Beast Games: Uninteresting as Reality TV, Unsettling as Everything Else

Surely you’ve heard of him by now. 

With 379 million subscribers as of Apr. 1, 2025, Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson is the creator of the most popular YouTube channel in history. With brands like Feastables already out-earning his YouTube channels, MrBeast is the head of a $5 billion company. And with Beast Games, his competitive reality TV show where 1,000 contestants undergo a series of trials to become the last one standing and win $5 million, MrBeast is looking to become a television mogul.

Photo Credits: The Guardian/Beast Games

MrBeast’s fame afforded him full creative control over Beast Games, and he rejected traditional reality TV production techniques. He went all-in on grandiosity: the show broke 44 Guinness World Records. No amount of over-the-top polish, however, can cover up for Beast Games’ obnoxious style, repetitive structures, and fundamental alienation from its own contestants.

From the very beginning, it is painfully obvious that MrBeast wants you to ogle at the scale of his creation. The first episode begins with all 1,000 contestants—which MrBeast helpfully repeats is “THE LARGEST CAST FOR A REALITY TV SHOW IN HISTORY!”—on display in a wide-open room. They are being filmed by 1,107 cameras, which is also, as repeatedly stated, the greatest number of cameras recording a reality TV show in history. The show cannot sit still, always panning and zooming and then switching to another of the 1,107 cameras. It is disorienting and plain uncomfortable to watch. 

The abundance of cameras harkens to a flashy, fast-paced editing style that MrBeast popularized on YouTube called “retention editing,” which aims to keep the viewer’s attention for as long as possible by always changing things up. In Beast Games, this same drive to never stop moving means that entertaining challenges are shoved aside for dull or recycled ones. In Episode 5, for instance, an action-heavy Navy SEAL-led hide-and-seek challenge is quickly resolved in favor of passionless coconut-rolling and guessing games.

Compounding the uninspired challenges is the fact that Beast Games is largely unable to give a peek into what being a contestant feels like on a personal level. The camerawork always seems to prioritize scale over individual stories as we return time and again to drone shots of the extravagant sets. When the camera does cut to specific people, it doesn’t linger; there is no time to leave an impression. It is as though we are stuck in MrBeast’s birds-eye view, only able to see the competitors as an inscrutable mass of people. 

As a result, it is strange that social-psychological challenges such as self-sacrifice and bribery make up the bulk of the show. In the first episode, three out of the four challenges involve self-sacrifice. Contestants are faced with the choice to eliminate themselves for prize money, for their teammates, or for some other incentive. The resulting emotional outpourings only come across as bizarrely overdramatic. Eliminated players crumple to the floor in tears, bemoaning their shot at the ultimate prize. Self-sacrificers wax poetic about how they want to show their fellow contestants that they truly care about them. We have only just met these people, and for all we know, they have only just met each other! Why would the self-sacrificer care about contestants they have never met? Why would the eliminated player think they had a fighting chance? 

Even when Beast Games unearths the seeds of storylines, they are never given time to mature. It is as though MrBeast is too scared to develop narratives, as if he does not trust the viewer to be able to follow them. In Episode 3, the latest self-sacrifice challenge traps groups of three in cells until one in each group sacrifices themselves. If they cannot come to an agreement in five hours, all three are eliminated. There are a handful of noteworthy conflicts: in one cell, two brothers conspire to trick a woman into sacrificing herself, while in another, a woman refuses to sacrifice herself after losing a card game that the other two contestants had cheated on. These one-sentence summaries, however, represent all of the depth that Beast Games can muster. We are not shown the machinations of the brothers or the cheaters, and any thought processes that we do catch a glimpse of are limited to the flashiest of hysterics. The majority of the episode is more of the same—contestants either spend MrBeast’s money or cry.

It is impossible to watch the first episode without being reminded of Squid Game. Participants are referred to by the number on their Squid Game-style tracksuit, and MrBeast is escorted around by guards dressed in Squid Game-esque hoods and masks for seemingly no reason other than to intimidate. Meanwhile, neverending shots of people sobbing cast a long shadow of desperation over the rest of the show. Most disturbing, however, is the ease with which the challenges brought out the worst in people. One self-sacrifice challenge ended with hundreds of people shouting at their neighbors to give themselves up. Hundreds of people, all congealing into one angry face of greed. While Squid Game articulated its aesthetics to amplify its message on class divisions, Beast Games mimics the dehumanizing aesthetics of Squid Game while dangling a real chance at financial freedom, all but recreating the dystopian vision of the former.

Aside from retention editing, MrBeast has explained that he has optimized his YouTube content by erasing any semblance of a personality from his videos. But at its core, reality TV hinges on the messiness of personality, of empathy, of humanity. Donaldson seems to know that, but he can’t seem to break from his roots. As you watch him blankly shill products in front of contestants who are minutes away from an emotional breakdown, you wonder how he was able to keep the worst of both worlds.

Rating: INDY

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Olivia Zhao is a sophomore studying Business and Global Affairs and she is one of the commentary editors for the INDY.