MrBeast’s Beast Games reality show was a demonstration of how money alone can’t buy truly entertaining television

In its final minutes, Jeffrey Randall Allen – better known, if really known at all, as Player 831 in the super-sized game show that started with 1000 contestants

YouTuber MrBeast’s reality competition Beast Games, which concluded Thursday with a record US$10-million prize, was a demonstration of how money alone can’t buy truly entertaining television.

In its final minutes, Jeffrey Randall Allen – better known, if really known at all, as Player 831 in the super-sized game show that started with 1,000 contestants – picked the right briefcase out of 10 on the first try to take all that money home to wherever he lives. (Who knows!)

Ten episodes of recycled games of skill and random games of chance had all led up to this: a very expensive and extremely short round of Deal or No Deal.

The US$10-million prize given out by MrBeast and his producers at Amazon MGM Studios – an amount that doubled in the finale in one of many mind-numbing moments that hinged on a slow-motion coin flip – is going to a good cause at least. Allen’s son has a rare disease called creatine transporter deficiency; he’s pledged to help fund research into treatments and possible cures.

But the lead-up to Allen’s lucky guess was an only intermittently involving ride because the team behind it didn’t show viewers enough on screen to make them care about the human motivations and circumstances of, roughly, 998 of the other contestants.

Indeed, in its focus on numbers over names, and a ghastly production design that spoke to our fascist-adjacent times, Beast Games was perhaps the most anti-human reality competition of all time.

The aptly nicknamed host MrBeast, a 26-year-old social-media star whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, tried to convince viewers otherwise in the final episode.

“Over one year ago, Beast Games was created with a purpose,” he said in one of his typically detached voice-overs. “In its pure form, its existence is a sandbox of the 1,000 different stories of the 1,000 different players.”

This was belied by the fact that only two of six finalists in the last episode had anything in the way of backstory communicated to viewers.

Only Allen and runner-up Twana Barnett, a wrestler who had experienced homelessness as a youth, got the honour of being interesting; the edit was, indeed, tipping the show’s hand all along.

Survivor, one of the first and still the best of the reality TV competition, gets much more drama out of the diminishing returns of its US$1-million prize each season because the show is mainly, as its still avid host Jeff Probst puts it, a “social experiment.”

Beast Games, on the other hand, was too much about the limited imagination of a social experimenter.

MrBeast, whose account has the most followers of any on YouTube, first went viral with a video he posted about eight years ago in which he counted to 100,000. He apparently learned from that that his young, mostly male, viewers are much more interested in big numbers than anything as complex as human relationships.

Beast Games, almost embarrassingly influenced by Netflix’s Squid Game with its masked crew members in hoodies, had a thousand contestants to start.

In order to get that many humans on screen, the opening episode took place on a set that had the aesthetic of a temporary detention centre like the ones past and present American President Donald Trump is fond of setting up for migrants.

Contestants lined up in rows on tall pillars – and when they were eliminated from competition, they fell through a trapdoor in what was, literally, gallows humour.

Like America’s head of the new Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk, MrBeast seems to get a kick out of capriciously cutting people out of the picture.

A barely disguised fantasy representation of mass executions extended to episodes that took place in a walled city MrBeast built in Toronto on the grounds of the former Downsview airport that is hard to describe without using the words internment camp.

Having not met many human-numbers lodging there in any detail, the mass eliminations of the first episodes led to images less familiar from reality TV than from the aftermaths of natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

Nameless people crying and screaming, mainly about their kids; survivors crying out thanks to God and Jesus.

As an experiment in mass psychology, Beast Games did have moments when this cruel choreography was engrossing.

An episode in which hundreds of contestants were split into four groups and then had to elect leaders who would have to resist an offer of US$1-million in order for them all to stay in the game was genuinely inventive and riveting.

But the form of the competition kept changing. There were games of skill, strength, social manipulation, the occasional round of trivia, and one full episode that was a mini-season of Survivor – with the island itself being the prize. (An American won a bit of Panama; hurray.)

Will Beast