Squid Game Review, Netflix, and the Attention Economy

TLDR: it's aight, but NFLX is out to get us

So, I caved into the hype and watched Squid Game. Rather, my fiancée just started playing episode 1 without the obligatory 30-minute discussion about “what should we watch?”. I was skeptical from the jump. Netflix, in my experience, does not have the highest quality of content, and when you don’t watch a ton of TV, it is important to try to make sure you are at least watching the best stuff. For context, in the past year, we have watched the entire Sopranos, Dexter (season 1-6), a few HBO Miniseries, every episode of The Shop, and a smattering of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, with a dozen or so movies thrown in. Needless to say we don’t hop on the “trending now” bandwagon very often, or ever.

Squid Game started out slow, sputtered, captivated, provoked, and then ended slow. It was all in line with Netflix’s high-level strategy of stretching their series thin to the point of exhaustion in order to keep your eyeballs glued as long as possible, but I will expand upon that in a little bit. First, I want to give a fair critique of the series.

Half live-action-comic-book-violence, half socio-economic-commentary, Squid Game follows the playbook (albeit with a tilted balance) of what I thought was one of the best movies in the past few years: Parasite. But thematic style is about where the similarities end between the two. Parasite had masterful pacing, witty dialogue, true tension and suspense, real human characters, and a twist no one saw coming. By comparison Squid Game had dreadful pacing, often cringy dialogue, manipulated and exploited tension, human caricatures, and the most predictable end game scenario. Now to give Squid Game a little more credit, it was not trying to win an Oscar here, it was leaning a little cheeky on purpose, and there were two side-stories that, even though seemingly ended nowhere, were in fact unexpected.

The essence of the show is captured in the colorful cast of characters, mixed with the familiar Hunger Games / Survivor gameshow-esque formula. Each character is mostly one-dimensional, but they are all quirky without fail, and grow on you whether you hate them, love them, feel bad for them, or identify with them. We watch shows to watch interesting people interact with other interesting people in interesting scenarios. If that is the price of admission, Squid Game has it in spades.

The virality is achieved when this cartoonish cast is thrust into the most horrifying of positions, due to a simple reason that everyone can identify with: they need money. They all have their reasons of course, but they are all brimming with despair, and have to labor with the internal realization that they would actually rather participate in this death march rather than return to their normal lives. There are some game theory aspects that are rather interesting, but this deep morality confliction is really the hook that Squid Game sinks into your flesh.

The intended social commentary is bi-focal: that people are willing to do this for money, and that there is somehow a group of elites that funding this whole (quite ostentatious) operation. Both are truisms baked into the fabric of our global income inequality gap. Sure, it is garish characterization, but is it so far off that we can’t see all of our favorite most hated billionaires rounding us up like cattle in order to gamble on our lives? Maybe when hyperinflation hits this will feel a little more plausible.

(Spoiler Alert – I thought the most cringeworthy part of the whole series was the dialogue of the “VIPs” who gathered to gamble on the participants live. For such a gaudy and mysterious palace of intrigue, the whole game was seemingly designed for a few guys who conversed like they were college football fans sitting in a luxury suite at a lacrosse game. You guys don’t know anything, are being treated like royalty, have dialogue like it’s written by GPT-3, and can’t even watch the whole game? Maybe this is an additional commentary on how Koreans view stupid Americans? Or maybe this will hit closer to home in the next 5 years when a thousand new crypto-billionaires are minted and we are all trying to figure out what the fuck is going on in society..)

That said, The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell was written almost a hundred years ago and has yet to materialize in real life (that we know of). We’re safe for now..

Anyways, my beef with Squid Game isn’t with the characters, or whether they adequately navigated the complex moral and social issues brought forth. My beef with Squid Game isn’t even with Squid Game.. my beef is with Netflix.

It has become painfully obvious to me that there is a high-level strategy in place at Netflix, that is dictated down to each director/producer on each series, that mandates they make each show as many episodes as possible. I don’t think this is applicable to movies or standup specials that are standalone pieces of work, but it is becoming a horrible trend with a lot of the series they host. I don’t know if this is an incentive based strategy where teams get paid more money depending on how many episodes they produce, or whether this is a more transparent directive, but there is a stark contrast in watching a show on any other platform versus watching a show on Netflix.

