"It looks stupid," my husband said 15 minutes into the South Korean Netflix hit that claimed No. 1 series spot in over 90 countries in a matter of half of a month, becoming the most popular show in the history of the service (Yep, more popular than Bridgertons).
He left another 10 minutes later, and my natural curiosity – why people actually would watch something that does look and feel so weird – made me stay to the end of the first episode of Squid Game. The next eight series went as one moment. A moment full of stress, compassion, worries and "that's ugly but true" thoughts.
At some point when I was halfway through the show, he saw my face watching it and asked if I was going to cry. I was close.
So what is it that made the show so popular?
Is it something brand new? No, by no means.
The bloody survival drama executes a many times-repeated plot about the world of the rich getting bored to a point where the only excitement that makes them feel something is death – senseless and relentless. And the world of the poor being desperate and pushed to the limit, overwhelmed by debt and problems they have no means to resolve. The only means the main character Seong Gi-Hun (Lee Jung-jae), No 456, has left, just as all other players, is his life. And along with other players sinking in debt, he agrees to risk all he has left to partake in an experiment and have a shot at an enormous amount of money.
The games they play are known since childhood (Korean childhood), which is almost comforting (even if you've never played those games, that notion of it being something familiar is calming). But the deathly twist to the games is new, which creates contrast and adds that terrifying nonsense element to the show.
The story of an unequal and deeply divided society is not new. There were previous shows about enclosed groups playing weird games as well.
Nor is the idea of capital killing anything human in people new, it was executed in cinematography and literature many times and is actually quite widespread among left-wing South Korean moviemakers. With every new game, with every new challenge, you expect to see Seong Gi-Hun's eyes fade, and you wonder what it will take to destroy the inner world of this naïve, sympathetic, kind but fortuneless man.
But showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk, who wrote and created all nine episodes and actually was pitching the idea of the show for 10 years, managed to bring together several different elements that grabbed the attention of millions of viewers. While we've seen it before, the strong humanitarian message of the show has probably become even more relevant these days.
The other part to the success would be the powerful emotions common in Korean shows and movies. The shooting techniques utilized in the show also played their role, making me jump up a bit every time another player got "eliminated."
A really important element to the success of the show is the main character himself. From flashbacks from his past, we learn that all his life he played by the rules, and that's where it got him. Nice, fair man, but a bit clumsy and unlucky. He owes to everyone around him, and in his efforts to help or take care of others, he only gets further into problems and debt. Anxiety that is too well known to so many today.
And of course, the full-of-action narrative is something that keeps viewers engaged throughout the entire show. It is so unpredictable that it almost made me give up on guessing what's next. The rules of the games are simple and easy to follow, and since the beginning viewers can assume that the main character should make it at least to the second half of the show. But it's impossible to predict what the new game will be, what it will bring, and what part of a human, remaining in players, it will challenge.
It's also the players and their actions that you never can guess. With every new game, I kept hoping to see them finding a way to remain kind, to stay together as a team, to trick the game runners, to stay humans despite everything. And at the same time with how the show goes, I was 100 per cent ready to see the worst. Not a single time did I really guess how the perfectly thought-through characters would behave in an unfolding narrative.
And every time the titles were running up the screen I was left with a question, what would I do? Not an easy one to even think about.
I guess that realistic and deep self-reflection, triggered by satire and a bit of futurism, is actually what resonated with people all around the world, leaving us wondering about what would happen if we were pushed just a bit further than where we are now, and making Squid Game so popular.
