The 50 best TV shows of 2021, No 5: Squid Game
Hwang Dong-hyuk's South Korean satire chimed with a massive global audience facing calamitous times
In 2009, Squid Game's creator Hwang Dong-hyuk got himself deep into debt. When both he and his mother found paid employment impossible to come by, he had to turn to loans to survive. Hwang's homeland is a desperate society, divided between those working themselves to death and those who, having been made redundant, are trapped in debt. But, in channelling the experience of downtrodden South Koreans into one of the finest TV shows of 2021, he made something whose appeal transcended national boundaries.
We saw 456 debt-riddled contestants selected by a shadowy corporation to volunteer for a real-life gameshow in which the winner goes home with 4.6bn won (28m) if they survive a series of brutal games, while the losers go home in body bags. In the first episode, contestants could only move when the face of a sinister mechanised doll is turned away from them. Those caught out were mown down with machine-gun fire. As corpses littered the floor and the living congratulated themselves on surviving, this was a drama that encouraged us to follow the logic of capitalism to its extreme by treating everything, including fellow humans, as commodities, as means to ends.
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