TV in 2021 painted a bleak picture of wealth, from Squid Game to Succession to The White Lotus

The Guardian

Squid Game's "incredibly bleak message – that people find the odds of surviving a sadistic game more favorable than achieving financial stability outside it – that struck a chord with millions living through our bleak, highly inequitable times," says Adrian Horton. "Squid Game’s unsparing brutality was a good match for a year in which the 745 wealthiest Americans alone made enough money to fund more than half of Biden’s beleaguered social spending plan, in which billionaires took their dick-swinging contest to space, and in which Fox News spun an attempted coup into Republican orthodoxy (and profit). Though the bloodiest, Squid Game is not the only popular show this year to present a dire reflection of our economic system: The White Lotus, HBO’s breakout summer hit about a week at a decadent and morally decaying resort in Hawaii, sent up wealth privilege and its attendant self-delusion with sharp teeth and lush visuals; the third season of HBO’s Succession, arguably the buzziest drama on TV right now, found its media mogul family (loosely based on the Murdochs, owner of Fox News) once again being miserable, ruining each other with malice and American democracy without a thought, and always evading accountability. Strip all three of these shows of their incisive barbs or sexual tension or meticulous set-dressing, and you’ll find the same molten black core: an economic system so stratified and broken as to be inescapable, invincible (in the timeline of these stories), and toxic from top to bottom. In each, emotional misery is a given, and ultimately preferable to ceding any privilege. The American dream and much of American media has long idealized the pursuit of money and the whims of the rich, but there is absolutely nothing enviable or aspirational about the wealthy in these shows. Dark parables or portraits of capitalism are, of course, not unique to 2021 – in western media, see: The Hunger Games series, the popularity of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, or the loony satire of Sorry to Bother You. Nor is the idea that money cannot buy happiness new to television – HBO has practically created a sub-genre for rich white people being miserable and/or terrible, from Big Little Lies to The Undoing. But what’s striking about this year’s crop of shows is just how little redemption they offer, just how few comforts they find in the capitalist status quo."

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• Squid Game had a deeper point to make than "capitalism is bad": The hit Netflix Korean drama series "makes the game — and the game within the game — simple on purpose," says Hannah Amaris Roh. "But what remains in the story isn’t just the unrelenting repetition of the same point, rendering the violence pointless. The point of Squid Game is not to explain to us that 'capitalism is bad,' but rather this: we already know, all too well, that capitalism is bad, but we keep returning to a dire, money-obsessed system, morphing into characters that consciously choose, game after game, to participate in our (and one another’s) demise. This very structure of repetition — and return — does tell us something about capitalism’s hauntings, even when, especially when, we try to reckon with it. As some have already pointed out, the major twist at the end of episode 2 is what separates Squid Game from others in the 'deadly game' genre, when fully grown (as opposed to adolescent) contestants decide to return to Squid Game Island. There is also the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), whose identity is revealed to be a former winner of the games who has returned to facilitate and perpetuate the violence — a crushing revelation for his own brother, the cop under cover. There’s the moment in the 'Gganbu' episode, when the protagonist Seung Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) — who had thus far maintained a connection (albeit a fragile one) with his own humanity and the humanity of others — begins to manipulate the old man, transforming into the very character he did not want to be. To his own dismay, Gi-hun chooses his own survival over this friendship, returning to the structure of violence that has traumatized him. But perhaps the show’s most sadistic return of all is the collective harkening to childhood, a desperate longing for innocence and 'fairness' that is revealed to be a harsh lie."