2 eps on Friday 19th December, 1 ep weekly thereafter
Amazon Prime
This has become a bit of a curio really. Mr Beast, world’s most famous Youtuber famous for his big money challenges and giveaways (and basically doing Real Life Squid Game in 30 minutes), now throwing his considerable weight around for Amazon Prime with a show with a very similar eliminatory premise – 1,000 people whittled down to 1 (so it’s Ultra Quiz then) – and a very similar (albeit bigger) prize – $5m which remains not “the biggest single prize in television and streaming” as X Factor US was offering it years ago and many shows have offered more in the past.
Like Squid Game: The Challenge there have been stories of the contestants not being treated in a way you’d hope to be treated. However despite this SG:TC ended up being a hugely compelling final product in a way I was hoping it wouldn’t be really. This show is promising 41 different challenges, quite a lot more than the 6 large-scale games SG:TC offered (although not counting its Moral Dilemmas of course), it will be interesting to see how many are repurposed from Mr Beast’s existing video ideas and how the whole thing is paced – it’s meant to be six episodes total, so ought to be getting through them quite quickly.
For such a big event show we’re slightly baffled by the lack of promo it’s had recently, you’d think Amazon would be pushing it a bit more, and next week on Boxing Day it crashes slap bang into Squid Game 2 on Netflix which may be diminishing returns but is going to get most of the press that weekend.
It might end up being really fun and good! Let us know what you think in the comments.
The lack of promotion is likely due to the immense controversy surrounding Mr Beast at the moment.
I think “immense” is overstating it. It’s hardly front page news.
Since I’ve seen people wondering about this (including Brig on Twitter/X), the first two episodes apparently drop on Amazon Prime Video at 12PM noon Eastern Time (at least in the US – I can’t speak for the UK).
https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/beast-games-amazon-prime-mrbeast-reality-show-premieres-rcna184009
As for Pop Culture Jeopardy, I’ve been watching all three episodes every Wednesday, though at some point it’s going to start being too much Jeopardy even for me.
That’d be 5pm UK I think, thanks.
I just checked again – the first two episodes are up now on my US Amazon box. Again, I can’t speak for the UK.
Yes, both eps are up, surprised they’re only about 40 minutes.
Well. Episode one I thought “blimey”. If Beast Games was a work of fiction I think I’d really bloody love it. As it is it feels like Squid Games Challenge Origins more than Squid Game The Challenge actually does. The show’s only really got one trick at this point and it’s “how much money will it take to sell out other people?”.
Episode two I found myself warming to it, maybe there’s so many quite irritating young Americans crying that I just got immured to it – the challenges are fairly decent by and large, would like a bouncy ball cheesegrater to go in my attic (although the amount of self-sacrifice ones by this point are a bit crap). And it’s ending on another “how much money will it take to sell out other people” task which is a bit old hat by now, but this time with seven figures!
The settings are fairly spectacular, they’ve thrown so much money at it and it shows, but really it has a problem in that so much cash is floating about to be won in such large numbers that it begins to feel abstract and rather tasteless, and the buy-out prizes are so large you’d be a bit silly in not taking them. I can’t say I’m not going to watch the next set of episodes.
Jimmy has quite good camera presence, his friends, who might as well all be the same person, do not. They should be called The Crap Mobsters.
Mr Beast promising episode three “ten times better than one and two”.
https://x.com/MrBeast/status/1870168503325732981
I sort of enjoyed it even though it was basically just a copy and paste of the YouTube content with a $100m budget kindly donated by Uncle Jeff who probably has less total Prime subscribers than the MrBeast YouTube channel subscribers
The bribes almost feel like playing Golden Balls or similar on very stong steroids
At this point the contestants have basically been given a $5m jackpot lottery ticket with a 1 in 1000 chance of winning it, certainly decent odds but nothing to get too upset about if they get eliminated
If you haven’t seen it there is also a video on YouTube of 2000 contestants being whittled down to the 1000 in a pre show qualifier, apparently this is the event that caused the many welfare complaints more so than the actual main show itself
I’m finding it way more entertaining than I expected. The production values are exceptional and we aren’t (so far) getting too.much saccharine backstory.
It is pretty much “how much money will it take to betray the others” which is fun.