games. That might be different age groups. It might be different demographics.”A happy ending to Warships at Squid Game: The Trials. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesFor Marian Lee, Netflix’s chief marketing officer, the brand offshoots are doing their job — bringing renewed attention to “Squid Game” — yet she acknowledges the risks of creating so many versions that relied on the same source.“We have a hugely popular show that basically captures the cultural zeitgeist, but the doll, all the iconography, is carried through to the unscripted,” she said. “For us as a marketing team, how do you make sure that people understand that this is an unscripted version of that, and not the second season yet? You have to make sure that fans are following along: Oh, this is the unscripted version. Oh, this is the live experience. Oh, Season 2 is coming.“The fandom is there. It’s just making sure that we’re able to create distinct moments for each of those things.” More

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      Netflix’s ‘Verified’ Gives Comedians a Path Forward

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      The path forward for comedians is especially confusing now. Netflix’s “Verified” showcases are giving them a national stage, even if they have to share it.How in the world do you make it in stand-up comedy?This question has long kept aspiring stars up at night, and we are living in a moment when the route to a successful career is more confusing than ever. Do you have to get on TikTok? Does Comedy Central still matter? The days of being told you just need a spot on “The Tonight Show” are gone, and with myriad platforms, there appear to be many roads, most leading nowhere. And yet, the one that still has the biggest reputation for elevating comics is Netflix. But it’s unclear how much the streaming service, known for specials by boldfaced names like John Mulaney and Adam Sandler, cares about minting stars.That’s why Netflix’s “Verified” is important. It’s two showcases, each about an hour, featuring emerging comics doing short sets. There is a promising precedent: The streamer aired “The Comedy Lineup,” originally in 2018, which starred relative unknowns doing 15 minutes of jokes. Three in the Class of ’18 have since gotten their own series (Taylor Tomlinson, Michelle Buteau, Sam Jay). One just played Carnegie Hall (Tim Dillon). Another has been a head writer and sidekick on late night (Ian Karmel, a James Corden stalwart).Rosebud Baker brought her hard-boiled persona to “Verified.”Marcus Russell Price/Netflix“Comedy Lineup” didn’t vault these performers to fame, but it helped. And in retrospect, the selection of the entire group (including Jak Knight, Phil Wang and Sabrina Jalees) reflected foresight and taste. The artists in the new showcases are not exactly newcomers. There’s a correspondent for “The Daily Show” (Dulcé Sloan) and a comic who recently played the theater at Madison Square Garden (Nimesh Patel). There are jokes about dating in your mid-30s (Leslie Liao) and a comic showing off her pregnant belly (Rosebud Baker, whose hard-boiled persona backs up a strong, spiky set).“Verified” doesn’t amount to more than a perfectly fine tasting menu of comedy. Sometimes, though, that’s all you want.There’s something pleasing about following the transgressive intensity of Robby Hoffman with the laid-back charm of Patel. In a recent column on Hoffman’s podcast, “Too Far,” I compared that bulldozing stand-up to Larry David because of her mountain-out-of-a-molehill kvetching, but her hilarious rage over people who complain about interruptions during a conversation makes her sound like a modern lesbian Andrew Dice Clay. I didn’t even think that was possible.Patel takes a leisurely pace, mixing crowd work and topical jokes (some solid roasting of Vivek Ramaswamy) with dated bits (a Mike Pence joke). Patel makes this hour seem casual, offhand, just another night at the club.Sloan may adjust to the form best because she starts quickly (“How y’all doing? Great”), ends abruptly and sticks to a couple of nontopical subjects, including a bit about the benefits of dating a poor man and a great observational joke that might have you looking differently at the way people buy weed. In less than 15 minutes, her set packs a wallop.It’s interesting what seeing all these comics in one place reveals about what is missing from most Netflix specials. Isiah Kelly begins his set with a joke about being broke, and how you know you’re having a bad week when you have to check your bank account before finishing an order at McDonald’s. Financial hardship is one of the most common subjects in live comedy, inevitably relatable to audiences today, but you’re less likely to hear about it from Ricky Gervais or Kevin Hart.Sabrina Yu brought nervous energy to the showcase. Marcus Russell Price/NetflixOne of the revelations