Squid Game And Heroes & Villains of 2024

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0:58restaurants. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde and me Richard Osman. How are you Marina? I'm sad to be parted from you. Yeah we're in, I'm in like a lockdown situation because I've got a slight cold. I don't want to affect anybody. Richard is under laboratory conditions as they used to say in game shows when they put people in a sort of glass box but I can still see him. Listen, Happy New Year sort of. Happy New Year. We stand on the eve of 2025. If it's anything like 2024, it's going to be a belter. Most certainly. Now, what are we going to talk about today?

1:36We're talking about Squid Game, Netflix's biggest ever franchise, which is Back, Back, Back. Started on Boxing Day. We're talking about that. Talking about heroes and villains of the year, our heroes and villains of the year. Yes, I've compiled mine in a slightly odd way. You'll be thrilled to know. You surprise me. And we are also talking about New Year's TV and how things have changed, how the scheduling of things has changed and what New Year's TV means. It's a big slot now. The biggest day of the year. Shall we kick off with Squid Game? Let us kick off with Squid Game. As you say, Netflix's biggest ever show, which returned on Boxing Day and they've dropped all the episodes at once.

2:17It is a return to the death game. Yeah. It is, I mean, it's obviously very, very bleak. Yes. There are certain things that they've changed in the format of their in-show game that the players can vote to leave, the majority can split the money. Listen, it's important you change the format in the second series. Yes. We all know that. Just the things you learn from the first series you can put into play. Yeah, otherwise the death is not fun anymore. Yeah, exactly. It's got to be fun. You need to keep that death fresh. so the creator Hwang Dong Hyuk he's so extraordinary Richard isn't he because he writes and directs every single episode of this thing as he did in the first season in the first season he like lost loads of teeth and stuff didn't he I think well yes that's the interesting thing when he's making the first season and you know anyone who watched the first season it's an extraordinary undertaking but the one thing of course they didn't know when they were making it was that it was going to be a hit they had no idea that it was going to be successful they certainly had no idea it was going to be the biggest show in the world and Netflix's biggest ever show and Netflix's most successful, most profitable ever show as well.

3:25So he was putting himself through all of that, losing teeth and so on, absolutely on a wing and a prayer. And when they came back to him and said, we'd love to do a second series and a third series, they filmed both at once. I think his initial response was, oh, but I don't want to because it really took so much out of me. The interesting thing with Netflix is when you sign up to do a show with Netflix, you don't own it so you don't have a back end so the fact that that had been so successful actually there wasn't a huge amount of payoff for hwang dang hook other than you know it makes him look great it's one of the many many ironies in this show about the sort of brutality of late stage capitalism that yeah he didn't really properly make that much money from it he would have he'd have made a quarter of a million or something which is very very nice to have but this new season i'd imagine he's made it making 10 million a season for both of them i would have thought i would have thought he'd be on 20 million odd that's tooth fairy money you know lose nine teeth get 20 million that's a deal you take isn't it i mean he can buy us some new teeth certainly want to talk a bit about the show and why it's so compelling and popular there's lots of uh and internationally so as well yes obviously k drum is very big but when he was coming up with the idea he read lots of comic books in the survival game genre and the gambling genre which is obviously relatively niche sort of comic books but is it is there a gambling comic book genre Yeah, I couldn't believe that.

4:45I'd be interested in that. Yeah, I know you would. It's right at your strata. There's something about it that obviously Netflix want shows that are very simplistic and stylised. It's almost theatrical in some ways, the sort of very simple and very clear themes. You can see how easy it is to sell into sort of all territories, really, or for people to appreciate it in all territories. I found myself watching it. I'm told that I don't want to sort of besmirch the script, because I'm told that the subtitles are quite poorly translated. and that Koreans are like, you're missing a lot of the subtlety.

5:19Because to me, it is a very, very simplistic script. And it helps to me that I'm seeing it in another language. It's not an Anglophone thing because I think some of the stuff might be too on the nose when I'm reading the subtitles. However, I don't know if that's a sort of, something's been lost in translation there. I think the reason that it is so compelling and so popular says something much wider about its times of which the world is going through it, But South Korea is a very extreme example of lots of these different things. Since that first season aired, obviously, martial law was recently declared in South Korea and then like undeclared.

