MrBeast's YouTube schtick is somehow even worse with the obscene Amazon money being pumped into Beast Games

The first four episodes of Beast Games have now aired, the beginnings of what is likely to be a long-term collaboration between the world's most popular YouTuber and Amazon Prime. Beast Games is inspired by both Netflix's Squid Game and the most popular video on MrBeast's channel, "$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!", and the basic setup is 1,000 contestants competing for a $5 million prize while being brutally eliminated via simple team games and in some cases psychological tests.

Squid Game is one of Netflix's breakout hits, with the second series out now, a fluorescent and creepy tale of what desperate people will do for money, and the people who exploit them and watch. The show's twist, which is a minor spoiler though it becomes clear early in the series, is that these childrens' games are deadly, and the losers do not walk away. One of the threads in the series is how different contestants deal with this realisation, and each other, while coping with the degrading and unsafe conditions they're kept in en masse between events.

Beast Games is aiming to be Squid Game without the literal death, but in the amount of money involved and how things start to play out the similarities and differences between the two shows comes into stark relief. Squid Game is all about what desperate people will do for money, the extremes of behaviour they can be tempted into, and the people who exploit them and watch and play on the greed. So is Beast Games.

Unleashed?

From the off Beast Games foregrounds two things: MrBeast himself, who in this slightly more traditional 'game show host' role is even more mannequin-like than usual; and the "the life-changing record-shattering" $5 million dollar reward. The first episode then makes one of the big reveals that runs through Beast Games' whole setup: MrBeast and his flunkies (more on them later) have a lot more money than $5 million to give away, and nakedly bribing contestants is a quick way to thin out the crowd and get some easy drama.

As for those contestants, there is a certain kind of performative angst that underlies almost everything about how people present themselves on a show like this, the same behaviour you see from a child told to be extra-appreciative of their Christmas presents. Every announcement, no matter how banal, is greeted with someone clapping their hands to their head and exclaiming "oh my god" or "this is crazy!"

One contestant is there to win to help out the homeless. Another wants to give it to her community. Others freely admit they are in it to buy "gold chains" or just straight-up change their own life, and fair enough. These little moral moments are the stock-in-trade for most US reality/game shows, but are brought into stark relief by the sheer amount of money being thrown around and the show itself constantly pounding the drum about "the biggest cash prize ever!"

The first challenge involves, according to MrBeast, a "one meelion" prize that will be shared by any competitors that quit right now. It's not surprising that many choose to do so, 52 eventually choosing to go home with just under $20K each. It's grim to see a camera trained on a young woman's face, as she talks about what her family would think of her for turning down this sizeable chunk of cash—she'll go on to be eliminated and receive nothing—before it cuts away to the next victim.

These people are victims. There's no crime and of course they all signed ridiculous NDAs to get a shot at the loot, but this is just a glitzed-up equivalent of making paupers fight for scraps. Desperation is the scent of the whole show, as distinct as brie behind the radiator, and the way the contestants are manipulated amps this up: What is this worth to you? Imagine what you could do with this money! But then that is the secret behind MrBeast's seismic popularity: He got there through virality and stunts, but stays there by giving the people what we want. It is still bread and circuses.

The second game of the first episode is where things threaten to become nigh-unbearable for the sane viewer. The contestants are split into rows and told one member of each row must self-eliminate for the rest of the row to progress: The last three rows to have a sacrifice will be eliminated entirely from the game.

Could you put it more on-the-nose? The shrieking and bartering and second-guessing that instantly, brazenly follows from competitors (well, the ones they included in the edit) is just grotesque, a masterclass for students of insincerity and dotted with these sad moments where some soul is peer-pressured, by their grinning teammates, into sacrificing themselves "for the greater good" of people they don't know in a team that was formed minutes ago.

These people will do anything, these people will say anything: And some will say good for them. At the end the cameras capture one man screaming into the camera, neck tendons straining, "yeah! We made it! We made it!"

If you think this can't get more nauseating, the losing contestants are then literally dropped through a hole: The panel they're standing on disappears, and they're yoinked down into the abyss while MrBeast says something like "you didn't think we could drop 80 people?" I have never thought that in my life and yet here MrBeast is, on my television screen, doing it.

