Squid Game - The Challenge: Behind the scenes on the new Netflix reality show
Squid Game: The Challenge is on Netflix from November 22.
Squid Game was the smash-hit series that became a global sensation. Now it returns to our screens in a reality-TV show format like no other.
A total of 456 real players - among them, Irish competitors including Co Donegal TikTok star Eric Roberts - will enter the contest in pursuit of a life-changing prize of $4.56 million (€4.2m) in Netflix’s forthcoming Squid Game: The Challenge.
The players will compete through a series of games inspired by the original show - with many surprising additions in the pipeline.
The reality format was a natural follow-on from the scripted series, but it brought enormous challenges, according to the forthcoming show’s executive producers.
“The director Hwang [Dong-hyuk] created this elaborate, spectacular, very unique world,” says Stephen Lambert, who previously worked on reality TV shows including The Secret Millionaire. “He also decided in his scripted show to have 456 contestants, which worked with the drama because he had a script and he knew who his heroes were.
“When Netflix asked us to make the show, their number one rule was they also wanted to have 456 contestants in the unscripted show. That was great, except the golden rule in reality shows is never have more than 20 people. So we had a few more than the golden rule and having to work out how to make that work was a huge challenge.”
Filmed in London’s Wharf Studios, the ten-part series involved contestants from all over the world including from Ireland. Unsurprisingly given the success of the drama series, interest from the public was enormous.
“Between 80,000 and 90,000 people applied to be on the show,” says executive producer Tim Harcourt. “Netflix were very keen for a large portion of that to be people from all across America. It’s a global success - they wanted to reflect that. So we've got Korean players, some English players, Irish players.
“We needed people to be free for up to three weeks essentially because if you go all the way to the very end, and win Squid Game, you would be there for 18 days.
“Everyone had to be physically and mentally able to take part in the game. We wanted a spectrum of ages and backgrounds. That's something the director Hwang had done in the original drama and we wanted to be true to that in our series as well. That whittled down the number to this still huge number 456. It was a military operation. We'd normally have a huge team in place just to find a cast of 20, so it was an even bigger team. There were teams on the east and the west coast of America and a team based in the United Kingdom looking for global players.”
Though some of the wildest games from the drama series will be revisited in the coming weeks, Squid Game’s success is greatly down to its ability to surprise viewers, and The Challenge will be bringing new elements into the mix, according to executive producer John Hay.
“We think the audience, having watched the drama, will want to see those games but obviously one of the keynotes of the drama is surprise. The dilemma for us was how to deliver the greatest hits but also deliver that surprise that was integral.
“In a way, the game that Hwang invented gave us the answer because people are forever being asked to make what we've ended up calling ‘pre-games’. They have to make choices without knowing the consequences, and then the consequences are revealed, and they have to play them out.”
Like audiences worldwide, the executive producers of Squid Game: The Challenge were blown away by the power of the series which became a sensation. “What they had, and the only other comparison I can think of is the George Lucas Star Wars franchise - it had such a strong visual language,” says Harcourt. “Just so confident from the get go - the guards, the shapes, the worlds that they built. Interestingly, a lot of the games feel like supersized reality TV games. Once you watch that first episode and you realise the absolute confidence of the world, I was pretty sure it'd be a global hit.”
“It’s an amazingly written and realised piece of work,” agrees Hay. “I also think it's an incredible mechanism for examining human nature and it’s tapping something universal. The drama is looking at character under pressure.
“Of course, that's one of the reasons that we were interested in adapting it because that question of who you are when the crunch is on sits at the heart of a lot of great scripted shows and a lot of unscripted shows. If you can find something that is able to meet that basic human curiosity as Squid Game does then it's going to extend infinitely.”
- Squid Game: The Challenge debuts on Netflix on November 22