5:54I mean, that's a squid game round, isn't it? Declaring then undeclaring martial law within 11 minutes. The birth rate is something like 0.8 per couple. Big movement, which now people are sort of saying they're going to fall in with in the United States. but of women saying that if my rights and my body and my feminism isn't respected, I'm not going to have sex with anybody. That's a movement that started in South Korea. There is massive economic disparity between classes. And there is a sense that there's no point and that you don't have a stake in capitalism and you're never really going to get one.

6:28I mean, there's even a K-pop singer in this one. It's like he's trying to just indict the whole of society, which I thought was like there's nobody left unscathed. one thing I found really interesting in this one is just how much younger the contestants are and this was obviously a big big hit amongst young people the show including sadly to say about among some of my children who were much too young to watch it but unfortunately have because I'm a terrible parent really they watched it not my youngest but my two boys have watched it and they absolutely love it they are four and six right they're 14 and 12 they are obsessed with it but it's interesting Hwang Dong Hyuk said that he thought that in order for people to have that much debt, i.e.

7:07that's what would make you play the game within the story. And also to be at a place in life where you feel you have no other hope. The really bleak thing between series one and, I mean, many bleak things, I'm going to overuse the word bleak again, between series one and series two is that he feels that you can now be at a place where young people obviously feel they have absolutely no stake in capitalism and that there's no means of getting one via Labour. It is a wonderful allegory for late stage capitalism, isn't it? It is one of those things that in 50 years time, when we look back at the revolution, we'll say, well, this was an early sign.

7:43If it wasn't, this guy losing all these teeth, making a show about rich people toying with people in debt, which, by the way, is capitalism. Yeah. That's all capitalism is. But with added game show. The things that have happened and made people get into this sort of situation, I don't know, crypto investment, online gambling. I remember last year on the tube, I saw, oh my God, I saw this sign on the tube, an advert on the British subway, London tube. The British subway, you call it. The British subway. Sorry, I wasn't trying to say that I was in South Korea and I'd seen this advert on the South Korean subway.

8:16I'm talking about the London one. It had a picture of this guy and it said, with all the money I make renting out my driveway, I barely even think about the£1 ,376 I lost in crypto. So it's like, wow. Well, I mean, it's all up there. It's all up there on the advert, isn't it? It's a sort of advert, if you showed it to your parents in 1978, it said this will be an advert in 30 years time. They'd be like, I can't understand any of those words. There was a couple in the first one, and he sort of threw that story away a little bit. And then latterly came because so many people said, but what was the story?

8:49How did those people get into the game together or whatever? That there are more people with existing relationships, familial or romantic within the game, which is obviously one way of sort of testing his whole kind of concept of how anything can survive and whether there's any possibility for collective action at all within this system. But obviously there've always been these shows that are, or films particularly, where the future is a death game. And I don't know, whatever it is, Road of Ball, Running Man, or Death Race 2000, or any of those things where the future is set up as a game. and sometimes hard target, even people being killed for sport.

9:27But it's always set in the future under a corrupt government. Yes, this is fascinating in that the dystopia seems very of the present day. And it's not saying, imagine a world in which it's kind of going, I mean, you could sort of see it. It's fascinating that having made the first one, it's interesting that thing, as I say, of when you make something you don't know it's a hit. Suddenly he's filming series two and he knows it's a huge, huge, huge hit. And what he chooses to do with the story and what he chooses to do really with the story is to give some of the players a bit more agency and to our hero from the first series coming back and sort of trying to stop the games, really trying to get people to team up, trying to get people to defeat the bosses.

10:10He set it up as a sort of duel between the front man and Jihan. Acting as a collective can make any impact on it. I mean, history tells us it can't, but we shall have to see this. I do think it's great. I do think that it's very, very hard to follow up such a huge hit. 330 million viewers, the first Squid Game had. I think 2.8 billion hours of viewing. Can I talk about Netflix's monetization of it? Yeah. I mean, Sarandos on that earnings call, whenever it was said, the Squid Game universe has just begun. They have a multiplayer game. They're going to have an English language version of it, which I think David Fincher is going to direct.

