Beast Games

The High-Def Dystopia of the Attention Economy

I don’t know exactly when late capitalism fully turned into a game show, but it had to be around the moment Jimmy Donaldson decided a blazer over a hoodie counted as “TV.” We’re now two seasons and twenty episodes into *Beast Games*, Prime Video’s garish attempt to turn the MrBeast YouTube machine into something like prestige streaming. It’s loud. It’s relentlessly bright. And it makes me want to disappear into the woods for a long walk—with my phone left at home.



Donaldson didn’t become a billionaire by reading the room. He did it by reading the algorithm—cranking the stakes until they blur together, drowning you in stimulation. Stretching that into a multi-episode season is a risky translation, and the results are… deeply weird. In the newly released second season, the prize pool is still a jaw-dropping $5,000,000. Real people—some carrying debts, medical bills, or last-ditch dreams—get fed into a candy-colored meat grinder of physical and psychological endurance. (I still can’t shake the sight of players forced to stack absurd foam-block towers in the middle of the night, their faces hollowed out under brutal studio lights, bodies folding in on themselves.)



The editing is what really cooks your nerves. The better reality shows know tension needs air—silence before a vote, a quiet look between rivals, a moment where you can actually feel someone thinking. *Beast Games* won’t let anything sit. Every potentially interesting interaction gets hacked into a frantic supercut. When longtime MrBeast regulars like Chandler Hallow or Karl Jacobs show up, they’re less hosts than jittery hype men, yelling about the money at every possible moment. Donaldson prowls around with that fixed grin, forever reminding everyone about the “generational wealth” at stake. On camera he’s a kind of anti-charismatic void—a guy who looks like he’s running numbers in his head while people cry over elimination dodgeball.



And for all the spectacle, there’s a hollow space right in the middle of it. *The Guardian*’s Stuart Heritage said during the messy first season that it’s compelling “in the same way that picking a scab is.” That’s dead on. You keep watching because the scale of the excess—private islands, Lamborghinis, gigantic sets built just to be wrecked—is weirdly hypnotic. But when the confetti clears and the oversized check changes hands, you don’t really know the people who were in the arena. You’re just left with ringing ears and the nagging thought: is this really what we’re doing with our time?