Beast Games on Amazon Prime is both disturbing and compelling

The point with Beast game is laid out with chilling sharpness in the first 60 seconds of the premiere. A thousand people are competing for a $5 million grand prize, which we’re told is the “largest in entertainment history.” But its host, 26-year-old Jimmy Donaldson, better known as the massively successful YouTuber with “MrBeast,” refers to this pile of money in a different way: “generational wealth.” This might sound like a strangely academic way of describing a jackpot, but only if you weren’t familiar with Mr. Beast’s defining quality: his desire to test exactly what people are willing to do for cash.

The next thing viewers hear about Beast game are the contestants describing their motivations for competing on the show. The first is a black woman who says she grew up homeless and wanted to use the money to help other homeless children. The other is a young white guy who says, “If I win $5 million, I could use it to earn passive income for the rest of my life.”

beast game, whose first four episodes are now streaming on Amazon Prime, know what it’s doing when it shows you one contestant arguably worthy of the award and another presented as far creepier in comparison. It knows what it’s doing when it shows you a pink-haired millennial crying hysterically because they knocked over a tower of blocks, or any other instance of adults acting like toddlers. It knows it has taken squid game, a show about how our delight in seeing poor people demean themselves for money can actually be a bad thing, drawing the exact opposite conclusion.

Beast game exists to make you hate it and other people and for you to keep watching regardless. In this it is an extraordinary success.

The gist is that 1,000 people wearing tracksuits compete in challenges to win the prize over the course of 10 episodes. They start the competition in a giant warehouse before moving to “Beast City,” which looks like a life-size Brio train set, and then to “Beast Island,” a $1.8 million private island in Panama. Future episodes move the remaining ones to Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. Despite allegedly costs more than 100 million dollars to make, it’s characterized by trashy writing, ugly graphic design, and frequent ads for MoneyLion, a payday loan company that markets itself as a cool fintech brand. Every moment of the show is designed to grab and hold your attention, and it does so even as you hate yourself more with each passing second.

The show’s logic is so toxic that the moments designed to strengthen viewers’ faith in humanity—like when all four team captains choose to turn down a $1 million offer rather than betray their teammates—made me want to scream at them from my couch. “Don’t you know the only reason you’re here is to win a lot of money?” I wanted to say before reminding myself that I am a grown woman watching Beast game.

But this cynicism is justified when one of said team captains then becomes a cult-like figure among a faction of his fellow contestants, spewing bizarre Christian sermons to promote his identity as a martyr. The big-bearded Jeremy claims that it is actually God who is guiding him through beast game, and God, who told him to take mostly his male teammates with him to the next round, even after he promised to help the women. This leads to a hilarious moment where a female contestant says, “I talk to God every day and I know for sure he didn’t tell him.”

Those who are Beast-fluent know that Donaldson typically shies away from more complicated narratives about gender and race, preferring instead to keep the tone to toddler simplicity: “Mr. Beast give the poor guy some money, Mr. Beast God! There is an almost shocking lack of conflict in many of his YouTube videos; any tension is only surface level.

This is where the Amazon show reinvents itself, pitting men and women and the white and non-white players against each other and forming the central narrative of the show. It’s horrifying and infuriating to witness two brothers happily convince a sobbing woman to sacrifice herself for them, or when a white guy takes back his promise to the two blacks he shares a jail cell with. (God, this shit is bleak.) By episode three, I was ready to swing pitchforks to defend the good-hearted players from the bad guys, completely forgetting that it was all a hoax orchestrated by the world’s most famous YouTuber and a multi-billionaire -dollar company with a long experience of exploitation.

Mr. Famously uncharismatic, Beast is useless when it comes to the task of comforting contestants who are kicked off the show (or, in some cases, fell into an abyss); the scenes that require him to show human emotion are painful to watch, and not just because he spends the entire show wearing a hideously shiny suit over a black hoodie.

His crew—Donaldson’s friends-slash-employees known as the “Beast Gang”—are worse. They are awkward, soy facing bros who do nothing but try to feign surprise at a game they designed while repeating whatever internet slang they think is most popular (drink every time they shout “Locked in!”). Neither of them are able to interact normally with other people, which I guess is understandable when the only time you have to interact with normal people is when they beg you for money.

This again is the logic of Mr. The Beast universe, composed of wealthy 20-something hustle-bro influencers of a variety of flavors and their armies of wannabe copycats. Here the kind of money jargon used by Mr. Beast and his participants – “generational wealth”, “passive income” – to gospel. Mr. Beast and his ilk are obsessed with rags-to-riches tales, both their own and others’, and dangling the dream of “financial freedom” to viewers by showing off Lamborghinis, Rolexes and their success with women. For them, money is the key to everything; it is the end of human life, everything. As Katie Notopoulos wrote on threads“‘Beast Games’ is obsessed with money; the first ep challenges are mind games about winning money, not physical challenges. It’s a game show where ‘wanting money’ is all the entertainment.”

Nihilism at the heart of Beast game is of course nothing new. As Emily Nussbaum catalogs in her history of the genre, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV, Making the poor lie down in an attempt to win money is older than color television broadcasts. 1945 saw the debut Queen for a daya radio program in which working-class housewives competed to win a series of prizes by sharing their sob stories to an audience who would decide the winner via applause-o-meter. Crucially, she writes: “You couldn’t be queen if the prize was for you. It had to be for your preemie baby, your sick aunt—and the more ostentatiously self-denying you were, the more likely other women would let you win.”

You could argue that there are plenty of reality TV shows that are more diabolical than Beast Games – The 2000s alone saw such ethical disasters as The Swan, Kid Nation, Cheaters, The Biggest Loser, and Jon & Kate Plus Eight. As ugly as Beast game is to be seen, it seems to have been even uglier behind the scenes. Participants reportedly had to sign contracts acknowledging “I understand that such activities may cause me death, illness, or serious bodily injury.” In a lawsuit filed against the show, several contestants said they experienced sexual harassment, were “degraded” by the experience, and lacked access to food and medicine. (Neither representatives for Amazon MGM studios nor Mr. Beast have commented on the lawsuit.) A few of the contestants also left the arena on stretchers, while others were hospitalized. “We signed up for the show, but we didn’t sign up to not be fed or watered or treated like people,” one attendee told the New York Times.

Over the past few years, it’s starting to feel a little like many of us are contestants on a reality show where our job is to sell sob stories to maximize the amount of attention and money we can squeeze out . It has been enlightening to see what kinds of people thrive on this particular show and watch beast game, at least helped me better understand the dark, gnawing desires at the heart of the American id. It’s Mr. Beast’s world now. Play on.