10:56And maybe Dennis Kelly's going to write it. I don't know. Oh, wow. And obviously they had Squid Game, The Challenge, the actual game that they played based on it. Now, can I just, we did that quite early on when we first started this podcast. And when we had watched it then, there was quite some distance between us watching the game show version of it and then watching the dystopian drama. And I slightly feel like I did find it, as I think I said at the time, sort of really quite grim that they had capitalized on a drama that was about the kind of rapaciousness of capitalism. But anyway, but there was some.

11:34Whereas I didn't mind it. Well, you didn't mind it. Well, that's what I want to ask you. Say the centuries about the rapaciousness of capitalism, strike it lucky. No, but to do it in the way they did. Yes, I get that. I get all of that. But when I watched it that time, there was some distance between the transmission of the drama and seeing this kind of quite revolutionary game show, really. Now I have seen the drama again. I cannot actually believe that this show about the race to the bottom of late stage capitalism has become a franchise. I found that irony too heavy. while I was watching it again, I kept thinking, I cannot believe they've turned this into an actual game show.

12:10The game show doesn't worry me particularly because, you know, this is, it's a drama, like it's made up and these people are actors and however much we might like to think it reflects the world in which we live, it's a piece of dramatic television. The weird thing I think is they have lots of live experiences now. Like in the same way you can do Taskmaster live and, you know, you can turn up and play some silly games. You can turn up and play Squid Game live in America and that feels peculiar. Would you like to come along to a big warehouse and take part in the game where, you know, people essentially die?

12:43And you say, oh yeah, that's going to be a lot of fun. You say, that's going to be a lot of fun. We'll take the kids. Why is it? I find it absolutely beyond depressing that they've made a sort of, trying to make a sort of Marvel product and an extended universe out of something which is supposed to be a sort of searing indictment of all of that. Is it that people just love the games and that the games obviously are based on fun childhood games? But do your kids watch Squid Game and think it's a searing indictment of capitalism? I think they think it's pretty unbelievably depressing, yes. But they love it.

13:14It really gets them. I think it is quite simplistic and it's very, very affecting. Yeah, they think it's absolutely intense and amazing. But yeah, they think it's very depressing. Can we watch another one? Just one more, please. They can't control themselves to watch one. And it's interesting, some of the brand hookups that Squid Game has put together, like Tottenham Hotspur, they had all the guards sort of going around the Spurs Stadium for photo opportunities and the large mechanical doll. Well, there's two things happening here. Most of the people listening to this will accept that Squid Game is a satire on capitalism and a satire on people who don't have a stake in society.

13:54Is that what this show is seen as culturally or is it that cool show with the tracksuits where they play the games? And if it's that, then you can have all sorts of brand hookups and they have got all sorts of brand hookups. I think that it is quite a niche view that we are watching a satire and we're watching something about what on earth has happened to us as a society. When you get to the amount of people watching this, 330 million, I think you've probably got 300 million people there. Well, has he failed then? if it's a niche view has he failed because that's what he explicitly says it is has he failed i think no because i think the only way that you do satirize capitalism is via capitalism these days otherwise otherwise it's not a satire you know if this was a thing that he was doing you know to eight people in a pub in dalston which is possible you could do a live live squid game in dalston i think it'd be very different but i i think in order to make the point he wants to make It is beholden on him to get 330 million people to watch.

14:54Otherwise, where's the satire? That's what I think. And he's clearly an extraordinary gentleman. It's unbelievable. The idea that he writes, directs, and then obviously edits every single one of these is extraordinary. Each of them is an hour. I mean, in this kind of prestige TV drama, the most you would get anyone to direct in one season is a block of three. because it's like that might be on a half hour show. Mostly people do one or two because that's like doing a feature film in itself. You need to prepare the pre-production, getting it all ready, and then the edit afterwards. The idea that he does all of these is completely extraordinary.

