Amazon’s Beast Games mega game show has received plenty of flack from critics. Averaging only 13 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, professional TV reviewers have called it “a sad reflection of our modern times” and “one of the most undignified spectacles ever shown on TV” and “a deafening, joyless cash dash” that “exists solely to show us the worst of the human condition.”
So, yes, the show is that good — addictive in a Squid Game knock-off kind of way. The amount of cash being tossed around is obscene, and that’s part of what makes the show guiltily watchable. In the second episode, when the show’s inflatable tube man host Mr. Beast howls and waves his arm when not one of four contestants are tempted by a $1 million dollar bribe to eliminate the rest of their 50-person teams, it’s very compelling TV. Indeed, viewers have firmly split with the critics on this show — the Rotten Tomatoes audience score for Beast Games is a glowing 89 percent positive. And the show’s viewership, if you believe Amazon’s claimed internal metrics (which we typically don’t, really) declare it the “Most-Watched Unscripted Show of All Time” with 50 million viewers globally.
What’s most striking about the show isn’t Mr. Beast himself — who critics have relentlessly tried to pick apart over the years (the incredibly popular YouTuber is, for some reason, regularly criticized for giving millions of dollars to fans and doing stunts like curing 1,000 blind people — get him!). What’s most interesting is the enormous generational divide on display between Gen X and the younger Millennial / Gen Z contestants which feels rather unique and occasionally unnerving.
But first: You’ve seen Survivor, right? It’s probably the closest legacy TV comparison to Beast Games. There are even multiple episodes of Beast Games set on a tropical island. But since Beast Games is on Amazon and not CBS, the prize during this stretch was winning ownership of the actual island — and that’s not even the Amazon show’s top prize, which is a TV game show record of $5 million. Winning a private island worth $1.8 million was merely a side quest. (Survivor‘s $1 million prize hasn’t changed in 25 years; inflation has impacted the value of everything on the planet except the payout for spending 39 days starving on a broadcast TV island).
So if you’ve watched Survivor, you’ve seen hundreds of contestants eliminated over the last few decades. Some get mad, some are stoic, some shed a tear. But what they almost never do is have a total mental breakdown on national television.
Watch Beast Games and you’d think that being eliminated is not merely a setback, but a shock to the system from which a contestant will never recover — particularly for the younger players who comprise the bulk of the show’s 1,000 contestants, a number that was rapidly paired down across the show’s first few episodes. The contestants sob. They wail. They fall to their knees. They curl into a ball. One young woman was reduced to inconsolable hysterics after she was cruel convinced her to quit the game by two other players. So many seem naive or unhinged. To be clear, I’m not saying Gen Z typically has these traits, I’m saying Beast Games sure does make it look like Gen Z has these traits, which isn’t the same thing.
Such moments are also where Mr. Beast, admittedly, also doesn’t look great. The Beastman and his collection of boyish and excitable co-hosts (one critic snarkily called them “soy faced”) often struggle to speak like humans to other humans and demonstrate any real empathy. Survivor‘s Jeff Probst may have never healed the blind, but you can tell the man has a heart. And when you begin a show with 1,000 contestants, watching people react to getting eliminated becomes the cruel-edged entertainment that’s primarily being served up.
The older-younger generational divide emerges in an entirely different way in the latter episodes, with a growing riff between pragmatic (some would say selfish) Gen Xers and more idealistic and collectivist (some would say guileless) younger millennial and Gen Zers.
One of those older contestants who turned down $1 million early in the season was eliminated empty handed. On his way out the door, he was screamed at for selected a well-liked other contestant to potentially get eliminated along with him in a last-ditch attempt to boost his survival odds. This man turned down $1 million (incredibly and, arguably, foolishly) to let 50 strangers stay longer on the show, yet was demonized for having the audacity to try and live another day (“Nobody’s going to respect what you did here, nobody!”).
Then last week, another older contestant decided during a moral dilemma scenario to take $650,000 from a pot of money for himself and leave only $27,000 for the remaining contestants to split. He points out that he has kids and must put his family first (“I love and respect you guys … but none of you are going to feed my children,” he says indignantly). Nobody was eliminated by this decision, yet the younger contestants were especially shocked and furious, seemingly unable to comprehend why he didn’t just take his “fair share.”
“You’re feeding your family by stealing food from the community,” declares one, which is wild: Nobody is stealing food. This “community” is fleeting and artificial TV construct. And the entire point of going on the show was to win money, right?
For somebody in a competition series to get offered a massive pile of cash, and then get berated for having the audacity to take it — or to get peer pressured into refusing $1 million … it feels like something new (and rather unlike Squid Game, actually). We’ve all grown up on competition shows where the prize is the point; typically the only point (“I’m not here to make friends,” as the cliche goes). For many young contestants on Beast Games, their goal is to support each other and to be painstakingly fair to everyone in the hope of some kind of equal outcome that’s at odds with the show’s stated concept.
This, in some ways, is refreshingly altruistic. If you can make it into adulthood with fifth grade everybody-must-share-the-cupcakes values intact, that’s arguably a nice thing. But then Beast Games comes along where contestants are successfully tempted into defying those ideals and Gen Zers seems shattered and devastated at the show’s harsh introduction to real-world quasi-capitalistic greed. One imagines the occasional Boomer checking out this show and being extremely confused.
Without judging either side (well, as ex-latchkey kid Gen Xer, I’m judging a little), Beast Games is a bit distressing in terms of what it says about America right now. Yes, there are always differences between generations, we all know that. But while the media relentlessly focuses on the political divide between Left vs. Right, the social experiments in Beast Games suggest there are perhaps even bigger ideological gulfs between older generations which were famously neglected and younger generations which were famously sheltered.
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