Stream It Or Skip It?

Like in the first season of Squid Game: The Challenge, 456 green jogging-suited players play kid’s games for a jackpot that increases by $10,000 for every player that’s killed (though the term in the reality version is “eliminated). That means that the winning player gets a massive pot totaling $4.56 million. Unlike the first season, the producers realized that we need to connect to at least some of the contestants right from the start, and have them play games that are a bit more intimate than “Red Light, Green Light.”

Opening Shot: In various cities, contestants stand on street corners, waiting to be picked up.

The Gist: The contestants enter the signature dormitory chamber, with towers of bunk beds around them, and notice there’s a red X and a blue O on the floor. The masked guards tell two people need to step forward as leaders. Twin brothers Jacob and Raul volunteer to lead the teams. Each team has to count out 456 seconds, and press a button when they’ve hit that number. The team that comes closest to the actual time stays, and the other gets eliminated. Yes, half the players are gone within the first 15 minutes.

There are plenty of other challenges on the first day, namely that two of the contestants have an hour to pick three others to quietly eliminate, or they’ll be eliminated themselves. Then, the remaining players are tasked to make teams of ten. Then each team is split in half; their legs are tied together to make one six-legged being that has to traverse a small track in a pentathlon of seemingly simple but tricky games: Ball in a Cup, Flying Stone, Gong-gi, House of Cards and Jegi. The team of five that wins that heat stays, the other is eliminated.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Cross Squid Game with Big Brother, and you have Squid Game: The Challenge. You might be reminded of Prime Video’s Beast Games, too, a MrBeast-hosted clone of this show that dropped in November of 2024.

Our Take: We think Studio Lambert, the producers of Squid Game: The Challenge (and The Traitors!), learned from the first season and tried to make their reality competition a bit more personal and a bit more distinct than the Korean megahit it’s based on. Despite the massive number of contestants, they highlighted just enough people in the first episode to help viewers connect to people in the competition and not just watch a mass of green jogging suits get their ink squibs detonated when they’re “killed”.

It also helps that the challenges are on scales that allow the producers to feature a few people and help viewers root for them to succeed or get disappointed when they fail. A makeup artist named Sydney says in her pre-contest interview that she’s spoiled. Mark, a burly customer service rep, just wants to do big things for his fiancée. Raul was given a terminal brain cancer diagnosis, striking fear in his twin brother Jacob, until doctors determined his tumor was benign. Curt is a gregarious risk-taker, and his daughter Zoe, a Denver Broncos cheerleader, thinks that might make them a target. But they bond over taking risks; they went to base camp on Everest together, for instance.

Given the focus of that small handful of the hundreds of contestants, you know something dramatic is going to happen in that episode with all of them. In fact, the episode’s cliffhanger involves whether Curt and Zoe, on different “Six-Legged Pentathlon” teams, will both stay in the game. That’s a whole lot better than what we saw in the early going last season.

We’ve never loved the idea that, in these early stages, that emotions already run so high. Our reaction to that is usually along the lines of, “Why would people subject themselves to such stress?” But what we’ve come to understand is that these 456 contestants have likely been through a round or two of auditions and stress, and the fact they were winnowed down from thousands of contestants to this seemingly smaller number makes each of them think they have a shot at $4.56 million, even if their chances are still really remote. That’s where the emotions come from, but it still feels like the producers working the contestants up to get those emotional reactions.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: We mentioned the cliffhanger above, with Curt and Zoe not knowing whether each of them made it out of the pentathlon or not.

Sleeper Star: Let’s give this to the extras who have been hired to spend their time on camera in the signature red suits of Squid Game‘s guards, pretending to look at the screens that observe the contestants.

Most Pilot-y Line: A little bit of explanation about Gong-gi and Jegi would have been helpful for those of us that didn’t watch the Korean scripted original.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While there are still aspects of Squid Game: The Challenge we don’t love, like how the eliminated contestants are “killed,” we liked how the producers made the early stages of the competition more intimate and personal, despite the hundreds of contestants. And the set design, which matches the design of the original series, is top-notch as always.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.