It's during these tasks that MrBeast's gormless co-presenters are given most screen time and, honestly, all they do is yell things at people. The real ick factor though is their clear sense of self-superiority over the meat, something that literally comes from the top: As MrBeast looks down on the massed contestants in episode two he says “they look like ants.” There's a point later on where the crowd has to move towards MrBeast on the ground for the next task, and as soon as it does one of the flunkeys blurts out "it's scary." MrBeast considers this, and responds "it's like a zombie horde."

The set is both expensive-looking and grotesque, with the centrepiece for the second episode looking like a multi-storey car park bisected by a giant elevator shaft. MrBeast and flunkies ride up and down between the four floors, and at points even take their scissor lift close to the peons for some words of condescension.

What’s odd is how cheap the games themselves feel next to all this set dressing and the obscene amount of money being thrown around. The first game in episode two sees both teams catching balls that drop from multiple holes in the roof, which no matter how many effects you overlay in post-processing is hard to get too excited about. The most fun thing about it is the ludicrous attempt to make this gaudy spectacle seem sinister by having two characters dressed like dime store versions of Squid Game’s Front Man dropping the (bright red!) balls into a pipe.

These characters hang about and are used for various establishing shots but it’s all a bit awkward because there’s nothing for them to do, really, beyond some part-time event work. MrBeast and the flunkeys are in control and set the tone, histrionic and narcissistic to the core.

The chintzy feel of the games persists. The second game is yet another self-sacrifice challenge where contestants have to give themselves up so their team survives. The “twist” is a pair of curtains separating the teams (so they can’t see how many of the other team have sacrificed) alongside a phone line connecting them. Two episodes in and this is already repeating a game concept and adding little twists to justify the formula. Things do pick up in later episodes, but this is not quite what you expect from the most expensive series ever made.

MrBeast’s major sin as a presenter is that he doesn’t have a discernible sense of humour. There are lukewarm gags scattered throughout his script, but the guy’s only delivery is a bark and he can’t even manage decent banter with the guests. One of his favourite words is “insane” and, yes, a lot of what you’re watching probably does fit that definition: But he doesn’t mean it that way, and lacks the wit and self-awareness to see why others might.

That’s the most baffling thing to me about the MrBeast phenomenon. There’s a wildly successful persona there, but just no personality: The man is not for us to know beyond a gurning cipher.

MrBeast stands on that pile of money while contestants are "screaming at him like he's a god", but the real God is the money. It is what everyone genuflects towards, it is $5 million, the alpha and the omega, with contestants dropping like flies as bribes are offered. But there are surprising moments: at one point four team leaders refuse a bribe that rises to a million dollars, which would give them the cash and a pass to the next round but doom their dozens of teammates. Watched on by the people they’d screw-over, and goaded by MrBeast and crew, none of them take it and every team goes through.

Reality bites

In the next round one of those “heroes” is eliminated after he gets an unlucky sandwich. He turned down a million dollars and goes out with nothing. But this is what we're here for really: Not the winners but the losers, the awesome devastation that MrBeast and his crew can unleash with numbers, the capriciousness and cruelty of fate being visited on others.

"This is diabolical!" shouts one contestant in glee. Well, yes, but maybe not in that way. I always thought the name was stupid but maybe MrBeast as a persona makes some kind of sense, the human touch of the pronoun framing animalism.

There's a sequence where the contestants are set up to take part in a sack race. As the games go this one is relatively low-stakes, but then shows the contestants bumping around and falling over to classical music in slow motion, aping a signature Squid Game technique: As if ripping off the concept wasn’t enough.

It only accentuates the differences. The parts in Squid Game where the contestants see their accumulating prize always come after a scene of horror, with the various reactions lingered-over and, at times, the mere thought of the money inspiring terrible subsequent acts. In Beast Games, you just get repeated shots of MrBeast and piles of money and people screaming about it. Then the timer starts, the cameras roll, they grasp for it, and we gawp.

There are those who will rightly point out that Beast Games isn't really doing anything new for a game show. At bottom these things are about people competing for prizes of one sort or another, and the only new thing here is the scale that Amazon enables. But that scale is so breathtakingly large thanks to Amazon's millions that the culture it's celebrating is stark, the YouTube fantasyland of "epic" giveaways and fratboys showering dollars on the great unwashed, each contestant a stick to beat the others with.

Beast Games is a unique product of our times, a mirror to a society rife with excess and disparity, where the haves say "jump" and the have-nots says "how high?" But I think what makes it stick in my craw is the presentation of all of this as aspirational, like it's some sort of life achievement to become the lab rat pulling levers in hope of a reward. That's entertainment, I suppose. So why am I not entertained?