The YouTube superstar Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson vowed to make his Amazon TV series Beast Games the “biggest reality competition show ever”, and by most metrics, he succeeded.
A little over halfway through its run, Beast Games has hit No 1 on Amazon in over 80 countries and is now the streamer’s No 1 unscripted show ever, with over 50 million viewers in just 25 days on the platform.
Though it borrows from Netflix’s K-drama Squid Game – echoing the show’s basic premise, its pastel color scheme, its numbered athletic uniforms and its gigantic pile of cash as constant motivation – Donaldson’s clone is louder, more insistently pick-me, and more stereotypically American than its Korean inspiration.
The price tag for Beast Games soared past $100m during the course of its chaotic production, which makes it the most expensive competition show in history. Confident that he’d find a partner willing to buy the show and companies willing to sponsor it, Donaldson fronted much of that money out of his own pocket, enough to cover an estimated $20m in prizes, the feeding and housing of 1,000 competitors, hundreds of staff and the rental and construction of an array of elaborate locations. One of these is a giant aircraft hangar filled with neon-lit pedestals, each rigged with a trap door to dispose of eliminated players; there is also an entire purpose-built $14m Canadian village, dubbed “Beast City”, and a pair of tropical islands in Panama, their fertile jungle transformed into fancy and disposable pop-up resorts.
The outcome of this spending spree is certainly a spectacle, but not of the epic, awe-inspiring type that MrBeast originally intended. It’s more Titanic than titanic: a slow-motion luxury cruise ship disaster, crashing, exploding and sinking slowly below the waves over the course of a surprisingly tedious 10 hours. And, as such, it’s very much a reflection of America itself in this moment. When Beast Games is unearthed by future generations – boldly assuming that there will, in fact, be future generations – Donaldson’s garishly indulgent program will serve as a fossil record of the greed, narcissism, self-destructive factionalism and worship of aggro-capitalism that has brought us our second helping of Trump.
Part of the reason Beast Games feels like such a document of our times is its unscripted nature. Unlike Squid Game, which is merely a fictional dystopia, Beast Games is an actual one, pitting very real, very desperate people against one another in a lurid exploration of the humiliations humans will undergo in order to give themselves a chance at $5m, what MrBeast refers to in the show as “generational wealth”. (Donaldson himself is worth an estimated $500 million) But the majority of the credit or blame for Beast Games’ unsettling black-mirror reflection of our times should be given to Donaldson himself and the creative choices he’s made; choices that turn Squid Game’s lacerating condemnation of oligarchy into a celebration of the broligarchy.
While Squid Game presents its ultra-wealthy overlords as the evil monsters they are, torturing and murdering the debt-ridden destitute as a means of entertainment, Beast Games paints Donaldson and his very white, very male gang of YouTube cronies as a modern-day Robin Hood and his merry men, conspiring to extract cash from corporate sponsors like T-Mobile and shower it on the poor. If that requires subjecting said poors to on-air ritual degradation for the pleasure of home viewers, well, eggs must be broken to make a delicious Sherwood Forest omelet.
Imagine Squid Game if the Front Man and his VIPs were the show’s heroes? That’s Beast Games. Surely it’s an unintentional irony that along with T-Mobile’s omnipresent hot-pink branding, the show gives us regular reminders of its tagline: “With Magenta Status, you’re the VIP!”
Beast Games is far from the first unscripted competition show that encourages its contestants to share the poverty and precarity of their lives even as it tortures and humiliates them for a chance at a way out. But it may be the most cynical. By framing rich white tech dudes as benevolent patrons handing out bags of cash to unfortunate people who’ve made bad choices in life, Beast Games tips its not-so-subtle agenda, and it’s one that Donaldson has ridden to a record-setting 340 million YouTube subscribers, the most in the platform’s history. His content, which combines big-money giveaways, flamboyant charitable stunts and a heavy dusting of exclamation points (“Cleaning the ocean!” “I fed 10,000 families for Thanksgiving!” “I built 100 houses and gave them away!”) relies on the idea that civic institutions are broken and that government is unable to take care of its people, requiring magnanimous individuals like Donaldson to step in and provide solutions.
A few days ago, after uploading his most recent public altruism stunt, Donaldson posted on X to promote it: “Just uploaded a video where we helped 2,000 amputees walk again. Many lived in America and it feels so disgusting that in a country with this much wealth, a f**ken YouTuber is their only option to get a prosthetic leg. We need to fix this.”
The post gets so much correct – American healthcare is in critical need of reform, and it is indeed disgusting that a nation with so many resources can’t set it right – until it lands on its self-congratulatory “it takes a YouTuber” conclusion.
After all, there’s a real fix for the American healthcare mess that doesn’t require a YouTuber. In December, the broligarch Elon Musk, flexing his selection as co-head of Donald Trump’s planned “department of government efficiency”, posted a graph showing how US healthcare was bogged down by billions more in administrative costs than countries like Canada and the UK – both of which have public, government-run medical systems.
