It’s the ‘biggest’ reality show in the world. But is bigger always better?

2 months ago 15

By Jared Richards

January 7, 2026 — 5.30am

Beast Games is billed as the biggest reality TV show in the world (season one had 1000 contestants and a US$10 million prize!) made by MrBeast, the biggest YouTuber in history (458 million subscribers!), for one of the biggest companies in the world (Amazon!).

Its first season, which dropped last summer, was an instant hit for Amazon Prime – a reality TV riff on Squid Game in which contestants live together and play through heightened versions of children’s games, notably without dying. (Somehow no copyright infringement either, with Netflix already launching its own reality spin-off of the South Korean hit called The Challenge.)

MrBeast (aka Jimmy Donaldson) hosts season two of Beast Games

Sure, critics decried it as a “dystopian nightmare” and “cruel abstraction”. There was a hideous irony that Beast Games′ inspiration was not only a bloody critique of capitalism’s dog-eat-dog world, but also partly a parody of reality TV, where fame and money are dangled in front of the vulnerable. And there’s that ongoing lawsuit too, where five contestants from season one are alleging poor working conditions and pay, in an environment they claimed “systematically fostered a culture of misogyny and sexism”. Donaldson has said the claims are “blown out of proportion” and Amazon has not provided comment.

But Beast Games is so big it broke 44 Guinness World Records! The show quickly became Amazon Prime’s most popular unscripted series ever, attracting a reported 50 million viewers in 25 days. And this week, season two kicks off with a three-episode drop, with MrBeast and his cohort of equally plain John, geeky co-hosts taking every moment they can to hype up just how historically big every single bribe, twist and game is.

Superlatives and big numbers offer little intel about Beast Games, beyond its sense of scale. But sheer scale is what MrBeast, aka the unassuming 27-year-old American Jimmy Donaldson, has built his name off, not to mention his business empire.

Inside the world of MrBeast

Much of Donaldson’s money – estimated by Forbes in 2023 to sit around US$500 million – comes from business ventures outside of YouTube, including snack food line Feastables and software company Viewstats. He’s claimed to have less than US$1 million in his own bank account, but also says it’s all poured back into his content. Beast Games, he claims, has lost him “tens of millions” as he covered the gap when season one went over budget.

Ever since his first viral video at 18, the 23-hour-48-minute-long “I counted to 100,000!”, Donaldson has continually raised his content’s stakes by employing hundreds of people and spending millions per video. That can look like an elaborate stunt (“I spent 50 hours buried alive”; “I spent 100 hours inside the pyramids!”) or experiment (“Hydraulic press vs Lamborghini”, “100 kids vs world’s strongest man”).

But he’s probably better known as a content philanthropist, with a steady stream of videos where Donaldson either offers life-changing acts of charity (“2,000,000 people get clean water for the first time!”) or runs challenges with life-changing cash prizes viewers can sign up for (“Last to leave toilet wins $1,000,000”).

MrBeast’s content is always chasing bigger stunts and bigger numbers. And Beast Games, his foray into television via a reported US$100 million production deal with Amazon Prime – may have been the only way to one-up his most-viewed video to date, a Squid Game recreation that arrived just a few months after the Netflix hit first dropped in 2021.

Even with his hundreds of millions of fans, MrBeast isn’t for everyone. As his YouTube titles suggest, he’s not exactly aiming for sophistication. Ultimately, his content all springs from the same question: What would an eight-year-old boy have an elaborate daydream about?

But it is very, very watchable – if not garish. While Donaldson and his co-hosts aren’t traditionally charismatic, they speak in short, shouty sentences that demand attention. Working with his regular production team on Beast Games, the show just looks like a YouTube series.

Despite the immense money poured into the show (or on-set, with a US$5 million cash pyramid continually moving between games, always there in the background), it’s bare bones and yet immensely loud at once. Visuals are never static, with constant cuts, zooms and graphics to keep engagement high alongside the continual reaction shots, as if we might click away at any moment.

What to expect from season two

Season two does trim down the contestants considerably from 1000 to 200, a move Donaldson has said was motivated by feedback and reviews that highlighted it was difficult to connect to characters. No doubt it’s much easier to manage on a production level too, though an early episode’s physically demanding challenge starts late at night and goes well into the daytime.

Still, there’s more of an attempt to create narrative, with this season’s cast divided into two groups: Smart vs Strong. Though they soon defy their stereotypes and show that people are at their most beautiful when allowed to reflect their many lights. Just kidding. The show cuts down contestants to a combination of a three-word motivation (pay off debt, three kids, dad with cancer) and jock/nerd attribute. In their home base of Beast City – the custom city built for the show in the Nevada desert, duh – the Strong crowd are filmed working out and doing backflips in front of each other.

Beast City, the custom-buily location for Beast Games in the Nevada desert (duh).

Meanwhile, the nerds – a mixed bag that includes people with photographic memories, double-PhDs and more questionable qualifications such as a “crypto content creator” and a “pro-Pokémon card player” – are seen hanging out between challenges in a science lab, solving equations on blackboards and sitting in libraries. They also all shout “Smart! Smart! Smart!” in unison upon arriving, which is perhaps the show’s funniest moment.

It’s that flattening that feels ickiest about Beast Games and MrBeast’s videos at large, where the sheer spectacle draws you in, but contestants resemble action figures more than humans, moved around by the will of a wealthy God. It’s alienating, rendering a life-changing miracle – tens of thousands of dollars, or, in one controversial YouTube video, the gift of sight for 1000 people unable to afford surgery – into a four-second clip. This could, however, change as Beast Games goes on, and more contestants are culled. Comparatively, Squid Game: The Challenge is excellent at character development.

Then again, there’s something refreshingly transparent about Beast Games′ pure spectacle. Reality TV fiends, myself included, love to intellectualise the likes of Real Housewives as Shakespearean text, or Big Brother as a social experiment, pretending it’s more dignified than simple brain rot.

Episode four of Beast Games, out next week, is an intriguing crossover with one of our most over- intellectualised and psychologically dissected competition shows, Survivor, complete with US host Jeff Probst. If just a smidge of that depth – real or imagined – makes its way back to Beast City, then Beast Games could be not just the biggest reality show ever, but a better one too.