for me was Sabrina Wu, who barrels into jokes with a nervous energy, then exploits it. “Oh my God,” Wu says to the roar of applause, sounding grateful, then offended: “That’s it?” This is a young comic who knows how to pivot. Wu’s standout bit involves talking trash about Amanda Gorman, the former National Youth Poet Laureate, at a contest early in her career, then describing the futility of a rivalry with her. It’s one of the better jokes from a comic on an eternally rich subject: jealousy.Class does not come up as much as race and ethnicity. Comics tend to introduce themselves by playing with their own background. Along with jokes about her deep voice and impatience with first dates, Liao, a Chinese American comic, draws attention to how Asian people’s faces are “gender neutral.” Asif Ali does some shouty jokes connecting the large Indian population to the lack of sex education. “You know why we’re not talking about it,” he says, before pointing in the air with mock aggression: “We’re too busy being about it.”Gianmarco Soresi, a Jewish comic who alternates between silkily feline physicality and frenetic gesticulation, digs into antisemitism, but only as it affects his act. His jokes parody his own solipsism. “I just feel if white people would stop complaining all the time about cancel culture and actually fought,” he says with passion, shaking his fist, “then all of us could do the Chinese accent again.”He then turns his back to the crowd and the camera shifts, giving viewers a moody shot of him looking downcast from backstage, adding a visual joke that stands out because it’s such a dramatically different camera angle. I have no idea how he convinced the producers to do this, but the effort was worth it.This shot is notable because there is something modest and safe about these sets. (Patel’s “Lucky Lefty” on YouTube is a better showcase of his work.) Partly, the length makes it feel low risk, but also maybe the stakes. If Netflix is where comics go to make it, then YouTube is where you go to complain about why you haven’t.Louis Katz, a bald, filthy veteran comic with slingshot punchlines, opens his new self-released special, “Present/Tense,” with better-known comics explaining why he never became famous. Nate Bargatze says he’s too dirty. Marc Maron points to his hair line. Dave Attell blames personality.It’s a funny way to begin a special, which goes on to offer its own theory. People today, Katz argues, don’t want jokes. They want comics to bare their soul. Perhaps. But in a way, his lament about the state of his career (“Stand-up comedy does not have a great retirement plan”) is his best attempt.David Drake, a strong joke writer, begins his latest YouTube special, “That’s It!,” with a pointed joke that has the ring of truth. “Here’s how you make it in this business,” he says. “Have a famous dad.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘American Symphony’ Review: Intimate Harmony

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      This portrait of the musician Jon Batiste and the author Suleika Jaouad follows an artistic couple through ambition and adversity.Partway through “American Symphony,” the musician Jon Batiste pokes gentle fun at the coverage he received in advance of the 2022 Grammys. The breadth of his 11 nominations, which bridged pop, jazz and classical categories, made him tough to label. He ultimately fended off Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish to win album of the year.This documentary, directed by Matthew Heineman, is likewise deceptively tricky to peg. In the broad strokes, it is a process film, following Batiste, who grew up in the New Orleans area and trained at Juilliard, as he prepares a wildly original symphony that shares a title with the movie. “My ambition for composing this symphony is massive,” he says. “I’m trying to expand the canon of symphonic music, break through long-gatekept spaces.”(Ben Sisario, writing in The New York Times, described the piece, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2022, as a “Whitmanesque canvas of funk, Dixieland jazz, operatic vocals and Native American drums.”)But this is also a movie about two artists, their love, their creative attitudes and how, as a couple, they approach living a “life of contrasts.” That description comes from the writer Suleika Jaouad, Batiste’s partner (they marry during the film), whose best-selling memoir, “Between Two Kingdoms,” was published in 2021 and who, before college, studied at Juilliard herself, with a specialization in double bass.As Batiste gets ready for his Grammy and Carnegie Hall coups, Jaouad undergoes a bone marrow transplant after a recurrence of cancer. (She received her first leukemia diagnosis at 22, and from 2012 to 2015 wrote in The Times about her experiences.)While some of the backstage material has an official feel (Batiste and Jaouad are listed among the many executive producers, along with Barack and Michelle Obama), the documentary does not shy from showing private moments. It captures Batiste hiding his head under a pillow as he talks on the phone with his therapist and sits in with the couple as a doctor discusses the open-ended course of chemotherapy he is recommending. When it comes to the music, too, the film is unafraid to dwell on a drawn-out silence or phrase.American SymphonyRated PG-13 Potentially upsetting medical scenes. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Family Switch’ Review: Out of Body Experiences for Everyone