“Shouldn’t the American people be getting their money’s worth?” Musk asked. Senator Bernie Sanders immediately replied: “Yes. We waste hundreds of billions a year on health care administrative expenses that make insurance CEOs and wealthy stockholders incredibly rich while 85 million Americans go uninsured or underinsured. Health care is a human right. We need Medicare for All.”
But advocating for single-payer healthcare doesn’t generate the kind of 40 million-view content that MrBeast needs to fuel his burgeoning video empire and grow from demibillionaire to full three-comma status. And supporting it would require him to acknowledge that the real reason for the ruinous state of America’s healthcare system is massive resistance from corporations that employ armies of lobbyists to preserve the status quo – professional influence peddlers like the former Republican state senator Tom Apodaca, who left his position as co-chair of the North Carolina senate’s committee on insurance in 2015 to launch a lucrative lobbying practice representing the likes of Blue Cross Blue Shield, Optima Health, and, as it happens, MrBeastYouTube LLC.
The fact that MrBeast employs rightwing lobbyists is hardly surprising. He may fashion himself as an edgy, wild-card maverick, but his business model requires him to be umbilically connected to corporate America.
One of the cringiest aspects of Beast Games is its constant and blatant spotlighting of its sponsors, which include not just T-Mobile but the online finance platform MoneyLion. The latter offers AI-generated financial advice and high-interest “Instacash” advances, and it has partnered with Donaldson for a Beast Games-themed sweepstakes that promises to bring the show’s cash-grab opportunities to users at home.
Every episode of the show includes multiple instances of Donaldson turning to the camera and promoting a QR code to download the app and participate in the $4.2m MoneyLion Giveaway. Curiously, right as Beast Games was about to drop, MoneyLion announced it was being acquired for $1bn by Gen Digital, formerly known as Symantec, which owns identity theft prevention programs such as LifeLock and security apps such as Norton AntiVirus.
The acquisition will allow Gen Digital to identify and super-target the most vulnerable users on the internet with MoneyLion payday loan offers. Its omnipresent branding on Beast Games will only help. Payday lenders focus their marketing efforts on groups facing dire economic precarity: those with less than a college degree, those earning less than $40,000 a year, and increasingly, young people aged 18-24 – a profile that maps out perfectly to MrBeast’s gen Z fanbro legions.
All of this should make it clear why Beast Games is a toxic portrait (and enabler) of the ugliest aspects of our present-day landscape – but there’s much, much more where that came from. Recent episodes have been infused with religious zealotry, with one frequently highlighted player, the impressively bearded Jeremy Grant (No 991) invoking his evangelical Christianity on camera at every opportunity, loudly according his success in the game to Jesus. (Unfortunately for Grant, his prayers went unanswered on episode six.)
In past eras with a greater sense of shame, this onscreen invocation of faith in a relentlessly materialist competition might seem odd, but professional sporting events and Hollywood awards shows have long since normalized it. What makes its presence in Beast Games stand out is how much time Donaldson – who grew up in a fundamentalist household and attended a Christian private academy but renounced fundamentalism in 2022 – chooses to focus on it, allowing the camera to linger on Grant as he collapses to the ground and prays at the top of his lungs before making any major decision. The scenes contribute to the way the series transforms Donaldson from social-media Santa Claus into a flat-eyed, grinning Messiah of Money, preaching a creepy millennial prosperity gospel from a glass pulpit containing $5m in cash to a congregation of rapt worshippers. The revival-meeting flavor of the show is not lost on the contestants themselves, with one of them telling the New York Times: “We’re all just looking up at the sky, screaming at him like he’s God.”
That same Times article also reports on the lawsuit a group of contestants have filed against Donaldson, alleging “chronic mistreatment [and] degradation” during the course of a chaotic, out-of-control shoot rife with bait-and-switch lies, organizational snafus and outright abuse. The plaintiffs say conditions were miserable, with poor sanitation, gross and infrequent meals, a lack of access to prescribed medications and insufficient medical personnel to treat a flow of in-game injuries. They accuse the production’s inexperienced ground team of engaging in favoritism, hostile behavior and sexual harassment, of dismissing and mocking special requests, such as pleas by menstruating women for clean underwear, and of encouraging players to mob up and scramble in ways that created threats of trampling and crushing.
To sum it up, Donaldson lured a vast horde of individuals into his orbit with an ecosystem rampant with hypocrisy, where wealth is fetishized, altruism is corporatized, and faith is co-opted. He’s accused of subjecting them to hazardous environmental conditions, providing them with insufficient healthcare and dangerous food and drug administration, and putting a team of partisan, unqualified bullies and sex pests in place to supervise them. And other than a handful of resistors, they adore him for it, demanding that he keep the game going for future seasons and allow them, his devoted worshippers, to return to it for more.
That’s Beast Games. And that’s America in 2025. Are you not entertained?