The devil is in the details. Scenes linger a tad too long, zooms and pans just a hold a second or two longer than necessary, dialogue is just a little too superfluous. Nothing sinister in the aggregate, nothing detectable to a casual observer who is scrolling Instagram while watching the show, but to someone like me who prides himself on “only watching good shows”, it stands out like a sore thumb. Each passing scene becomes almost like a drinking game, trying to spot the 4-5 seconds of filler. To me it is eerily similar to the scandal that Tim Donaghy pulled off.

To those who don’t know, Tim Donaghy is an ex-NBA referee connected to organized crime and was arrested for rigging NBA games in which he officiated. The genius of his operation was that Donaghy didn’t have to make any blatantly wrong or egregious calls on the court, he just slowly and methodically erred on the side of his bet, making calls that would get a star player in foul trouble early, or disrupting momentum when the wrong team was ahead. When the NBA went back and did an audit on every call he ever made over 772 games officiated, they found that almost none of the calls he made, however close they were, when looked at in a vacuum, could be construed as blatantly wrong. However, over time, enough close calls favoring a certain side resulted in massive manipulation. Tim Donaghy never got a pick wrong.

That is how I feel about series on Netflix. No one scene is so egregiously drawn out that I have to turn the show off, it just dilutes the experience and slowly thins the content out from six episodes into nine. Why do they do this? Well, (assuming my conspiracy theory is correct), it is due to what all tech companies are monetizing: our attention.

There are a lot of apps now. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, YouTube TV, Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Disney+, Apple TV+ and Prime Video to name the top ones. There is also “good try but lol” efforts like Peacock and Paramount+. These will probably consolidate further in the coming years. I know some of these are social and some are media, but the fact is that they are both content generating apps that are competing for our attention, and content is rapidly becoming a commodity. Think about the cost it takes to make an Avatar movie, and the cost it takes to make a TikTok video. Both are competing for the same short attention span we have, and the divergence of the cost effectiveness of each is becoming paramount (no pun intended). Why are companies going to continue to pump millions of dollars into creating great content when kids would rather watch the UGC on social? The ROI on Hollywood starts to diminish unless the cost of content can come down. Set aside the love affair and inevitability of a Hollywood and Tech convergence and think about what the objective of the game becomes. Each consumer has a finite amount of screen time they can allot each day. Everyone is competing for it; it is the Attention Economy. Netflix has slowly and steadily slipped into the margin of where “high-quality” expensive content, and “low-quality” addictive content are mingling. The strategy simply becomes “have as much content as possible”, and longer content = more content.

For another glimpse into a Netflix’s high-level strategy, consider their reach, revenue, and expenses. They now have over 200M subscribers paying roughly $14 per month for a standard plan. (side note - can I get snappier ‘director’s cut’ pacing if I pay for Premium?) That is $2.8B per month or $33.6B per year in revenue. What are they doing to ensure they have enough content to keep everyone watching? They are paying $14B per year for content. Case in point: the recent acquisition of the Roald Dahl empire for $686M earlier this year. Buying the rights to a treasure trove like this is essentially a license for unlimited content. Love Willy Wonka? Forget about a (yet another) remake, how about a never ending series? How about we follow James and the Giant Peach, or Matilda for years after their coming-of-age stories? How about 35 season of Fantastic Mr. Fox with spinoff shows for all his friends? I’m not going to lie, I was a huge Roald Dahl fan growing up, and would love to see some of this content if done properly, doing justice back to the original work. But if it is going to be run through the pasta maker and flattened and diluted into oblivion, I just can’t get behind that sort of philistine behavior.

My point is this: content of all types is becoming commoditized and shedding the label that once defined it as art. Sure there will still be artists (hopefully there will always still be artists), but there is no ROI in this medium anymore. Public company shareholders are demanding higher margins, and there is only so much Attention to go around. They need to develop hooks (engagement algorithms, intriguing plots, or licensed content), and then hold us as long as possible when they have us. I’m not saying we all have to give up TV, or revolt, just be cognizant and apply a level of discretion to your content diet (in all mediums). Or maybe Squid Game is awesome and I’m just a fucking buzz kill.