I can’t stop watching Mr. Beast’s new game show and I hate myself

The point of Beast Games is laid out with chilling starkness in the first 60 seconds of its premiere. A thousand people are competing for a $5 million grand prize that, we’re told, is the “largest in entertainment history.” But its host, 26-year-old Jimmy Donaldson, better known as the massively successful YouTuber styled “MrBeast,” refers to this pile of money in another way: “generational wealth.” This might sound like an oddly academic way of describing a jackpot, but only if you were unfamiliar with Mr. Beast’s defining quality: his desire to test exactly what people are willing to do for cash.

The next thing viewers hear on Beast Games is the contestants describing their motivations for competing on the show. The first is a Black woman who says that she grew up homeless and that she would use the money to help other homeless kids. The second is a young white guy who says, “If I win $5 million, I could use that to make passive income for the rest of my life.”

Beast Games, whose first four episodes are now streaming on Amazon Prime, knows what it is doing when it shows you one contestant presumably worthy of the prize and another presented as far more sinister by comparison. It knows what it is doing when it shows you a millennial with pink hair crying hysterically because they knocked over a tower of blocks, or any other instance of grown adults acting like toddlers. It knows that it has taken Squid Game, a show about how, actually, our glee at watching poor people debase themselves for money might be a bad thing, and drawn the exact opposite conclusion.

Beast Games exists to make you hate it and other people, and for you to keep watching regardless. In this, it’s an extraordinary success.

The gist is that 1,000 people wearing tracksuits compete in challenges to win the prize over the course of 10 episodes. They start the contest in a giant warehouse before moving to “Beast City,” which looks like a life-size Brio train set, then onto “Beast Island,” a private $1.8 million Panamanian island. Future episodes move those remaining to the Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. Despite reportedly costing more than $100 million to make, it’s marked by nonsensical writing, ugly graphic design, and frequent ads for MoneyLion, a payday loan company that markets itself as a cool fintech brand. Every moment of the show is designed to capture and keep your attention, and it does, even as you hate yourself more with every passing second.

The logic of the show is so poisonous that the moments designed to strengthen viewers’ faith in humanity — like when all four team captains choose to forgo an offer of $1 million rather than betray their teammates — made me want to scream at them from my couch. “Don’t you know that literally the only reason you’re here is to win a bunch of money?” I wanted to say, before reminding myself that I am an adult woman watching Beast Games.

But this cynicism is justified when one of said team captains then becomes a cultlike figure among a faction of his fellow contestants, spewing bizarre Christian sermons in order to further his identity as a martyr. The large-bearded Jeremy claims that it is in fact God who is guiding him through Beast Games, and God who told him to take mostly his fellow male teammates along with him to the next round, even after he promised to help the women. This leads to a hilarious moment where a female contestant says, “I speak to God every day and I know for a fact he didn’t tell him that.”

Those who are Beast-fluent know that Donaldson typically shies away from more complicated narratives about gender and race, preferring instead to keep the tone to toddler-level simplicity: “Mr. Beast give poor guy money, Mr. Beast God!” There is an almost shocking lack of conflict in many of his YouTube videos; any tension is only surface-level.

This is where the Amazon show innovates, pitting the men and women and the white and non-white players against each other, forming the central narrative of the show. It’s horrific and infuriating to witness two brothers gleefully convince a sobbing woman to sacrifice herself for them, or when a white guy takes back his promise to the two Black people he’s sharing a prison cell with. (God, this shit is bleak.) By the third episode, I was ready to wield pitchforks to defend the good-hearted players from the evil ones, forgetting entirely that all of it was a fallacy orchestrated by the world’s most famous YouTuber and a multibillion-dollar corporation with a long track record of exploitation.

Mr. Beast, famously uncharismatic, is useless when it comes to the task of comforting contestants who get booted off the show (or in some cases, dropped into an abyss); the scenes that require him to show human emotion are painful to watch, and not just because he spends the entire show wearing a hideous shiny suit over a black hoodie.

His crew — Donaldson’s friends-slash-employees known as the “Beast Gang” — are worse. They are awkward, soyfacing bros who do nothing but attempt to emulate surprise about a game they designed while repeating whatever internet slang they think is most popular (drink every time they shout “Locked in!”). None of them are capable of interacting normally with other human beings, which I suppose is understandable when the only time you have to interact with normal people is when they’re begging you for money.

This, again, is the logic of the Mr. Beast universe, composed of wealthy 20-something hustle-bro influencers in a variety of different flavors and their armies of wannabe copycats. Here, the sort of money jargon used by Mr. Beast and his contestants — “generational wealth,” “passive income” — amounts to gospel. Mr. Beast and his ilk are obsessed with rags-to-riches narratives, both their own and other people’s, and with dangling the dream of “financial freedom” to viewers by showing off Lamborghinis, Rolexes, and their success with women. To them, money is the key to all of it; it is the be-all, end-all of human life. As Katie Notopoulos wrote on Threads, “‘Beast Games’ is money-obsessed; the first ep challenges are mindgames about winning money, not physical challenges. It’s a game show where ‘wanting money’ is the entire entertainment.”

The nihilism at the heart of Beast Games is, of course, nothing new. As Emily Nussbaum catalogs in her history of the genre, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV, making poor people prostrate themselves in an attempt to win cash is older than color television broadcasting. 1945 saw the debut of Queen for a Day, a radio show in which working-class housewives competed to win a slate of prizes by sharing their sob stories to an audience, who would determine the winner via applause-o-meter. Crucially, she writes, “You couldn’t be queen if the prize was for you. It had to be for your preemie baby, your sick aunt — and the more showily self-abnegating you were, the more likely other women would let you win.”

You could argue that there are plenty of reality TV shows more diabolical than Beast Games — the 2000s alone saw such ethical disasters as The Swan, Kid Nation, Cheaters, The Biggest Loser, and Jon & Kate Plus Eight. As ugly as Beast Games is to watch, it appears to have been even uglier behind the scenes. Contestants reportedly had to sign contracts that acknowledged “I understand that such activities may cause me death, illness, or serious bodily injury.” In a lawsuit filed against the show, several contestants said they experienced sexual harassment, were “degraded” by the experience, and that they lacked access to food and medicine. (Neither representatives for Amazon MGM studios nor Mr. Beast have commented on the lawsuit.) A few of the contestants also left the arena in stretchers, while others were hospitalized. “We signed up for the show, but we didn’t sign up for not being fed or watered or treated like human beings,” one contestant told the New York Times.

Over the past few years, it’s begun to feel a little bit like many of us are contestants in a reality game show, one where our job is to sell sob stories to maximize the amount of attention and money we can squeeze out. It’s been illuminating to see which sorts of people thrive on this particular show, and watching Beast Games, at the very least, helped me understand better the dark, festering desires at the heart of the American id. It’s Mr. Beast’s world now. Game on.