Some of the buzziest shows in 2021 – Squid Game, Succession, The White Lotus – offered incredibly bleak takes on capitalism fitting for our dystopian times
The first episode of Squid Game, the South Korean dystopian drama that became not only the year’s biggest TV show but Netflix’s most popular series of all time, has plenty of hooks: an underdog protagonist, an intriguing high-stakes mystery, the thrill of watching a widely recognizable childhood game rendered a matter of life and death. But the real kick of the series arrives in the second episode: the players, each facing financial ruin for various reasons, vote to quit the eponymous game and return to their lives, only to find the allure of a gamble preferable to the crushing weight of debt. By the end of the second episode, everyone has chosen to return to Squid Game, with a money pot of 45.6 billion won ($40m) literally hung from the ceiling.
It’s an incredibly bleak message – that people find the odds of surviving a sadistic game more favorable than achieving financial stability outside it – that struck a chord with millions living through our bleak, highly inequitable times. Squid Game’s unsparing brutality was a good match for a year in which the 745 wealthiest Americans alone made enough money to fund more than half of Biden’s beleaguered social spending plan, in which billionaires took their dick-swinging contest to space, and in which Fox News spun an attempted coup into Republican orthodoxy (and profit).
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