Squid Game

Seasons 2 and 3 expand the ensemble without losing the original flavour. Yim Si-wan, Kang Ha-neul, Park Gyu-young, Park Sung-hoon, Jo Yu-ri and Lee Jin-uk all turn up as new contestants, each carrying a version of the same basic wound. Debt. A wrecked family. A plan that went wrong.

🧠 What It's Really About

The games are the hook. Capitalism is the subject.

Hwang has been clear in interviews that he wrote the original script back in 2009, shopped it around for a decade, and no one would touch it until the streaming era made a Korean-language prestige project commercially viable. The delay is instructive. The show is not really a game show wrapped in horror. It is a long argument about what debt does to people, and about how the spectacle of watching poor people suffer becomes a commodity that wealthy spectators are happy to pay for. The VIPs, the gold-masked Western billionaires who watch the later rounds from a lounge, are not subtle. They are not meant to be.

Running underneath that is a sharper theme about consent. Every contestant signs a contract. Every contestant is told, repeatedly, that they can leave by majority vote. I think the genuine horror of the show is not that these people are being forced to play. It is that they are choosing to, because the world outside is already killing them more slowly.

🎨 Style and Atmosphere

Visually, Squid Game is unmistakable the second you see any still from it. The tracksuit green of the players. The fuchsia of the guards. That vast optical-illusion staircase that leads to nowhere. The game arenas borrow from M.C. Escher and from the candy-coloured sets of 1970s Korean children's shows, and the contrast between the warmth of those references and what happens inside them is the whole thesis of the design.

The score leans on baroque and classical cues. Haydn's Trumpet Concerto and Strauss's Blue Danube waltz appearing over moments of violence, a choice that has been copied so often since 2021 that it is easy to forget how jarring it felt the first time. The production design team built every arena as a practical set, which is why the games have weight that a CGI substitute would lose.

A few hallmarks that set the show apart from its imitators:

• Children's games as lethal puzzles, with the rules explained in the first thirty seconds so the audience can play along
• Colour-coded costuming (green for players, pink for guards, gold for VIPs) that functions like a caste system the camera never comments on
• Choreographed violence that is brief rather than lingering, closer to Park Chan-wook than to American horror
• A willingness to let long dialogue scenes sit in the dormitory between games, which is where the show actually does its character work

📈 Reception and Legacy

Season 1 pulled 142 million households in its first four weeks and held the Netflix record for most-watched series until Wednesday briefly dethroned it. Season 2 took that record back with 68 million views in its opening week. Season 3 then broke the three-day debut record, pulling 60.1 million views between 27 and 29 June 2025, and became the first Netflix show ever to premiere at number one in every country the platform ranks.

The awards followed. Lee Jung-jae's 2022 Emmy was historic. O Yeong-su's Golden Globe was historic. The show took Outstanding Directing for Hwang Dong-hyuk, and was the first non-English series nominated for Outstanding Drama at the Emmys. Korean production became a global premium export off the back of it, and the surge in Netflix investment in Korean content that followed is a direct line.

It also produced one of the most parodied aesthetics of the decade. Halloween costume sales of the players' tracksuits made every outlet in October 2021. The giant killer doll became a meme within a week. Seven-Eleven ran a ppopgi promotion.

🏆 Why It Works

The reason Squid Game works when the wave of imitators (and there are many, some quite good, like Alice in Borderland) do not, is that Hwang is not actually interested in the games. He is interested in the people playing them, and he is willing to slow the show down to prove it. The dormitory scenes between games, the flashbacks to life outside, the conversations about what each contestant is going to do with the money if they win. All of that is what makes the violence land. You know who is on the line.

If you liked Black Mirror for how it takes a single systems-level horror and sits inside it for an hour at a time, Squid Game is working a similar trick at season length. If Money Heist got you on the group-under-pressure dynamic, this does the same with less cartoon and more moral weight. And if Severance scratched the itch of a corporate dystopia rendered through unforgettable production design, the two shows make an uncanny double bill.

Three seasons. One creator, one vision. Rare for a show this big to finish on its own terms.

Hwang Dong-hyuk

Writer/Director