15:31It's really sort of almost unmatched. I think that people are very, very able to compartmentalize a television program. And I think that with Screw Game, I think while one part of them could go, no, it's interesting, isn't it? Because actually, if you think about it, it's sort of true. But at the same time, you go, oh my God, it was so cool when they're on the glass bridge. And that, I think, trumps, the latter trumps the former. The other thing I was interested in, the sort of Netflix side of it, because I've been talking to quite a lot of different TV producers about making shows for Netflix.

15:59It's been quite interesting the way that you get notes if you're building a drama. What they'll say to you is, we need to twist in episode four because the algorithm shows us that at the end of episode four, people who are a bit iffy about it will just stop watching at that particular point. If you have those kind of conversations with producers, I'm now starting to be able to see the really clear bones of not just like how they've done it in this show, but the actual template. Obviously, if you get a note about something, you either all notes are good in that either you say, no, this is exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to do.

16:32And here's let me argue more compellingly than I obviously did on the first draft why this works. But you can't argue with this type of note because you're arguing with a computer. So it also made me realize that it's one of the many things that's made me realize that executives' jobs are going. I know everyone thought that writers' jobs were going with AI. But if the level of the note is the algorithm says this is what's got to happen at this point and this is why, then you don't really need someone very, very highly paid to deliver that. Well, interestingly, I'm going to be talking about that in our heroes and villains section in a moment.

17:03Oh, are you? Oh, okay, good. Well, I'm going to hold that then in that case. The other thing, just a tiny one more little point about compliance, which I had a Netflix, which we have talked about before because of Baby Reindeer. They spoke to that person again. Someone has found that person again who because they put a real phone number in the first season, this guy was getting up to 4000 calls a day asking to take part in the game. Wow. So that was another compliance triumph for Netflix. but also they have now, I think, in the subsequent, they eventually painted it out. But yes. I would say despite the dystopia and despite the fact that it's perhaps becoming the thing that it was intended to satirise, I thought it was great this second season.

17:49You've got to see it. I mean, it's extraordinary. We should have said that up the top, really, because it's great TV. Iconic and it's absolutely of the age and I think it's sort of unmissable. I think you have to see it. Well, speaking of capitalism, Richard, should we go to some adverts? Let's do it.

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20:15Welcome back, everybody. Now, we are going to talk about our heroes and villains of the year. 2024. Yeah, of 2024. yes that specific year yeah that specific year i mean makes sense right yeah we could do 2017 but that's uh it would be weird yes we're not going to do pre-emptive ones although i would still pick cole palmer it's not even close first of all he is a cultural artifact who should be placed in the british museum a non-looted one which is nice you want to put cole palmer in the british museum not really i i want him i want him i but he is a cultural highlight without any question he's also got that thing actually speaking of he has got that thing that all celebrities dream of that you can be just incredibly offhand and monosyllabic in an interview and instead of everyone because you're so good at what you do that instead of everyone hating you they call it an art form and they love you even more so in that sense i should point out to 48 of our viewers cole palmer is a chelsea footballer yeah i mean he's so much more than that but he wasn't actually formally one of my cultural highlights of the year all my villains heroes and villains one heroic thing we've seen in entertainment this year is the idea of like being messy people actually people have loved things like charlie xcx the whole brat thing that whole vibe of i've just sort of seen described as mess and those sort of organic stars who don't seem super polished like chapel rowan's serena carpenter they're not really ordained by vogue any longer these people and they don't have these they don't appear to have these kind of really kind of meticulous publicity machines their internet sort of chooses them and I suppose my villains in contrast to those would be the people who have been really overly polished.

21:53So you see someone like JLo who had two films, a tour was announced. She said she launched a skincare line, claimed she'd never used Botox. Cocktails line, she said she didn't drink. That's sort of taking your fans for granted and also just being too much. Katy Perry in her sort of faux feminist return, a kind of lazy attempt to resell fans what you'd sold them before. They seemed really out of time, those stars. And they were just, it was too much orchestration. Sense of a campaign like the Brat Summer or whatever that felt so organic and slightly chaotic, just was so much more in keeping with the energy of the times.