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      Even Pickles the dog gets to trade places in this movie directed by McG, but there are no revelations or bursts of originality here.In a holiday-themed twist on “Freaky Friday,” Jennifer Garner and Ed Helms star as out-of-touch parents who suddenly find themselves occupying the bodies of their teenage children (Emma Myers and Brady Noon), and vice versa, in the Christmas comedy “Family Switch.”Jess and Bill Walker bring the whole over-scheduled family — their daughter, CC, is in the running for the U.S. national soccer team, and Wyatt, their older son, is a science prodigy who’s interviewing for Yale — to the Griffith Observatory to witness a rare planetary alignment.A chance encounter with a fortune teller (Rita Moreno, hamming it up) during the celestial event combines with a cosmic energy conversion so powerful that it zaps the Walkers into a triple body swap: Jess with CC, Bill with Wyatt, and their toddler, Miles, with Pickles, the French bulldog. They break the observatory telescope in the process, and fixing it, which will take a week, is the only way to reverse the spell.On top of CC’s soccer tryouts and Wyatt’s college interview, Jess is prepping for a major presentation on the job at an architecture firm, and Bill is set to perform with his cover band (Rivers Cuomo, Patrick Wilson and Brian Bell cameo as his bandmates) at the school holiday concert. Predictable antics ensue as the Walkers try and fail to excel in each other’s roles, and they soon realize that the telescope isn’t all that needs fixing.Loosely based on the picture book “Bedtime for Mommy” by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, “Family Switch” carries a surprisingly raunchy streak given its source material. But seeing that it’s directed by McG (“Charlie’s Angels,” “The Babysitter”), the gross-out humor shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The real nail in the coffin is the film’s messaging about the power of family, which is about as tacked-on and stilted as they come — hardly a shock in light of the rest of the Netflix holiday movie lineup.Family SwitchRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Movies

      Stream These 16 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in December

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      We rounded up the best titles leaving the streaming service for U.S. subscribers. That includes Oscar winners, comedies, horror and four ‘Jaws’ films.The end of the year means plenty of expiring licenses on Netflix, so December’s list of movies exiting the service is bulkier than usual — and more prestigious, including two Oscar winners for best picture, two massively popular franchises and recent favorites of horror, comedy and family entertainment. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Us’ (Dec. 30)Stream it here.Jordan Peele followed up the massive critical and commercial success of “Get Out,” his Oscar-winning feature debut from 2017, with this similarly potent brew of horror, social commentary and bleak comedy. Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke star as upper-class parents whose family vacation is disrupted by the appearance of silent but terrifying visitors in the night. Are they home invaders? Common criminals? Supernatural doppelgängers? Or something even more sinister? As with “Get Out” before it and “Nope” after, Peele has as much fun building dread and atmosphere as he does delivering shock thrills, slyly threading in pop-culture shout-outs and obscure historical references to keep audiences equally puzzled and frightened.‘American Beauty’ (Dec. 31)Stream it here.The Oscar winner for best picture of 1999 has fallen rather out of favor these days, thanks to some of its more controversial themes and the divisive presence of its leading man, Kevin Spacey (who took home his second trophy for best actor). But there’s still a great deal to admire in this story of rebellious teens, midlife crisis and suburban ennui: Annette Bening’s thrillingly unhinged work as an impatient mother and driven real estate agent, Conrad L. Hall’s luminous cinematography (another Oscar winner), and a supporting cast that boasts the likes of Wes Bentley, Thora Birch, Chris Cooper, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney and Mena Suvari.