Double screen: Beast Games blurs the line between YouTube and television | Television

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Double screen: Beast Games blurs the line between

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and television | Television

Beast Games,

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Prime Video’s reality competition series hosted by the YouTuber known as

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, is not a well-made show. It is certainly an expensive show, something Mr Beast, the alter ego for 26-year-old Jimmy Donaldson of Greenville, North Carolina, likes to frequently remind viewers. The series is a feat of scale shocking to audiences outside the realm of

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, and especially Donaldson’s fiefdom: 1,000 contestants, filmed by a system of 1,107 cameras, battling each other for a $5m cash prize – the largest in entertainment history, according to Donaldson. For the competition, Donaldson and his posse designed a warehouse war zone modeled on the

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dystopian series Squid Game, constructed a bespoke city and purchased a private island (also to be given away, along with a Lamborghini and other lavish prizes). Contestants eliminated in the first episode are dropped through trap doors to unseen depths; there is a pirate ship with cannons.

Yet for all the ostentatious displays of wealth, the show still looks terrible – garishly lit, frenetically edited, poorly structured, annoyingly loud and tackily designed. Many have pointed out that the show’s central conceit – broke Americans duking it out and playing psychological warfare for luxury prizes, many in the name of paying their bills – is as dystopian as the

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series it’s based on, a depressing spectacle of aggro-capitalism for our neo-Gilded Age times, with Donaldson as a

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.

For sure, Beast Games has a rotted, though grimly compelling, core, but its surfaces are also telling. On a stylistic level, the show erases what line remained between

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and television. Beast Games has a higher production budget than any of MrBeast’s

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videos, which run anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes and reach upwards of 360 million subscribers. (Almost all take some base-attention magnet concept – being stranded at sea, stuck in the Great Pyramids or helping blind people see again – to their most extreme and hyperbolic ends.) But it maintains the same aesthetics and incentives of addled attention. It looks like

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content – content being the operative word (Donaldson also made the first three episodes available on

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).

And it is popular. Beast Games is now

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Prime Video’s

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ever, reaching 50 million viewers in 25 days (although it’s worth noting that

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does not disclose what counts as a “viewer”). It reached number one on

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in 80 countries. Squid Game, for reference, reached 142 million households in 2021, according to

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. The show is not a sea change – plenty of reality shows look terrible, and many Americans have long consumed

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videos as their primary source of entertainment – but it is a line in the sand, as television shifts both in form and function.

What is television in 2025? Is it a device? A style? A format? It’s hard to say – the content is

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, while use of the device shifts to

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. In the US, people watch

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on a TV more than any other device, causing CEO Neal Mohan to proclaim, in his

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this month, that “

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is the new television”.

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is not making television, per se, but is serving as such; global viewers

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over 1bn hours of “content” on their TV screens last year, according to the company, including

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a month of supposedly audio-only podcasts. The company shut down its Originals division in 2022, though it is now making a push into children’s entertainment,

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in late 2024.

Functionally,

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may not be the new television so much as its next evolution. Formally, they’re converging. Even though digital-native influencers like

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talent (and TikTok talent, for that matter) have

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despite huge numbers of fans, the ethos of the platform – the incentive structure of more eyeballs, the ring light glare, the maximalist aesthetic for maximum viewership – dovetails with evolving Hollywood logic.

As one MrBeast director

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: “These algorithms are poisonous to humanity. They prioritize addictive, isolated experiences over ethical social design, all just for ads. It’s not MrBeast I have a problem with. It’s platforms which encourage someone like me to study a retention graph so I can make the next video more addicting.” In other words, value-neutral entertainment over art. Content as a means to an end. Which is not that different than the business logic of a streaming platform. Hollywood has its own race to the bottom for viewers, with its own aesthetic effect – the

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, the

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, the

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– that mirrors the lowest-common-denominator attention economy ethos of a MrBeast.

Donaldson, after all, now leads an

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show, styled after a

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original series, that is explicitly fixated on “entertainment”. The show is all about, as he says, “making entertainment history” – being the biggest, the brightest, the most shocking, the most entertaining. As in, a product devoid of complexity or values or even narrative, for the one value of capturing attention. With the MrBeast-ification of entertainment, as Vox’s Rebecca Jennings

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, the lines between content, entertainment, television and influencer are even blurrier than they already were. He has crossed what divide remained – will Hollywood subscribe?

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#Double #screen #Beast #Games #blurs #line #

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#television #Television

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