22:32It does feel refreshing, doesn't it? I wonder sometimes how much of it is stage managed and I wonder how much of it is planned. And I actually think the truth is not a huge amount of it is. I think there is chaos involved and I think there is agency from the stars themselves in a way that they didn't used to be. Maybe Madonna had agency, but hard to think of too many other stars of that era who did. And now, you know, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Chapel Rowan, just huge new star after huge new star who seem to have some level of control over their career. I mean, Sabrina Carpenter's year.

23:08I mean, she was number one for about 30 weeks. I mean, it's absolutely crazy. It's absolutely nuts what she's managed to do. We talk an awful lot about the actors and stars of things and less about the people behind the scenes. So we've talked a lot about Mr. Bates versus the post office. You know, if you look at it in a public way, you think wonderful Toby Jones and Monica Dolan. But Polly Hill, who commissioned it at ITV, didn't have to. I put all these down as well. Isn't that funny? No, that's good. So, Polly Hill and Gwyneth Hughes, who wrote the thing, you know, when you look back on successes, they seem obvious.

23:42You know, you think, oh, of course, Mr. Bates versus the post office is obvious. And of course, you would commission a drama about the post office scandal, but it's not obvious at all. And that's, you know, when we talked about execs and what it is that they do. And sometimes the thing that they do is absolutely just get the scent of something and not let it go until they've got something on screen. And that's what Polly Hill and Gwyneth Hughes did. And I think amazing performances. He produced it. I really do agree on ITV for commissioning it. And I do think that we've said before, it's interesting how many of the things, and there's so few dramas that have actually changed policy or changed public opinion to such an extent that policy then gets changed down the years.

24:23And a lot of them have been on ITV, knowing, as ITV did, that a drama about the British Post Office is not going to be sold to all sorts of other foreign streamers and to still go ahead with it because they just thought that it was an amazing and extraordinary story that had to be told. The people who wrote that story, Nick Wallace, and covered it, Nick Wallace at BBC, Rebecca Thompson at Computer Weekly, Private Eye, those people were so overjoyed. At no stage did they say, oh my God, I've been trying to write about this for years and this one TV drama and everything changed. They were just completely overjoyed with whatever got it over the line.

25:03And everybody involved in that story was so grateful to that drama for doing what it did. And listen, we all know that Alan Bates is a hero, but this is an entertainment podcast. So we have to nominate as our heroes the people that actually bought it to screen. Yes, yes. Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. And because it's not at all a gimme, as we say. And on a similar note, so Netflix is a very interesting place. And it got to a point where Netflix suddenly had an awful lot less money. And everyone was saying, oh, God, Netflix is going to be in trouble. And I think Anne Mensah, who runs the UK side of drama over there, she started the year with Fool Me Once, the Harlan Coburn adaptation, which was a huge worldwide hit.

25:45I mean, massive. One of the biggest shows in the history of Netflix. She ended the year with Black Doves, which, if you haven't watched it, is terrific. and in between that she had the gentleman your favorite she had one day and she had baby reindeer she had these huge worldwide hits that's one after the other that's not what you are supposed to do it is supposed to be very hard to do that and however much we talk about the algorithm and AI and Netflix shows must be a certain thing in a certain way you do have to have extraordinary judgment to work out that all these very very different shows some not based on IP at all some based on a book or they all come from different places to have that level of you know hit rate within one year is very very unusual and all of those shows have extraordinary talent behind them the gentleman I accept you may not agree listen people loved it and I just have to accept that they were wrong but Ann Mensah being across all of them then there may be a common denominator here hit after hit after hit and that is very very difficult to do as as anyone who's ever made will tell you.

26:48Yes, it is an extraordinary run. My villain has been sort of lazy puff promotion. I think we're starting to see a real sea change in how things are promoted and what's expected of people. And any sort of celebrities or stars who are attached to big things, who don't get the vibe right, or don't look like they're really trying, there can be a big backlash. Whereas my heroes for this it can only be those two gals of the wicked press tour because they left it all out there Richard I pure unfiltered celebrity emotion you don't feel they're trying to sell you anything other than the specific thing they're trying to sell you it was chaos in some ways there was a moment where a fan had photoshopped the poster so it looked exactly like iconic one from the musical where you see the Cynthia Erivis character, the brim of her hat obscures her face.