Netflix announces return of VERY controversial series - despite it sparking waves of complaints for 'tone deaf and ignorant' scenes
The streaming giant has officially renewed Squid Game: The Challenge for a second instalment - and also revealed when it will land on screens.
It first debuted in 2023, following on from the original South Korean drama, but without the life or death consequences.
Netflix bosses have revealed a second series of the show will be available to stream from November 4, with a brand new set of contestants.
In addition, they've officially ordered a third series, cementing Squid Games' future on the platform until near the end of the decade.
A teaser said: 'This time, 456 brand-new contestants will enter the ultimate test of strategy, alliances, and endurance as they compete for a life-changing $4.56 million prize.'
It added: 'Inspired by the iconic original series with shocking new twists and never-before-seen games season two raises the stakes higher than ever. As players face elimination at every turn, only one can emerge victorious. New players. New games. New rules.'
The new series comes after Squid Game: The Challenge was previously savaged by critics, pulling in a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 48%.
Squid Game's original drama launched in 2021 and aired for three seasons before being cancelled by the streamer.
Fans previously slammed the competition spin-off, saying Netflix brought the competition that the Squid Game TV series satirises to life as they condemned the streaming platform.
'I see you completely missed the point of the series. Good job,' they wrote.
'How are you so ignorant to the entire point of the show that was on your platform,' another wondered. 'Like did you even watch it?'
'The fact this even exists proves they didn't understand the point of the actual show - it's going to be so disappointing how popular this will likely be,' a third penned.
Many pointed out that Netflix represents the very forces of power that the series is trying to speak out against and is ignorantly proving the point of the series.
Netflix also revealed they've officially ordered a third series, cementing Squid Games' future on the platform until near the end of the decade
The new series comes after Squid Game: The Challenge was previously ravaged by critics, pulling in a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 48%
'Making a reality game show based a show that critiques capitalism is still super cringe,' one user wrote.
Another commented: 'I hate that this exists. Squid Game's entire premise was a satire of greed, class warfare and exploitation of the working class. So naturally a large corporate entity like Netflix just saw dollar signs $$.'
'Squid Game is a show about people struggling with finances, being played with and humiliated by the rich. It is not subtle about it, and mentions some Korea-specific circumstances and events,' one viewer said, adding: 'Making a fun happy-go-lucky game out of it is, IMO (in my opinion), tasteless.'
Meanwhile, three anonymous contestants previously spoke to Variety, claiming they had to film for hours on end in zero degree Celsius weather.
'This is not a Bear Grylls survival show. If they had told us it was going to be that cold, no one would have gone through with it,' the first source shared.
They added: 'Imagine you're playing Red Light Green Light for six hours. What game is that? This isn't a game.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
24 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The Guide #204: The local dystopian TV shows captivating global audiences
I'm scandalously late to The Eternaut (El Eternauta), the Argentinian dystopian thriller that was released way back in April on Netflix. I inhaled all six episodes of the show's first season only a few weeks ago, after a glowing review on the podcast The Watch (which was also fairly late to it, making me feel a little better about my own finger-off-the-pulseness). Anyway, it's absolutely terrific, an end-of-the-world chiller that is vividly, realistically rooted in the socio-politics of the country in which it is set. This despite a premise that sees Buenos Aires beset by an unseasonal flurry of what turns out to be killer snow. That specificity, as anyone familiar with The Eternaut will know, is mixed into the story's foundations. The show is based on Héctor Germán Oesterheld's 1957 comic strip of the same name, which proved eerily predictive of the civil unrest and lurch into authoritarianism that would beset the country in the following decades. Of course, the reason for said unrest is very different: in the show and comic, an alien invasion causes the snowfall, while in real life it was in response to the installation of a military dictatorship. But the effects are similar: distrust between communities, paranoia and violence. Indeed, Oesterheld would be a victim of the turmoil he imagined in his strip: having joined a leftist group opposed to Argentina's ruling military junta, he, as well as his four daughters (two of them pregnant) and four sons-in-law, were disappeared in 1977, and a new appeal to find the family members was launched in the wake of Netflix's adaptation. Said adaptation goes light on anything overtly political, but it pulses away under the surface. For example, the show's primary character