Under the influence: Beast Games and the YouTube-ification of television

Amazon's hugely successful extreme competition series is the latest attempt to lure younger online viewers to TV

Beast Games, Amazon Prime Video's reality competition series hosted by the YouTuber known as MrBeast, is not a well-made show. It is certainly an expensive show, something Mr Beast, the alter ego for 26-year-old Jimmy Donaldson of Greenville, North Carolina, likes to frequently remind viewers. The series is a feat of scale shocking to audiences outside the realm of YouTube, and especially Donaldson's fiefdom: 1,000 contestants, filmed by a system of 1,107 cameras, battling each other for a $5m cash prize - the largest in entertainment history, according to Donaldson. For the competition, Donaldson and his posse designed a warehouse war zone modeled on the Netflix dystopian series Squid Game, constructed a bespoke city and purchased a private island (also to be given away, along with a Lamborghini and other lavish prizes). Contestants eliminated in the first episode are dropped through trap doors to unseen depths; there is a pirate ship with cannons.

Yet for all the ostentatious displays of wealth, the show still looks terrible - garishly lit, frenetically edited, poorly structured, annoyingly loud and tackily designed. Many have pointed out that the show's central conceit - broke Americans duking it out and playing psychological warfare for luxury prizes, many in the name of paying their bills - is as dystopian as the Netflix series it's based on, a depressing spectacle of aggro-capitalism for our neo-Gilded Age times, with Donaldson as a self-styled Willy Wonka figure.