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“Beast Games,” a reality-competition show currently streaming on Amazon Prime, opens with a dramatic camera shot, circling in three-sixty degrees to capture the show’s host, a skinny young man holding a mike. The man appears unremarkable: with his sparse beard, fresh-faced complexion, and straight-off-the-Zara-rack outfit (skinny pants, bright white sneakers, blazer over hoodie), he has the look of a junior medical-equipment salesman ready for a night out at a Murray Hill sports bar with his college buddies. The fact that he’s standing on a pyramid-shaped stack of dollars, however, clues us in to the fact that he is no everyman; and when he speaks, his voice, too, crackles with the feverish energy of a megachurch pastor’s. “I am standing on five million dollars of real money,” he shouts. “The largest grand prize in entertainment history! And competing for this five million dollars are these one-thousand contestants. Come on in!”
The man is Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. the YouTube sensation MrBeast—the kind of figure who you might not have heard of if you’re over twenty-five, but that the Gen Zs and Gen Alphas in your life are intimately familiar with. (Even if they’re not fans: “Please don’t write about MrBeast,” my thirteen-year-old daughter implored, before knowledgably walking me through some key moments in his career.) Donaldson, who is twenty-six, is currently the most popular creator on YouTube, with three hundred and forty-four million subscribers and hundreds of millions of views for nearly every video he posts. (He recently told Time magazine he brings in between six hundred and seven hundred million dollars in revenue a year.) He began his journey to platform dominance in 2012, when he was just thirteen years old, and, over the years, has become notable for his extravagant, high-production-value videos in which seemingly insurmountable challenges are confronted and bested. Sometimes he serves as the guinea pig to various P.O.W.-style experiences (“I Spent 7 Days Buried Alive”; “I Paid a Real Assassin To Try To Kill Me”; “I Spent 7 Days In Solitary Confinement”); sometimes he extends his hand in charity to a less-fortunate group (“I Helped 2,000 People Walk Again”; “I Saved 100 Dogs From Dying”); and sometimes he offers sizable prizes to contestants whom he pits against each other in a series of gladiatorial rituals (“Every Country On Earth Fights For $250,000”; “100 Boys Vs 100 Girls For $500,000”).
“Beast Games” is aligned with the latter category, and though the show is Donaldson’s first foray into television, it retains much of what has made him a figure of note on YouTube. In the course of ten episodes (only six of which have aired at the time of this writing), Donaldson and his all-male “crew”—five young and excitable sidekicks with names like Nolan and Chandler—preside over a series of challenges, gradually winnowing down the number of contestants from the original thousand the game opens with. The games range from a trivia competition (“Who founded Amazon?” “Jeff Bezos is the correct answer”), to a block-stacking contest (who will be among the first hundred people to be eliminated because of their stack toppling?), to oversized beer pong (which team will get more balls into an enormous Solo cup?). The action takes place, first, in a dark and cavernous hall built out with individual platforms for the competitors, then in a depressingly maquette-like “city” (complete with a “T-Mobile V.I.P. House,” where the winners of one challenge kick back), and later in the brush and sand of a private Panamanian island that members of the gang are competing to win.
The contestants, dressed in blue tracksuits marked by individual serial numbers, are watched over by hooded guards—an Abu Ghraib meets Adidas aesthetic borrowed from the dystopian Korean series “Squid Game,” in which a group of financially hard-up competitors participate in a string of deadly children’s games. But though the Netflix hit is a clear inspiration, “Beast Games” is also a paean to Donaldson’s obsessions, which seem consistently kindled by the infantile instinct to turn make-believe into reality. “What you are witnessing is real,” he intones in voice-over, as the contestants enter the hall where the games begin. “This is bigger than anything you can even imagine.” The point here is over-the-topness: the winner will take home five million dollars, yes, but on offer are also other wins: that Panamanian private island! A Lamborghini! Not to mention additional “large, giant piles of money” besides the main purse. There are also cannons fired from a “real pirate ship,” and “real Navy SEALs” to hunt down contestants in a survival challenge. During the series, the five-million-dollar cash pyramid follows the players to most of the sets the games take place in, standing mutely but pointedly at the center of the action. And, when some of the competitors are eliminated, they drop swiftly and suddenly through trap doors into holes in the floor. All of which is to say, this is not a show that prizes subtext. The spectacle here is one based on literalism: nothing need be imagined ever again.
The glut on display, meanwhile, is coupled with deprivation. “Completely getting my family out of the poverty pipeline,” one contestant explains, when asked why she’s joined the show; another’s father has cancer; a third grew up homeless. The stakes at play are articulated most bluntly by an enthusiastic competitor: “I will die for this. I will die for five million dollars.” This desperation serves as the drama’s motor. Many of the games Donaldson presents are meant to test the competitors’ individual need—or, perhaps, greed—against their commitment to the group. Will a contestant sacrifice himself to insure that the team he’s been placed in won’t get eliminated en masse? Conversely, will a competitor resist offers of money which, if accepted, will make her rich but eliminate her team?
These moments are set up as gripping “Sophie’s Choice”-style decisions. But, as I kept watching, I had to admit to myself that my interest wasn’t stirred, nor was my empathy—mostly because I found it difficult to care about the plight of contestants who, for much of the show’s run, number in the hundreds, and are mostly referred to by their serial digits rather than by their names. There are several nods to the supposed “friendships” contestants have made during the games, and yet, it seems that even Donaldson himself is aware that the show’s participants aren’t strangers just to us but to each other. They “just said no to one million dollars, not for their friends but for people they’ve only known for a couple of days,” he marvels, after four contestants pass, who knows why, on a bribe that would have led to their teammates’ elimination. No matter: what animates the show isn’t character, or motivation, or plot, but numbers. When I looked over the notes I took during my viewing of the series, it occurred to me that they looked less like the critical marginalia I usually jot down and more like a math-class scratch pad. “18 people, $13,000 per person,” one note read; “62 people eliminated, 431 remain,” read another; “player 413 wins golden ticket” read a third.
I’m a lover of reality television, and, yet, I also understand much of the criticism it draws. Reality stars, whether on competition shows like “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race” or on soap-opera-style series like the “Real Housewives” franchise, agree to have their lives used for strangers’ entertainment—a trade-off that, even if consensual, surely isn’t always healthy or even fair. Still, at the very least, they get to be singular characters. The beauty of much reality television—claims of bad edits and manipulative storytelling notwithstanding—is that, as viewers, we’re able to focus on people’s particular experiences and tendencies. (Every day, I thank those generous enough to agree to that trade-off for the American public’s pleasure and edification.) And yet, in “Beast Games,” there are no stars—no subjectivities to observe, no people to get to know, no complicated relationship dynamics to respond to—just a bunch of faceless numbers whooping, screaming, and crying their way through a series of senseless challenges. This kind of abstraction is, in a way, what the show is about, and it is bone chilling. “They literally look like ants,” Donaldson tells one of his cronies as the two stand atop a tower, watching from high up as below them, hundreds of contestants pour into Beast City. Later, he offers another observation: “It’s like a zombie horde coming at me.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