Juan (played by the veteran Argentinian character actor Ricardo Darín) has been aged up from the original series into his 60s – old enough to remember the days of the junta and be uniquely chilled by the prospect of societal breakdown. Juan is haunted by memories of the Falklands war, still a traumatic conflict for some. And at a time when the country is experiencing the effects of a new, hyper-individualist rightwing government, plenty have thrilled to the show's gentle ethos of collectivism as its characters work together to keep something resembling a society afloat (though The Eternaut's paean to solidarity might be undermined for some by its use in one scene of generative AI). The Eternaut is just one of an eastern seaboard-destroying wave of foreign-language dystopian or post-apocalyptic series available, and readily lapped up, by English-language viewers. Once the only role the likes of Seoul, Cairo or Buenos Aires would play in end-of-the-world dramas was to be vaporised, flooded or beset by zombies in Hollywood productions, as a way to demonstrate the threat that (the far more important) American cities were about to face. Now though, thanks to the continent-crossing capabilities of streaming, audiences are able to see other countries' often terrifying visions of societal collapse. And those visions come in so many shapes and sizes. In Korean drama Black Knight (Netflix) air pollution has rendered oxygen a much-fought-over commodity, hoarded by elites in gated communities. In the surveillance state hellscape of Dutch series Arcadia (Channel 4) the public are given 'citizenship scores' that determine their quality of life, while Agnieszka Holland's 1983 (pictured above, Netflix) imagines that communist rule in Poland extended into the mid-00s, even as the rest of the iron curtain fell, resulting in an isolated and consequentially brutal police state. Meanwhile, the Nigerian animated series Iwájú (Disney+), Spanish drama The Barrier and Brazilian drama 3% (both Netflix) all imagine futures where the privileged are walled away from the rest of a struggling society. It seems notable that many of these shows are on Netflix. The streamer's global expansion march has seen them throw money at original programming everywhere from Turkey to Taiwan, and in quite a few of those territories the result has been dystopian dramas, a genre you have to assume the streamer's famous all-powerful algorithm considers appealing to audiences outside those territories. Which is understandable: the fear of the end of the world is a universal one. What I find most absorbing about many of these series is a sense of hyper-locality, of being rooted in the traditions, styles and concerns of the specific country. Consider the show Families Like Ours, available on BBC iPlayer, which takes a very real threat to Denmark – rising sea levels – and pushes it to terrifying (and, some claim, impossible) extremes, with its population of 6 million forced to leave the country and become climate refugees. It's a predicament depicted in a matter-of-fact, almost mundane fashion, with characters shrugging reactions to each new grim development like frogs in boiling water. Families Like Ours is directed by Thomas Vinterberg, the film-maker behind Festen and The Hunt and veteran of Denmark's Dogme 95 film movement, who here applies its deadpan sensibility to something deeply serious. The result is markedly different from traditional disaster movies, rooted in Danish cinematic traditions and energised by its deepest fears. The same, of course, applies to The Eternaut. A second season, that will conclude the story, is in production, and won't arrive until 2027. I definitely won't be so desperately late to it when it arrives. Sign up to The Guide Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday after newsletter promotion If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
The Guardian
24 minutes ago
- The Guardian
My Cultural Awakening: Years & Years helped me accept my bisexual identity
I first discovered Olly Alexander, of Years & Years, by accident. I was teaching English as a foreign language in South Korea, and I showed a video of a BBC Glastonbury roundup on the projector as part of the lesson. I remember glimpsing an incredibly cute blond guy on stage, and being transfixed. I knew immediately that he was gay because the way he moved was unashamedly fluid and graceful. He was doing a pirouette. The clip was so short there wasn't even a mention of the name of the band, so I had to do some detective work. I Googled something ridiculous like 'bleached hair gay man Glastonbury 2015' and trawled through hundreds of search results until I found him. I was 24 and out as bisexual, but I had never done more than kiss a man. I grew up on the west coast of Ireland, and while my area was relatively liberal, we still used the F-slur regularly and referred to anything remotely crap or weak as 'gay'. At school, I liked girls enough to distract myself from the fact that I also liked boys – but by the time I was in my final year of university, I wasn't able to ignore my feelings for men any more. I told friends and family I was bisexual, but I did it in an almost aggressive way. My attitude was: 'I'm bisexual and if you have a problem with that, I don't want to hear about it.' Looking back, I think I was being