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 referred to as the massively profitable YouTuber styled “MrBeast,” refers to this pile of cash in one other manner: “generational wealth.” This may sound like an oddly educational manner 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 girl who says that she grew up homeless and that she would use the cash to assist different homeless youngsters. The second is a younger white man who says, “If I win $5 million, I may use that to make passive revenue 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 exhibits 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 exhibits you a millennial with pink hair crying hysterically as a result of they knocked over a tower of blocks, or some other occasion of grown adults appearing like toddlers. It is aware of that it has taken Squid Recreation, a present about how, truly, our glee at watching poor individuals debase themselves for cash may be a foul factor, and drawn the precise reverse conclusion.
Beast Video games exists to make you hate it and different individuals, and so that you can hold watching regardless. On this, it’s a unprecedented success.
The gist is that 1,000 individuals carrying 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 seems like a life-size Brio practice set, then onto “Beast Island,” a personal $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 hold your consideration, and it does, whilst you hate your self extra with each passing second.
Beast Video games exists to make you hate it and different individuals, and so that you can hold watching regardless. On this, it’s a unprecedented success.
The logic of the present is so toxic that the moments designed to strengthen viewers’ religion in humanity — like when all 4 group captains select to forgo a suggestion of $1 million relatively than betray their teammates — made me wish to scream at them from my sofa. “Don’t you realize that actually the one purpose you’re right here is to win a bunch of cash?” I needed to say, earlier than reminding myself that I’m an grownup girl watching Beast Video games.
However this cynicism is justified when considered one of mentioned group captains then turns into a cultlike determine amongst a faction of his fellow contestants, spewing weird Christian sermons so as to additional his identification as a martyr. The big-bearded Jeremy claims that it’s in actual fact God who’s guiding him by means of 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 converse to God day-after-day and I do know for a reality he didn’t inform him that.”
These who’re Beast-fluent know that Donaldson usually 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 a lot of his YouTube movies; any stress is barely surface-level.
That is the place the Amazon present innovates, pitting the women and men and the white and non-white gamers towards one another, forming the central narrative of the present. It’s horrific and infuriating to witness two brothers gleefully persuade a sobbing girl to sacrifice herself for them, or when a white man takes again his promise to the 2 Black individuals 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 every one of it was a fallacy orchestrated by the world’s most well-known YouTuber and a multibillion-dollar company with a lengthy observe document of exploitation.
Mr. Beast, famously uncharismatic, is ineffective on the subject 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 indicate human emotion are painful to observe, and never simply because he spends your entire present carrying a hideous shiny swimsuit over a black hoodie.
His crew — Donaldson’s friends-slash-employees referred to as the “Beast Gang” — are worse. They’re awkward, soyfacing bros who do nothing however try and emulate shock a few sport 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 individuals 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 completely different flavors and their armies of wannabe copycats. Right here, the type of cash jargon utilized by Mr. Beast and his contestants — “generational wealth,” “passive revenue” — quantities to gospel. Mr. Beast and his ilk are obsessive about rags-to-riches narratives, each their very own and different individuals’s, and with dangling the dream of “monetary freedom” to viewers by displaying off Lamborghinis, Rolexes, and their success with ladies. 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 sport present the place ‘wanting cash’ is your entire 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 individuals prostrate themselves in an try and win money is older than colour tv broadcasting. 1945 noticed the debut of Queen for a Day, a radio present wherein working-class housewives competed to win a slate of prizes by sharing their sob tales to an viewers, who would decide the winner by way of 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 probably different ladies would allow you to win.”
You could possibly argue that there are many actuality TV exhibits extra diabolical than Beast Video games — the 2000s alone noticed such moral disasters as The Swan, Child Nation, Cheaters, The Greatest Loser, and Jon & Kate Plus Eight. As ugly as Beast Video games is to observe, it seems to have been even uglier behind the scenes. Contestants reportedly needed to signal contracts that acknowledged “I perceive that such actions might trigger me loss of life, sickness, or critical bodily harm.” In a lawsuit filed towards 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 medication. (Neither representatives for Amazon MGM studios nor Mr. Beast have commented on the lawsuit.) Just a few 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 just a little bit like many people are contestants in a actuality sport 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 explicit 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.
