Summary
The first season of MrBeast’s reality gameshowBeast Games, which premiered earlier this week, has been panned by critics and labelled as “evil” and “dystopian” by viewers.
A few years ago, the idea of Jimmy Donaldson, better-known as MrBeast, putting on a big games show might have seemed appealing,but that’s changed throughout 2024. Over the past few months,Donaldson has gone through a variety of controversies, from hiscollaboration with Logan Paul and KSI for Lunchlytoaccusations of insider trading.
One of the biggest sources of controversiesregarding MrBeast over the last year has to do with his new series on Amazon, Beast Games. The new Squid Game-esque series, which pits 1,000 contestants against each other for $5 million, caused a stir when five anonymous contestantsfiled a lawsuit against Amazon and MrBeast over allegations of sexual harassment, hostile working conditions, and even hospitalisation.
Beast Games Labelled “Evil” And “Sadistic” By Viewers
This lawsuit waved a pretty big red flag for Beast Games and now that the first season of the series is out on Amazon Prime,its reviews are pretty reflective of that fact. As of the time of writing, Beast Games sits at 38 on Metacritic,with IGN and The Telegraph both giving the series a two out of tenand calling it “a bust"and a “joyless cash-dash”.
While the series is faring slightly better with a 6.2/10 on IMDb, the reviews are still fairly critical of the show as a whole. The same can certainly be said of the response from viewers, which has been largely negative and calls out the premise of the show for being “evil”, “dystopian”, and “sadistic”.
MrBeast even responded to the negative review from IGN, calling it out as “sad” that one person who doesn’t like him labelled it a 2/10 when “a thousand people” poured their lives into it.
Over on Twitter, Beast Games viewers have been sharing their thoughts, and a lot of them aren’t very positive. While some are perhaps unsurprisingly defending the show for offering people $5 million and saying no one forced them to take part,most of the comments call out how “dystopian"it all feels,with another labelling it “bleak”.
One post from Twitter user mercurialaries sums up a lot of the responses nicely, noting that the show takes advantage of people who are “struggling and vulnerable” and that the ‘entertainment’ comes from how far everyone goes. This is reflected in some of the Reddit responses, whichnote that the challenges “suck” due to them being based on other contestants screwing you over.