‘Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy’ / ‘Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues’ (Dec. 31)Stream them here and here.The writer and director Adam McKay’s recent shift from broad comedies (frequently starring his “Saturday Night Live” collaborator Will Ferrell) to serious-minded social commentaries (including “The Big Short,” “Vice” and “Don’t Look Up”) took some moviegoers by surprise. But there are big ideas floating through even his goofiest farces, including his 2004 feature directorial debut “Anchorman” and its 2013 follow-up. The original “Anchorman” seems a broad goof on ’70s culture, focusing on the egomaniacal idiot Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) who fears his spot fronting the news on a San Diego station is endangered by the arrival of a new co-anchor (Christina Applegate); look closer, and it’s pointed satire of male insecurity and toxic masculinity in the workplace. “Anchorman 2” could have been more of the same, with Burgundy and his team going national in the then-burgeoning cable news scene; instead, McKay incisively sends up the unsavory practices of ratings-chasing in media. Both are far smarter than they needed to be — and uproariously funny to boot.‘Gladiator’ (Dec. 31)Stream it here.Winner of Academy Awards for best picture and best actor (Russell Crowe), Ridley Scott’s action extravaganza from 2000 brought back the sword-and-sandal epic, one of the standbys of late ’50s and early ’60s cinema (particularly out of Italy), but with a modern sensibility and a comparatively gargantuan budget. Crowe stars as Maximus, a Roman general betrayed and enslaved by the evil Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), who returns to prominence as an unstoppable gladiator to exact his revenge. This is Crowe at his best, combining brute physicality and intense internalized emotion, and Phoenix is an appropriately vile villain; it’s a short walk from his work as a petty tyrant here to his current, entertaining reunion with Scott as a tantrum-throwing “Napoleon.”‘Jaws’ 1-4 (Dec. 31)Stream them here, here, here and here.It seems like a gross oversimplification to note that “Jaws” changed movies forever in 1975, but that’s less analysis than common wisdom: It created the template for making and marketing the summer blockbuster, and it sent the career of the director Steven Spielberg (only helming his second theatrical feature) into the stratosphere. It’s so easy to view “Jaws” through its historical and economic lens that it’s easy to forget what a genuinely, indisputably great movie it is — scary, funny, elegantly crafted, beautifully acted and populated with rich and memorable characters. As for its sequels … well, “Jaws 2” is pretty good, a welcome return for Roy Scheider’s no-nonsense Chief Brody, featuring some effective scares and well-executed set pieces. (The less said about “Jaws 3” and “Jaws: The Revenge,” the better.)‘Kung Fu Panda’ (Dec. 31)Stream it here.In retrospect, it’s sort of shocking that it took so long to build a family franchise around Jack Black, since he’s so wildly animated and kid-friendly even in live-action movies; creating a cartoon for a living cartoon seems a relatively simple proposition. The inaugural entry of the series (2008), spawning two sequels and a Netflix series, introduces Black as Po, the titular karate-chopping, slapstick-prone giant panda, who must learn the ways of kung fu to fulfill his destiny as the Dragon Warrior. The supporting voice cast is impressive — Jackie Chan, David Cross, Dustin Hoffman, James Hong, Angelina Jolie, Randall Duk Kim, Lucy Liu, Ian McShane and Seth Rogen all turn up, and all seem to be having a ball — the animation is delightful and Black is as hysterically funny and warmly likable as ever.‘Mission: Impossible’ 1- 4 (Dec. 31)Stream them here, here, here and here.In its current iteration, the “Mission: Impossible” franchise is a well-oiled machine, with the recurring writer and director Christopher McQuarrie (who has been with the series since its fifth entry, “Rogue Nation”) orchestrating a cast of repeating characters and running story arcs. But this wasn’t initially the case at all; the first four films in the series were each helmed by a different, distinctive filmmaker, comporting each picture to their own style, with the general story and the star Tom Cruise among the few common elements. The approach was unsurprisingly hit and miss; the John Woo-directed “M: I-2” crosses the line from cool to goofy with more frequency than was presumably intended, and J.J. Abrams’s third picture suffers from a generic style that betrays the director’s television background. But Brian De Palma’s inaugural installment, from 1996, is wildly entertaining, and filled with the kind of Hitchcockian set pieces on which that auteur made his name, while the Brad Bird-helmed fourth film is filled with breathtaking action sequences, memorable supporting players and the beginning of a house style that McQuarrie would refine and perfect.