It would be difficult to construct a more stridently anti-capitalism TV show than Squid Game. Netflix’s unexpected hit is, after all, a series that tosses its hapless victims into a world in which people risk their lives on clearly rigged children’s games for a faint chance of financial security and success—and then goes out of its way to demonstrate that this system is, if anything less profoundly unfair than the society from which these unfortunate souls have just escaped. Its basic and most central metaphor—capitalism is a lethal game where the rules are redesigned, on a whim, to suit the powerful at the expense of the weak, while constantly touting its own “total fairness”—could not be more clear, to the point that you could sometimes accuse series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk of abandoning subtext entirely and laying it all on a little thick.
Except, of course, for the existence of the many, many people who try to argue with you that Squid Game isn’t really all that anti-capitalist of a program—a list that apparently includes Tim Harcourt, one of the executive producers of new game show Squid Game: The Challenge. Given that numerous people—including our own Saloni Gajjar—have argued eloquently about how Netflix’s attempted expansion of the series into the real world misses the source material’s entire point in a profound, existential, and frankly depressing way, it wasn’t entirely surprising to hear Harcourt tell TV Guide’s Kat Moon this week that “For us the anti-capitalist allegory is only one very small part of Squid Game.”
“I often say to people,” adds Harcourt, who apparently often says this to people, that “Star Wars is about swashbuckling rebels overtaking an empire, but people don’t necessarily just focus on that as being about freedom or being about anti-imperialism. So for us, that was one element.” Which, a) sort of casually disregards the entire existence of things like “tone” as they apply to the storytelling intent of a piece of media and, b) Lucasfilms has never tried to pitch people on a reality show about how cool it would be to get blown up by the Death Star.
Anyway, Squid Game: The Challenge—in which real people risk failure and humiliation in pursuit of a multi-million dollar prize while the rest of us sup heavily on their sorrows—is about all that other stuff Squid Game is about, according to Harcourt, including “how people come together when they’re required to beat the game” and “how we’re ingrained from childhood to be competitive.” Also, it’s not depressing like Squid Game is, because it’s all about people wanting millions of dollars in a fun, aspirational way, and not because they’re in the process of being chewed up and thrown away by their society the second their bodies no longer have worth to the system! “Director Hwang’s vision was about need—the players [in the original show] are all in desperate times,” Harcourt said. “For us, it was about opportunity.” It’s beautiful, really, if you think about it.