defensive: I didn't want to discuss my sexuality because I wasn't entirely comfortable with it yet. It made me feel vulnerable to accept that I was interested in men because it messed with my sense of masculinity. I am still often perceived by strangers as straight. When I did develop a crush on a boy, growing up, it would be a macho lad who liked football and girls. Discovering Olly Alexander was seismic for me because it was the first time I fancied a man who was openly gay in his presentation. In the weeks after I found Olly online, I listened to Years & Years' debut album, Communion, on repeat. In a few songs, Olly refers to his love interest as 'boy', and I remember listening out for that word and feeling electrified by it. I was taking taekwondo lessons in my spare time, and I suggested to my instructor that we put Communion on in the background while we trained. Because it's a form of combat, taekwondo is a hypermasculine sport, but it is also elegant and feminine in the sense that it is like a dance. Listening to that music while doing those moves made me feel as if I was pulling together the two parts of my own nature, and finding some balance between the masculine and the feminine. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion At the point in the session when we were doing a particularly high-intensity kicking routine, the song King would start playing on the record – which is all about being desired by another man on a night out. My instructor loved the record too, although he was a very traditional South Korean man, and from small comments he had made I could tell he was casually homophobic. He had no idea that he was enjoying an album about gay men in the club. The music unlocked something in me. I began to pursue boys and go to gay first sexual experiences with men happened at precisely the same time as I was discovering Communion. When I listen to Shine now – which is about the magnetic feeling between two men – I still get this feeling in my stomach. It's difficult for me to disentangle the feeling of desire from the excitement I feel when I hear the opening bars. I started dating my first boyfriend around the time Years & Years' second album, Palo Santo, came out, so Olly Alexander's music doesn't just sound like lust to me. It also sounds like love. Anonymous Did a cultural moment prompt you to make a major life change? Email us at You can tell us how a cultural moment has prompted you to make a major life change by filling in the form below or emailing us on Please include as much detail as possible Please note, the maximum file size is 5.7 MB. Your contact details are helpful so we can contact you for more information. They will only be seen by the Guardian. Your contact details are helpful so we can contact you for more information. They will only be seen by the Guardian. If you include other people's names please ask them first.
The Herald Scotland
an hour ago
- The Herald Scotland
Does 'New Heights' glitch present an issue for NFL come Week 1?
The issue was resolved, but with the NFL and YouTube streaming the Week 1 game in Brazil between the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers on Sept. 5, it begged the question: should the NFL be concerned about YouTube's capability to stream a game to a worldwide audience that will command far more than one million viewers at once? It's not an unfamiliar situation for the league. Last season, as the first-ever NFL games aired live on Netflix set for Christmas Day approached, the streaming service also faced questions about the streaming capabilities in the wake of the issues viewers experienced during the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight. Netflix had roughly one month to figure out the issues and largely aced the test, with hardly any complaints throughout the two games (and a Beyonce live halftime performance). YouTube does provide the NFL Sunday Ticket Package and many people watch the league through YouTubeTV. But those are premium, subscription-based services with a number of viewers the company - owned by Google - is now accustomed to. (The tech issues for Sunday Ticket during the 2023 season certainly irked fans.) The scale of the Chiefs-Chargers game will exponentially increase the viewership numbers compared to those products, especially since the game is free to watch. A spokeswoman from Google confirmed to USA TODAY Sports that it was not a YouTube issue that led to the glitch. After the calamities of the Paul-Tyson fight, Netflix addressed its issues in connecting its backup servers - utilized to account for the heightened traffic on the platform - with the countless internet service providers (ISPs) throughout the world. Worth noting is that millions of people will be using YouTube simultaneously not for the purposes of watching the AFC West matchup, which could also strain streaming capacity. The NFL would not have handed out exclusive rights to YouTube - financial terms have not been disclosed but its almost certainly in the nine-figure range after NBCUniversal paid more than $100 million to air the first-ever game in Brazil in 2024 on Peacock - if the league didn't think the company could pull it off without issue. Ultimately, YouTube corrected the "New Heights" issue and fans had their "Tayvis" moment. But come Week 1, the company won't have that leeway.
