Bright colours, quick transitions and a big cash giveaway are all part of the Mr Beast YouTube formula. With 362 million subscribers, Mr Beast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) is the ultimate influencer. But what does the man who has mastered YouTube try next? The answer: TV.
★☆☆☆☆
A collaboration with streaming giant Prime Video, Beast Games challenges 1,000 contestants to compete for a five million dollar cash prize. It is, as Mr Beast will continually remind you, a record-breaking show with both the largest cash prize and the most contestants in entertainment history. However, with more contestants than possible to fit into a single camera frame, Beast Games makes it difficult to emotionally invest in any of its many contestants. Initially, the show chooses to forgo naming contestants on screen, choosing to not use confessional talking head footage between games. This means it takes multiple episodes to learn the names of who is playing, let alone pick someone to root for.
Perhaps self-aware of this issue, the opening challenges aim to burn through as many contestants as possible. These challenges are mainly relationship-based such as sacrificing yourself to save your team or betraying your team to take a bribe, but Beast Games lacks the character connection necessary for an audience to emotionally invest. The hosts do not help this. A good host should be magnetic and able to show interest in anyone they interview so that viewers become interested also. But as Mr Beast and his entourage repeatedly cut contestants off and laugh in their jeopardy, they suggest they don’t care about the players, so why should we?
With masked guards, numbered tracksuits, and imitations of death if you lose, Beast Games’ iconography is almost identical to the similarly-named Netflix smash-hit drama Squid Game. In Squid Game, viewers see fictional contestants compete in emotionally excruciating games for entertainment. In Beast Games, viewers see the same thing, but this time the contestants are real. Though there are moments of joy as well as heartache, there is a sense that Beast Games feels like a big-budget psychological experiment. This applies to many of the challenges where contestants are repeatedly put into emotionally testing situations to see how they will react. However, it also applies to the viewer. Overloaded with shots of contestants in extreme distress, it raises the question of how many tears does it take for us to tune out?
Before Beast Games even aired, five contestants alleged in a lawsuit that they were denied privacy and access to the outside world, lacked access to hygienic products and medical care, had very limited control over meals, and were exposed to dangerous conditions while filming. Though only a small fraction of the Beast Games competitors complained, these allegations are worrisome. Each time Mr Beast claims that he has made the biggest and best game show ever, it feels false because the enormous budget for the show seemingly did not extend to contestant care. Mr Beast claims that the allegations are “blown out of proportion” and that behind-the-scenes footage proves this. But viewers should not need to seek out bonus show material to confirm that contestants were looked after, this should be something obvious in the show itself. To have any doubt that adequate welfare provisions were met creates an uneasy viewing experience.
Beyond contestant care, Beast Games struggles because many of its challenges are weak. The unplanned nature of games appears confirmed in Colin and Samir’s behind-the-scenes documentary of the series which shows Mr Beast, alongside show creators Tyler Conklin, and Sean Klitzner, brainstorming game ideas just three days before production was due to begin. The show struggles greatly with sequencing; in episode one, three out of the four challenges are sacrifice-based, which makes the introduction to the series already repetitive. The challenges that don’t focus on sacrifice such as building a foam tower and answering trivia, are contrastingly refreshing but they do feel simplistic and relatively small-scale for the grand production set of Beast City. Television should be the space where you can elevate action but many of the games in this show can be made on a YouTube budget.
Even the Mr Beast team don’t seem to have full faith in their concept, as action is not given room to breathe before a twist is added in. For example, in episode two, contestants have to throw a ball from a tower into a giant red cup. However, a mere two minutes into this challenge, a gold cup is added. If contestants successfully shoot the ball into the new gold cup, they don’t add points for their team but win 250 thousand dollars for themselves. They return to the repetitive theme of bribes and sacrifice. When any moment of Beast Games gets good, the Beast team try to make it bigger, but unfortunately not better. In the opening minute of Beast Games, one contestant proudly claims “I will die for this”. Luckily, there are legal regulations that inhibit game shows from killing their contestants. But Beast Games pushes players to uncomfortable emotional extremities which makes it feel like the Roman Colosseum revived.
Beast Games is certainly watchable and its maintained place in the Prime Video Top 10 proves this. It is a show filled with exciting snippets, perfect for viral TikTok clips, and the generous prize-givings are exciting to see. However, hyperfocused on retention rates and broken records, Mr Beast and Prime Video did not zoom out to consider either challenge design or contestant care in enough detail. The result is a show that is easy to watch but not overly enjoyable. A game show made with all head but no heart.
Words by Jennifer Cartwright
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