‘Squid Game' Over As Media Tires Of Survival Series

Forbes

3 days ago

Netflix survival thriller series Squid Game has ended its run with a season which got less than half the media coverage it had during the month following its debut four years ago.
The Korean streaming show became an almost-overnight success when it was released in September 2021 thanks to its timely viral premise. Its name refers to a deadly series of secret games which cash-strapped players compete in for the chance to win $30 million. The games are overseen by the Front Man, a mysterious character who is clad in black and protected by an army of masked guards in pink jumpsuits.
The story is told from the perspective of Seong Gi-hun, a divorced father and indebted gambling addict who lives with his elderly mother. He soon finds that if a player loses a game it results in their death which increases the prize pool. It makes for tense storytelling as Gi-hun triumphs and sets out for revenge against the Front Man only to be told that he can't stop the games because human nature perpetuates them.
Squid Game's debut season still stands as Netflix's most-watched show with 265.2 million views in its first 91 days of streaming. Its success was all the more surprising given that the show is in Korean so English viewers have to watch it dubbed or with subtitles. As a result, the show launched with little fanfare and caught the media completely off guard.
This is reflected in data from Factiva, a search engine owned by Dow Jones which includes content from 33,000 news, data and information sources in 32 languages. It shows that Squid Game wasn't mentioned in the media at all in June and July 2021, just a matter of months before its debut. It attracted 1,524 articles when it launched in September 2021 and rose almost eight-fold to 11,943 the following month as word spread.
Despite its dystopian and far-fetched premise, many viewers remarked on how relatable the show is and there is good reason for this. Squid Game was created, written and directed by South Korean filmmaker Hwang Dong-hyuk who based it on his own economic struggles as well as the class disparity in his home country. This authenticity paid off as the show earned a flurry of awards including six Primetime Emmys and one Golden Globe.
As the hype continued to build, it set the scene for season two to get even more media coverage than its predecessor but it was not to be. The second season launched on Boxing Day last year and became Netflix's biggest television debut ever with a total of 126.2 million views across 11 days. However, by then saturation had begun to set in as Squid Game hadn't just taken Netflix by storm, it had also partnered with everything from Domino's pizza to the Duolingo online language learning program in an attempt to drive even more exposure.
This appears to have had the opposite effect as the number of times Squid Game was mentioned in the media fell to 7,890 in December last year which presumably would not have happened if the public had still been lapping it up as much as when it debuted. No doubt this wasn't helped by the fact that the show's novelty had worn off and, to his credit, Dong-hyuk could see the writing on the wall.
In stark contrast to filmmakers for studios such as Disney, Dong-hyuk said that the third season of Squid Game would be the "finale" and it was filmed back-to-back with the second one. Season three was released in June this year and was yet another knockout for Netflix as it became the first show in the streamer's history to debut at number one in all 93 countries where its users are based.
What's more, the 60.1 million views that season three attracted in its first three days were more than any other show has attained in the same period. However, it failed to reach the heady heights of its predecessors and currently stands in third place on the list of the ten most popular non-English Netflix shows of all time as shown in the table below. Tellingly, both the number of views and the number of hours viewed have fallen sharply with the release of each season since the first debuted in 2021.
Similarly, Google records show that the peak number of times 'Squid Game' was searched during June this year was around a third lower than in October 2021 following the release of the first season. Likewise, the 5,343 media mentions of the show in June were less than half the total from October four years ago. Both season one and three launched towards the end of the month and the bulk of the media coverage would usually be expected in advance to promote them.
A different picture emerges when comparing the coverage during the week of release as the third season leads the way with 2,742 mentions in the media followed by 2,047 for season two and just 227 for the inaugural instalment. This suggests that the core fanbase of Squid Game fans became increasingly interested with every season whilst the wider appeal waned which is why the coverage of the show didn't increase as time went by.
It highlights the need for Netflix to continue commissioning new content as even shows which once seemed to be bulletproof can eventually fall in popularity. Squid Game isn't the streamer's only show which is ending in 2025. Hit retro-style supernatural drama Stranger Things will also come to a close with the debut of its fifth season at the end of the year. However, unlike Squid Game, it is finishing on a high as its fourth season became Netflix's most-watched English language series when it debuted in 2022.
Squid Game does however still have some fight left in it as an English-language version directed by David Fincher is under development. It is rumoured that it will star Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett, who made a cameo in Season 3 of the Korean version. Time will tell whether it can get back to its winning ways in the media.