London Reviews| Is Squid Game: The Challenge unethical or top entertainment?

Writing in Psychology Today, psychologist Dr Pamela Rutledge even suggests that the show is “ethically questionable”, arguing that it “turns the original series, where violence was a call to action against inequality” – ie where the violence was a metaphor in a drama about poverty and social disparity – into “a vehicle that promotes the opposite: a ‘game’ among ‘real people’ where ruthlessness and lack of empathy are essential to a big payout”. Should we feel bad about watching contestants suffering and being humiliated on a global platform?   

In The Age of Static, his book about how TV has affected society, critic Phil Harrison wrote of the first British season of Big Brother, a show to which SGTC has been compared: “It became clear that at its best, this stuff had what it took to compete with, and possibly even surpass, scripted fiction.” He feels the same about SGTC.

‘An inversion of what the drama stood for’

“It is horribly entertaining and I devoured it,” Harrison told Culture. “But I’ve also watched with a certain amount of guilt. I think the problem, such as it is, is that the drama version is such a bitterly acute satire of the ruthlessness of late capitalism, whereas, played out for real, it loses the satirical beats and becomes the thing the drama railed against.

“I talk about the ‘last man standing’ trope in my book – the notion [promoted by reality TV series] that sharp-elbowed competitiveness is the only feasible route to personal fulfilment – and how it feels very symbolic of our era in terms of how many people lose as opposed to how many eventually win. You see it in shows like The Apprentice and Big Brother and films like The Hunger Games too. This feels like the ultimate expression of it, which is ironic because it’s an inversion of what I assume the intention of the drama was.

“There were a couple of moments [in the first batch of episodes] which I found genuinely quite hard to watch, and I was quite concerned about the well-being of the people involved. But that extremity is, I suspect, a feature not a bug – it’s one of the reasons it’s so compelling.”

So are we all sadists, revelling in human suffering while watching from the safety of our sofa? Not necessarily, says Dr Sandra Wheatley, a social psychologist for Potent, and a chartered member of the British Psychological Society, who believes that we’re sucked into watching a show like Squid Game: The Challenge for less obviously malign reasons – because of a desire to be part of the cultural conversation.