Critics say Netflix's Squid Game is 'most gripping show since The Traitors'

22 November 2023 , 14:30

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Critics say Netflix's Squid Game is 'most gripping show since The Traitors'

Netflix's reality TV version of the Korean thriller Squid Game has gone down a storm among TV critics who have hailed its as the "most gripping reality TV since The Traitors."

Squid Game: The Challenge bares a stark resemblance to the original show in the outfits that the contestants wear and the set. But instead of death, participants are simply eliminated and therefore miss out on the cash prize of £3.66million. Viewers see contestants become ruthless and use a series of manipulative tactics to get closer to cash prize. Each elimination of a contestant adds £8,000 to the prize fund.

Squid Game: The Challenge is a TV critics favourite (Netflix)

A TV critic for The Guardian said: "The real-life version of the Netflix drama is a grandiose, addictive spectacle that will have you shouting at your TV before the end of episode one. Squid Game: The Challenge not only works, but may turn out to be the most gripping reality TV since The Traitors."

And The Telegraph said the reality TV show "loses none of the tension or intrigue." It added:"With money at stake, rather than life itself, some of the cooped-up politicking in the middle episodes smacks wearily of Big Brother. Other passages of play lean too heavily on popularity contests. But by the final few episodes the tension, intrigue and antagonism are bubbling to the boil. I’ve seen eight of the 10 episodes and am agog to discover how ruthless the last dollar-driven survivors can be."

The Independent likened the Netflix show to that of BBC's The Traitors. Their review read: "For all that the ghost of its Korean cousin sticks in the mind, this is little more than a combination of The Traitors and Takeshi’s Castle. The fear of death and anti-capitalist themes may have been replaced by a rabid consumerism (an apt metaphor for modern America, if not an intentional one), but Squid Game: The Challenge is obviously an epic of its genre. Like most epics, it’s overlong, overblown, and thinks it’s much smarter than it really is. But as a showcase for human desperation, and an illustration of the random brutality of chance, it just about sticks the landing."

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Contestants on the show have to share a dorm while in the competition (PETE DADDS/NETFLIX)

But it appears that the show has divided opinions. The Hollywood Reporter was not impressed by Netflix's latest offering. A TV critic for this publication wrote: "It exists to cash in on one of the streamer’s biggest-ever hits, the 2021 South Korean scripted drama Squid Game. In that context, it looks not like a one-off curiosity but like a brand extension that fundamentally misunderstands what the brand was meant to represent in the first place."

It added: "The Challenge builds on the most superficial aspects of Squid Game while ditching or, really, undermining the most profound. Squid Game could hardly have been more explicit or more scathing in its takedown of economic inequality, and yet it was smoothly co-opted to enrich an already wealthy corporation, at the expense of ordinary citizens who don’t have millions of dollars just lying around. "

It continued: "Or perhaps that outcome only further underlines the drama’s central point, about the way the system entraps us all. You can try to take the anti-capitalism out of Squid Game but capitalism will always find a way to rear its ugly head."

Lucretia Munro