‘Role Models’ (Dec. 31)Stream it here.The raw edge yet soft heart of this wildly funny bad-boy comedy from 2008, and the presence of the frequent leading man Paul Rudd, might lead you to assume it’s the work of Judd Apatow. But the roots of “Role Models” go back farther than that — the director is David Wain, one of the minds behind the comedy troupe The State — and several of its members (including Kerri Kenney-Silver, Joe Lo Truglio and Ken Marino) turn up in supporting roles. Rudd and Seann William Scott star as a pair of irresponsible energy drink salesmen who are ordered to perform community service, and wind up in a Big Brother-type program, mentoring a foul-mouthed kid (the uproarious Bobb’e J. Thompson) and a cosplaying nerd (the “Superbad” favorite Christopher Mintz-Plasse).‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ (Dec. 31)Stream it here.Martin Scorsese kicked off his loose trilogy of outsized critiques of the American capitalist system (continuing with “The Irishman” and “Killers of the Flower Moon”) in 2013 with this savagely funny and narratively ruthless adaptation of the memoir by Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), a corrupt penny-stock broker who parlayed his limitless greed and limited ethics into (briefly, at least) an unimaginable fortune. As with his earlier “Goodfellas,” Scorsese makes Belfort’s indulgences of sex, drugs and good times into virtuoso scenes of visceral and vicarious thrills; he similarly makes his protagonist’s fall from grace into an ugly indictment of both the individual and the system that made him possible.ALSO LEAVING: “8 Mile,” “Catch Me if You Can,” “Field of Dreams,” “Lost in Translation,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Scarface” (all Dec. 31). More

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      ‘Squid Game: The Challenge’ Is More Depressing Than the Original

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      “Squid Game: The Challenge” keeps the slick design of the dystopian drama but loses the point.Late in the first season of Netflix’s “Squid Game” — two-year-old spoiler alert, I guess — an elaborate, deadly contest among 456 needy contestants is revealed to be an entertainment for the viewing pleasure of a handful of crass, wealthy “VIPs,” who watch the gruesome proceedings wearing golden animal masks.You could look at that situation and see a dramatization of the way a decadent system exploits desperate souls. Or you could look at it and say: All that production effort and they couldn’t monetize the show for a bigger audience?For everyone in the latter group, there is now “Squid Game: The Challenge.” The reality spinoff, whose first five episodes premiered Wednesday on Netflix, keeps the drama’s kaleidoscopic set design, its outfits and many of its competitions. It gets rid of the messy murder business — sort of — along with most of the uncomfortable ideas.What’s left is a beautifully designed but empty game box, a creepy dystopia cosplay, an answer to the question of what happens when you take a darkly pointed TV satire and remove its brains.The worldview of the original “Squid Game,” written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, was as subtle as a gunshot. Debtors, criminals and sundry other last-chancers are recruited by a mysterious organization to compete in scaled-up versions of playground games. One player will win a life-changing sum; the penalty for losing is death.Through the protagonist, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), we confront the question of whether one can survive the game, and by extension a ruthless economic system, and still keep one’s soul. The commentary could be blunt and obvious; “there’s a difference between making reference to something and actually illuminating it,” my colleague Mike Hale wrote. But the show had something to say and said it with style.“The Challenge” keeps the style, with the copycat precision of an A.I. image generator. It opens with a montage of colorful re-created “Squid Game” sets and the singsong of the giant robo-doll that presided over the opening game of Red Light, Green Light.That game opens “The Challenge,” with the full mob of contestants, dressed in familiar green track suits, stop-start racing to a finish line. Those who fail, by moving when they are supposed to be frozen, are eliminated faux-execution-style; tiny squibs explode under their shirts, spattering them with black ink. (Apparently a simulated shooting massacre is tasteful as long as you don’t use red.) They fall “dead,” like war re-enactors. The survivors are brought to a re-creation of the cavernous prison-dorm and burst out in cheers. “Best