The first two episodes of Beast Games are streaming on Prime Video.
Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson didn’t become the biggest YouTuber in the world because of charisma, cleverness, or creativity. The new Prime Video series Beast Games makes it abundantly clear he has none of these qualities. The creator is trying to translate the style, stunts, and back-patting generosity of his YouTube channel to a longer-form project, but the results – which involve him vamping along while 1,000 contestants compete in so-so games for a grand prize of $5 million – prove his near-ubiquity online is merely a triumph of spectacle. Beast Games resembles a MrBeast video in how it relies on constant reminders that what you’re watching is “wild” when, in reality, it’s almost entirely wearisome.
The MrBeast formula involves frying attention spans by throwing plenty of annoyingly loud, yet empty, escalations at the viewer. The same is true of the way Beast Games hits you over the head with refreshers about what’s unfolding right in front of your eyes as contestants rally together to shoot a ball into a giant cup. The first two episodes are completely averse to the kind of tension that better reality competitions earn by, say, letting us get to know their contestants and/or not hopping from shot to shot and scene to scene with the energy of a teenager downing their first Red Bull. One of Donaldson’s YouTube breakthroughs involved a 17-hour marathon in which he recited the name “Logan Paul” 100,000 times, establishing a pattern that carries over to Beast Games: Doing the most in terms of volume while doing the least when it comes to actual entertainment value.
It all feels eerily similar to when Donaldson recreated Netflix’s Squid Game for a 2021 video, missing the entire point of the dystopian series and instead positioning the prospect of desperate people pitted against each other as something aspirational. But, as he assures us ad nauseam, Beast Games takes that concept and blows it up to a tremendous scale, tastelessly allowing us to see greater numbers of real people crying about the millions of dollars they’re losing. It’s a shallow series best suited to existing MrBeast fans, reality show completionists, or people looking for background noise while they scroll on their phones.
And yet something sinister lurks beneath the surface of this disposable distraction. While some of this, yes, has to do with the concerning allegations of sexual harassment, chronic mistreatment, and more that cast a shadow over the series (Donaldson has said this is “blown out of proportion” and claimed he has yet-unreleased footage to prove it) it also has to do with what made it into the final cut. Donaldson frequently interjects to encourage his viewers to scan a QR code for a chance to win what he says is a $4.2 million dollar giveaway that critics and consumer advocates have already warned could trap participants into a payday loan-esque swindle. In addition to the ethical nightmare of someone with such a largely, predominantly young fanbase shilling for such a predatory enterprise, Beast Games’ partnership with MoneyLion grinds everything in the show to a halt. Ad reads are par for the course for MrBeast; they’re often dropped right into the middle of the action in his YouTube videos. But what’s awkward there is even more awkward on a show that’s ostensibly a bigger, more serious project from the creator. As is often the case with online celebrities operating in such scammy ways, it’s about getting the bag at all costs.
But Beast Games isn’t just surprisingly dull. It's also almost entirely devoid of anything to get invested in. Though future episodes may delve deeper into competitors’ personalities and motivations – the bread and butter of any reality show – once their ranks are whittled down, the beginning of the series is so impatiently frenetic that we’re barely introduced to any of them. Some of this, again, carries over from YouTube, where MrBeast’s output often feels like a bunch of TikTok videos crammed together out of fear that you’ll get bored unless something new is thrown in your face right this second. But Beast Games is uniquely out of its depth. The spread of games is vast – they include contestants trying to convince their teammates to eliminate themselves and a block-stacking challenge – but they all prioritize breadth over depth. The ones that could be more psychologically tense have no weight, passing with breakneck speed so we can get to the next one then the next one and so on. They all feel like they were made up in five minutes, and there’s nothing memorable about them aside from how they steal the iconography and callousness of Squid Game.
An ongoing TV series requires more than a YouTuber bludgeoning his audience with reminders of what’s at stake. Even when Beast Games stumbles into a potentially fun challenge – like a trivia game where we get to see the personalities of the players briefly shine through – each sequence is so edited to pieces that you don’t actually feel any of its impact. It’s headache-inducing rather than anything close to harrowing or humorous. When Donaldson jumps in to brag via voiceover how they have thousands of cameras on set (a weird flex if there ever was one), it made me wish he had fewer. An editor who could’ve built some breathing room into the proceedings would’ve been nice, too.
This brings us back to Beast Games’ biggest problem: MrBeast himself. Donaldson’s entire persona and approach to creating “content” may have cracked the code for generating record-setting YouTube views, but that doesn’t translate to TV. He just isn’t funny enough to carry a show like this; everything he does and says sounds like he’s trying to sell you something rather than genuinely amuse you. If there were anyone else at the center of Beast Games then it might be more engaging. Instead, what we have is a strange, woefully overstretched re-creation of his YouTube videos and Donaldson chiming in with what he seems to think is witty commentary. In reality, it can largely be boiled down to endless variations of “Can you believe that just happened?”
MrBeast, when it all comes down to it, is a hype man for himself, his brand, and his content. He just wants us to keep watching, and Beast Games is another part of that. The show, much like the man behind it, isn’t inventive, thoughtful, or even entertaining. But it's there, and there's a lot of it – seven more episodes are set to debut through February. It’s a show that’s the equivalent of the sketchy financial company Donaldson hawks throughout: corrosive to the culture, yet possibly too big to fail.
