The purpose of Beast Video games is laid out with chilling starkness within the first 60 seconds of its premiere. A thousand individuals are competing for a $5 million grand prize that, we’re informed, is the “largest in leisure historical past.” However its host, 26-year-old Jimmy Donaldson, higher often called the massively profitable YouTuber styled “MrBeast,” refers to this pile of cash in one other method: “generational wealth.” This would possibly sound like an oddly educational method of describing a jackpot, however provided that you have been unfamiliar with Mr. Beast’s defining high quality: his need to check precisely what individuals are prepared to do for money.
The following factor viewers hear on Beast Video games is the contestants describing their motivations for competing on the present. The primary is a Black lady who says that she grew up homeless and that she would use the cash to assist different homeless children. The second is a younger white man who says, “If I win $5 million, I may use that to make passive earnings for the remainder of my life.”
Beast Video games, whose first 4 episodes are actually streaming on Amazon Prime, is aware of what it’s doing when it reveals you one contestant presumably worthy of the prize and one other introduced as much more sinister by comparability. It is aware of what it’s doing when it reveals you a millennial with pink hair crying hysterically as a result of they knocked over a tower of blocks, or every other occasion of grown adults performing like toddlers. It is aware of that it has taken Squid Recreation, a present about how, really, our glee at watching poor folks debase themselves for cash is perhaps a foul factor, and drawn the precise reverse conclusion.
Beast Video games exists to make you hate it and different folks, and so that you can preserve watching regardless. On this, it’s a rare success.
The gist is that 1,000 folks sporting tracksuits compete in challenges to win the prize over the course of 10 episodes. They begin the competition in an enormous warehouse earlier than transferring to “Beast Metropolis,” which appears to be like like a life-size Brio prepare set, then onto “Beast Island,” a non-public $1.8 million Panamanian island. Future episodes transfer these remaining to the Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. Regardless of reportedly costing greater than $100 million to make, it’s marked by nonsensical writing, ugly graphic design, and frequent advertisements for MoneyLion, a payday mortgage firm that markets itself as a cool fintech model. Each second of the present is designed to seize and preserve your consideration, and it does, at the same time as you hate your self extra with each passing second.
Beast Video games exists to make you hate it and different folks, and so that you can preserve watching regardless. On this, it’s a rare success.
The logic of the present is so toxic that the moments designed to strengthen viewers’ religion in humanity — like when all 4 staff captains select to forgo a suggestion of $1 million reasonably than betray their teammates — made me wish to scream at them from my sofa. “Don’t that actually the one purpose you’re right here is to win a bunch of cash?” I wished to say, earlier than reminding myself that I’m an grownup lady watching Beast Video games.
However this cynicism is justified when considered one of mentioned staff captains then turns into a cultlike determine amongst a faction of his fellow contestants, spewing weird Christian sermons to be able to additional his id as a martyr. The big-bearded Jeremy claims that it’s in reality God who’s guiding him via Beast Video games, and God who informed him to take largely his fellow male teammates together with him to the subsequent spherical, even after he promised to assist the ladies. This results in a hilarious second the place a feminine contestant says, “I communicate to God each day and I do know for a truth he didn’t inform him that.”
These who’re Beast-fluent know that Donaldson sometimes shies away from extra difficult narratives about gender and race, preferring as an alternative to maintain the tone to toddler-level simplicity: “Mr. Beast give poor man cash, Mr. Beast God!” There may be an nearly stunning lack of battle in lots of his YouTube movies; any pressure is simply surface-level.
That is the place the Amazon present innovates, pitting the women and men and the white and non-white gamers in opposition to one another, forming the central narrative of the present. It’s horrific and infuriating to witness two brothers gleefully persuade a sobbing lady to sacrifice herself for them, or when a white man takes again his promise to the 2 Black folks he’s sharing a jail cell with. (God, this shit is bleak.) By the third episode, I used to be able to wield pitchforks to defend the good-hearted gamers from the evil ones, forgetting totally that each one of it was a fallacy orchestrated by the world’s most well-known YouTuber and a multibillion-dollar company with a lengthy observe file of exploitation.
Mr. Beast, famously uncharismatic, is ineffective in terms of the duty of comforting contestants who get booted off the present (or in some circumstances, dropped into an abyss); the scenes that require him to point out human emotion are painful to look at, and never simply because he spends all the present sporting a hideous shiny swimsuit over a black hoodie.
His crew — Donaldson’s friends-slash-employees often called the “Beast Gang” — are worse. They’re awkward, soyfacing bros who do nothing however try to emulate shock a couple of recreation they designed whereas repeating no matter web slang they assume is hottest (drink each time they shout “Locked in!”). None of them are able to interacting usually with different human beings, which I suppose is comprehensible when the one time you must work together with regular folks is after they’re begging you for cash.
This, once more, is the logic of the Mr. Beast universe, composed of rich 20-something hustle-bro influencers in a wide range of totally different flavors and their armies of wannabe copycats. Right here, the form of cash jargon utilized by Mr. Beast and his contestants — “generational wealth,” “passive earnings” — quantities to gospel. Mr. Beast and his ilk are obsessive about rags-to-riches narratives, each their very own and different folks’s, and with dangling the dream of “monetary freedom” to viewers by exhibiting off Lamborghinis, Rolexes, and their success with girls. To them, cash is the important thing to all of it; it’s the be-all, end-all of human life. As Katie Notopoulos wrote on Threads, “‘Beast Video games’ is money-obsessed; the primary ep challenges are mindgames about profitable cash, not bodily challenges. It’s a recreation present the place ‘wanting cash’ is all the leisure.”
The nihilism on the coronary heart of Beast Video games is, in fact, nothing new. As Emily Nussbaum catalogs in her historical past of the style, Cue the Solar!: The Invention of Actuality TV, making poor folks prostrate themselves in an try to win money is older than shade tv broadcasting. 1945 noticed the debut of Queen for a Day, a radio present through which working-class housewives competed to win a slate of prizes by sharing their sob tales to an viewers, who would decide the winner through applause-o-meter. Crucially, she writes, “You couldn’t be queen if the prize was for you. It needed to be on your preemie child, your sick aunt — and the extra showily self-abnegating you have been, the extra possible different girls would allow you to win.”
You would argue that there are many actuality TV reveals extra diabolical than Beast Video games — the 2000s alone noticed such moral disasters as The Swan, Child Nation, Cheaters, The Largest Loser, and Jon & Kate Plus Eight. As ugly as Beast Video games is to look at, it seems to have been even uglier behind the scenes. Contestants reportedly needed to signal contracts that acknowledged “I perceive that such actions could trigger me loss of life, sickness, or critical bodily damage.” In a lawsuit filed in opposition to the present, a number of contestants mentioned they skilled sexual harassment, have been “degraded” by the expertise, and that they lacked entry to meals and drugs. (Neither representatives for Amazon MGM studios nor Mr. Beast have commented on the lawsuit.) A couple of of the contestants additionally left the world in stretchers, whereas others have been hospitalized. “We signed up for the present, however we didn’t join not being fed or watered or handled like human beings,” one contestant informed the New York Instances.
Over the previous few years, it’s begun to really feel a bit bit like many people are contestants in a actuality recreation present, one the place our job is to promote sob tales to maximise the quantity of consideration and cash we will squeeze out. It’s been illuminating to see which types of individuals thrive on this specific present, and watching Beast Video games, on the very least, helped me perceive higher the darkish, festering wishes on the coronary heart of the American id. It’s Mr. Beast’s world now. Recreation on.