slumber party ever!” one says.The stakes are real, if not life-or-death. For every player fake-murdered, $10,000 is added to the prize pot, represented as in the drama by a giant piggy bank, up to $4.56 million.The idea of basing a real game on a brutal fake one isn’t inherently bad. (The reports of “inhumane” filming conditions are another matter; Netflix has said that “all appropriate health and safety measures were taken.”) Plenty of great reality shows gamify deadly situations. “Survivor” is a stylized shipwreck. “The Traitors,” from the same studio as “The Challenge,” is essentially a murder mystery.The problem with “The Challenge” is symbolized by those little pops of black “blood.” It’s painfully literal, yet colorless.Between contests, the players stay in a hangar-like dormitory as in the original.Pete Dadds/NetflixIt doesn’t want you to forget for a second that you’re visiting the wonderful world of “Squid Game” — that I.P. is too valuable to abstractify. Besides rebuilding the sets, it tries to reproduce characters from the series, finding contestants to fill the roles of hard villains, doomed softies and sympathetic elders. One group of allies dub themselves the “Gganbu Gang,” using the Korean word for a close friend that was a key term in the series.But “The Challenge” shies away from everything in “Squid Game” that cut to the jugular — in particular, the commentary about how capitalism pits ordinary people in gladiatorial combat. Like a lot of reality shows, it peppers in interviews with players who want to win the prize to support family or achieve dreams. But the competition is cast as opportunity, not exploitation. “The Challenge” does not want to bum you out.Why does it matter? Great games don’t just have good mechanics. They have ideas, like Monopoly, the family rainy-day pastime originally conceived to disseminate Georgist concepts about land use and equity. Reality shows have ideas, too, uplifting or cynical or even satirical. A game’s rules are an expression of values; the kind of play that works in a certain game says something about the kind of behavior that works, or should work, in the world.So if you take a reality competition — even a fictional one — and keep its aesthetics while stripping its foundational ideas, you’re left with, in this case, a well-produced, boring version of “Big Brother.” There’s a lot of generic conflict, a lot of stultifying downtime in the bunk room and way too many characters to try to build investment in.And because “The Challenge” wants to reproduce the look and gameplay of “Squid Game” while staying all in good fun (a producer likened it to a theme-park ride based on a movie), it’s a tonal mess.At times, it offers a bleak view of human nature. Players are disdained for cracking under pressure and one contestant, an early “villain” in the narrative, says, “sympathy, it’s only a weakness.” Other times, it is stickily sentimental and heartwarming. Sometimes the show encourages, or at least allows, cooperation; sometimes it forbids it.“The Challenge” does pull off some exciting set pieces. There’s a wicked twist to set up the pairings in the one-on-one marble game (which was also the dramatic high point of the original series). It even manages to improve on the glass-bridge hopscotch game. (Other events, like a board-game-based replacement for the drama’s tug of war segment, feel interminable.) But even at its best, you’re always conscious of watching an escape-room simulacrum of a famous TV show.And that’s where there is a kind of message in “Squid Game: The Challenge,” if an inadvertent one: It is an object lesson in how entertainment can appropriate any artistic or political statement. There is no dystopia so chilling that, with the right production values, you can’t sell it back to the audience as escapist fun.Since “The Challenge” does depend on being escapist fun, though, it can’t embrace this meta idea either. Maybe the biggest loss in this adaptation is the tension between the players and the competition itself. In the original drama, the game was the ultimate villain, and we saw the hero finally rebel against its shadowy makers.In the reality show, I’d expect no such satisfaction. The only way to win is not to watch. More

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      In ‘Squid Game: The Challenge,’ the Deaths Are Fake, but the Cash Is Real

