Is Netflix's Squid Game: The Challenge Real?

Reality shows can definitely be manipulated, whether producers are engineering the on-set conditions or a room full of editors are tweaking the narrative after cameras are down. So what about Netflix's new reality competition "Squid Game: The Challenge," based on the brutally violent South Korean drama of the same name that was released to a ton of acclaim back in 2021? According to an article on Netflix's TUDUM, producers worked extremely hard to make all 496 contestants feel as if they were really on the original series — without all the casualties, though.

For one thing, cameras never stopped rolling; nobody ever yelled "cut!" to signify that filming was over. Cameras were even on while contestants were asleep (though the article claims that was mostly for health and safety reasons). Basically, as production designer Mathieu Weekes said, they wanted the players to feel completely controlled by their surroundings.

"You want to make it the most immersive experience possible so they feel like they're in Squid Game," he said. "You are just creating an environment for them to behave and act, and be pushed and prodded and pulled."

According to that TUDUM piece, it's not just the contestants who are constantly kept on their toes. The production team has to work behind the scenes to pull off this massive enterprise, stay off-camera, and keep guiding the players throughout the process. This is obviously made much more difficult when you consider that the cast never leaves the set, requiring the production team to quickly make adjustments or clean up common areas while players are wrapped up with one of the show's massive games.

"[The showrunner will tell us,] 'We want them peeling potatoes,'" Mathieu Weekes said, trying to provide an example and likely referencing the frequent "chore time" which contestants perform throughout the show's first five episodes. "'Can you get a pot of potatoes to peel?' And then the next day, if it's a game day, we have a team that's standing by on the game set just to facilitate the crew and shooting that. And then we'll have the lion's share of the crew turning the dorm around. A deep clean gets carried out during that time to reset. All the beds are remade. So we kind of flip-flop into two modes every other day, really."

"Squid Game: The Challenge" is about as real as any other reality show — like "Survivor," it strands its remaining contestants in one place and forces them to coexist in uncomfortable conditions — but some of its "realest" moments actually center around its public controversies. In February of this year, a Rolling Stone report circulated that filming the Red Light, Green Light scene was especially treacherous for the players, who spent a whopping nine hours in freezing cold conditions while being told to (ironically) "freeze" in various positions for extremely long periods of time.

One player alleges that he was so cold after filming that he fell down a flight of stairs and incurred several injuries. Others said they developed pneumonia and sinus infections. Most jarringly of all, if a player collapsed — which some apparently did — medics would tend to the person, but they would also block the fallen player from the view of the cameras and require standing players to, basically, keep playing the game.

"People were beating themselves up, including myself, around the fact that you've got a girl convulsing and we're all stood there like statues. On what planet is that even humane?" a player told the outlet. "Obviously, you would jump and help — that's what our human nature is for most of us. But absolutely it's a social experiment. It played on our morals and it's sick. It's absolutely sick."

Beyond safety concerns, the players told Rolling Stone that they also believed the game was rigged from the start. "Instead of 'Squid Game,' [they] are calling it 'Rigged Game.' Instead of Netflix, they're calling it 'Net Fix,' because it was clearly obvious," one contestant said. "It was just the cruelest, meanest thing I've ever been through," another agreed. "We were a human horse race, and they were treating us like horses out in the cold racing and [the race] was fixed."

These players alleged that the show's creative team seemed to know who they'd want to eliminate or keep around. Some claimed that the plane tickets that flew them to London for filming already had a return date, which was one day after they were ultimately eliminated. One player said that time on a game was extended so a mother-and-son duo could keep playing together, while others said that they crossed the Red Light, Green Light finish line with time to spare ... but were eliminated anyway and not told why.

So is "Squid Game: The Challenge" real? Kind of! The bottom line is that it's as real as any other reality competition show where producers get the final say in the product.