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).
Though the bloodiest, Squid Game is not the only popular show this year to present a dire reflection of our economic system: The White Lotus, HBO’s breakout summer hit about a week at a decadent and morally decaying resort in Hawaii, sent up wealth privilege and its attendant self-delusion with sharp teeth and lush visuals; the third season of HBO’s Succession, arguably the buzziest drama on TV right now, found its media mogul family (loosely based on the Murdochs, owner of Fox News) once again being miserable, ruining each other with malice and American democracy without a thought, and always evading accountability.
Strip all three of these shows of their incisive barbs or sexual tension or meticulous set-dressing, and you’ll find the same molten black core: an economic system so stratified and broken as to be inescapable, invincible (in the timeline of these stories), and toxic from top to bottom. In each, emotional misery is a given, and ultimately preferable to ceding any privilege. The American dream and much of American media has long idealized the pursuit of money and the whims of the rich, but there is absolutely nothing enviable or aspirational about the wealthy in these shows.
Dark parables or portraits of capitalism are, of course, not unique to 2021 – in western media, see: The Hunger Games series, the popularity of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, or the loony satire of Sorry to Bother You. Nor is the idea that money cannot buy happiness new to television – HBO has practically created a sub-genre for rich white people being miserable and/or terrible, from Big Little Lies to The Undoing.
But what’s striking about this year’s crop of shows is just how little redemption they offer, just how few comforts they find in the capitalist status quo. The contestants in Squid Game scrap and form loyalties and betray each other – the foibles of human morality under pressure – for (minor spoiler) the sport of ultra-wealthy Americans, no one character able to stop the crushing wheel of the game. The White Lotus loops through a merry-go-round of emotional exploitation that doesn’t spare even the most sympathetic characters, and ends more or less where it started: a new round of expectant guests arrives as the former depart, combustions and revelations having made little difference. It’s easier to fixate on the perceived slight of a barely smaller hotel suite, or cover infidelity with $70,000 bracelets, or to stay in a clearly terrible new marriage, than to change.
Succession’s somewhat frustrating third season has wheel-spun through the same dynamics of emotional abuse it has honed since its first season, but wealth remains the trump card. Nothing sticks to Waystar Royco – not a scandal over coverups of sexual assault in its cruise division, not the threat of a hostile takeover by their main rival, not a federal investigation over corporate malfeasance, not even political headwinds. The justice department comes for Waystar, and even that’s not enough – patriarch Logan Roy directs his channel, a stand-in for Fox News, to pressure the Republican president, a former ally referred to derisively as “The Raisin,” forcing him to abandon plans for a second term. The characters on Succession are each sad and pathetic in their own way, but the world is set up so the Roys, and especially Logan, never take a true loss.
These shows aren’t so much anti-capitalist (they’re on Netflix and HBO after all, and none imagine a different way, though that’s admittedly a lot to ask of entertainment) as fiercely down on the present, which appears not to be working for anyone – not the resort staff and vacationers bound in an awkward compact, not the billionaire media heirs whose wealth isolates them from human emotion, and certainly not the ordinary debtors who would prefer to try their odds in a perverse tournament than face the struggle of scraping by in the real world.
To be clear, I loved each of these shows for their own reasons, laughed more at their sharp writing than at many comedies. But sometimes I wonder if we’ve reached the bottom of the barrel with television bleakness. It can be gloriously refreshing to watch television that dares to acknowledge things are very, very bad, and in 2021, some of the best shows dressed this black pit of late-stage capitalism with deliciously deranged dialogue, edge of your seat suspense, gorgeous Hawaiian vistas, Halloween costume– worthy outfits, a Jennifer Coolidge performance for the ages. But they’re still staring the pit down, sparing no one the poison. Hope, collectivism, the imagination of a different way? Maybe that’s for 2022.