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      A new reality competition based on the violent Korean hit features 456 players vying for a $4.56 million prize.Player 450, dressed in a green and white tracksuit, lunged forward, rushing to reach the finish line. Suddenly, the head of a gigantic doll swiveled around and she froze, but it was too late. She crumpled to the ground.Those who watched the TV thriller “Squid Game” will remember the Red Light, Green Light blood bath, in which players had to race across a room and stop moving every time a doll’s head turned around, or be shot to death.But in this version of the game, it wasn’t blood soaking Player 450’s shirt — it was black ink from a squib under her T-shirt. And not long after dropping to the ground, Player 450 would get up, disappointed but otherwise unscathed.She and 455 other contestants were competing for a $4.56 million prize as part of “Squid Game: The Challenge,” a Netflix reality competition, premiering Wednesday, that recreates the devilish games of the streamer’s hit Korean drama, including the dalgona candy contest, the glass bridge challenge and the marbles game. When Netflix opened its casting call in 2022, more than 80,000 people applied to join.As their numbers dwindle, the players forge alliances and break promises, making Machiavellian maneuvers to avoid elimination and gain the upper hand in pursuit of the cash prize.“We wanted the show to reveal, just as the drama had revealed, a study of human nature under pressure and what people are really made of,” John Hay, one of the show’s executive producers, said in an interview. The show, filmed in England, is co-produced by the Garden and Lambert Studios.The show recreates the games from the original, like the dalgona candy contest.NetflixUnlike with the original drama, the producers of this show say they didn’t know ahead of time who would ultimately win. Earlier this year, some former players told Rolling Stone that the games were rigged, claiming that some players were preselected to advance to the next rounds.In a statement to The New York Times, Netflix denied that this happened. “All eliminations in the series were approved by our independent adjudicators, who were on set at all times to ensure fairness of all games,” a spokesman said.In an interview, executive producers said they compiled an enormous amount of footage of all the contestants early in the games, which allowed them to edit the show to focus on contestants who survived until later stages.To supplement the games, the producers also introduced a series of “tests of character”: mini-challenges in which contestants are forced to make difficult choices. Early on, two contestants receive the option to either eliminate a player or give another player an advantage for the next game. In a different test, a man gets a phone call and is told he has two minutes to convince another player to take the phone from him and be eliminated.“The drama is all about the alliances and groups people form,” said Stephen Lambert, an executive producer. “We needed to find ways to create challenges for people that would play to their sense of loyalty and sense of trust.”Recreating the games required complex engineering and a scientific attention to detail. To re-enact the dalgona game, in which contestants had to extract part of a candy without breaking it, the show’s designers spent months testing a variety of cookie recipes to find one that would accommodate contestants’ allergies while not being too soft or too brittle.Re-enacting Red Light, Green Light also posed challenges. To design the doll, which is more than 13 feet tall, the show’s designers requested exact dimensions from Hwang Dong-hyuk, the director of the original drama.Then they fed the designs into the largest 3-D printer in the United Kingdom and left it running for a month in order to fabricate the doll’s components, said the lead production designer, Mathieu Weekes. The most difficult task was designing an enormous head that could whip around fast enough to eliminate contestants without flying off the doll’s body in the process, said Ben Norman, the lead games designer. Once the doll was ready, the contestants were brought into a gigantic airship hanger in Cardington, a city north of London, to play the game.Former contestants told Variety and Rolling Stone earlier this year that they were forced to play the game in cold temperatures, resulting in some players receiving medical attention, a claim that Netflix has confirmed.The Red Light, Green Light contest included a working replica of the show’s 13-foot doll.Netflix“On the day of filming Red Light, Green Light, a small number of people were treated for mild medical conditions caused by the cold temperature, and one person was treated for a shoulder injury,” a Netflix spokesman said. “There were no other medical issues with the contestants during the remainder of the games.”The spokesman added that medics were on set at all times and that “all appropriate health and safety measures were taken throughout the filming period.”One of the contestants, Bryton Constantin, 23, said in an interview that he recalls people complaining about the cold, but he doesn’t remember any contestants experiencing severe injuries because of it.“We didn’t sign up for a beach trip in Hawaii,” he said. “We signed up for ‘Squid Game’ to win $4.56 million.”A Netflix spokesman would not say whether or not any contestants were compensated for their physical suffering or other unpleasant experiences on the show.After filming Red Light, Green Light, the show moved to studios in east London, where contestants lived in a large room filed with dormitory-style bunk beds, similar to the living quarters in the original series. Once they entered the studios, the lucky few who survived to the end would not leave for 18 days.“Nobody likes to sit in a room with 200 other people and eat not good food every day,” Constantin said. “But you’re in there struggling because everyone’s there for the same exact reason.” More

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      ‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’ Review: Beloved Film Gets Anime Treatment

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      Not quite a reboot or a sequel, this anime series brings back the cast of the beloved “Scott Pilgrim” movie but lands without the same charm.Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers in the Netflix series “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.”NetflixDid you know that at some point in the ’90s there were two separate, very different Sonic the Hedgehog TV series running simultaneously? “And the same guy played Sonic in both shows,” Scott Pilgrim, the doofy 23-year-old layabout of “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” shares, unprompted, to his love interest, Ramona Flowers. “Isn’t that wild? The same guy playing two different versions of the same guy??”Totally wild. It’s almost like how the same guy (Michael Cera) has now played two different versions of this same guy (Scott Pilgrim) — first in Edgar Wright’s damn-near-perfect 2010 film, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” and now in this underwhelming Netflix anime adaptation, both based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s beloved graphic novel series.In the books and in the film, Scott discovers that Ramona, a girl he’s been seeing in his dreams (because of a convenient subspace highway that runs through his head, of course) is real, but he can’t date her until he defeats her seven deadly exes in epic video-game-style faceoffs.“Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” isn’t a reboot or a sequel; it begins almost identically to the film but takes a sharp turn at the end of the first episode that sets it up as essentially an alternate-reality scenario. Here, Ramona and her exes take center stage, and though the series is still set, like the film, in a Toronto from “not too long ago,” this new story feels more grown up, often at the expense of its humor.The film, which condensed the six-book series into a svelte 112 minutes of addictive original songs and millennial- and Gen X-friendly references, more baldly satirized hipster culture and the cliché ways in which young adults sabotage their relationships and fail to hold themselves accountable for their knuckle-headed decisions.“Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” directed by Abel Góngora, is more dutiful in its depiction of toxic relationship behaviors and more generous in redeeming its characters — even its antagonists — through their own arcs of personal growth.The band Sex Bob-Omb in “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.”NetflixToo bad those are also the blandest story lines. There are some intriguing new reveals and romantic pairings, along with jamming music from Scott’s band, Sex Bob-Omb (original songs by Anamanaguchi), but the bulk of the eight-episode series feels like a filler arc or, to use an anime term, OVAs (original video animations).The jokes are either wholly lackluster or slightly tweaked and watered-down versions of what appeared in the movie. The pacing lags too, and though most of the film’s stars return to voice their animated counterparts — including Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Aubrey Plaza and Jason Schwartzman — the performances often land like bad English dubs, with any emotiveness muted and intonation flatlined.Anime is a cozy fit for O’Malley’s work. But for as much as “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” is conversant in the medium’s visual motifs, gags and gestures, it doesn’t fully take advantage of the absurdity that the format allows. Or at least not until the ending; in its last two episodes, the series finally exhibits the kind of imagination one would expect from a story featuring superpowered vegans and spying robots.So I won’t say “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” completely fails to launch, because it offers a wholesome sense of closure for fans of the books and of the film. But the series never fully succeeds either. The characters may have grown, but in this incarnation, the story itself is stuck in a state of arrested development. More