Korean Netflix drama became one of the biggest shows ever made

How did Squid Game, a Korean-language drama about a series of murderous schoolyard games, end up as one of the biggest TV shows ever made? Launched on Netflix in September 2019 this unheralded, barely promoted take on a Hunger Games-theme quickly became the streaming giant’s most-watched series ever. More than 142 million households spent 1.65 billion hours watching it in its first month.

They are figures that are almost beyond comprehension, but creator and director Hwang Dong Hyuk has a simple explanation for his show’s runaway success: “It’s because it’s simple. During season one as well, I always wanted to go simple. It could be the games, or it could be the symbols, I just wanted them to be very simple.”

By “the games”, Hwang is referring to Squid Game’s central competition. In the first season, the story begins with a man in a suit signing up the debt-laden and desperate for a tournament on a mysterious island in which one of them could win a huge sum of money.

That tournament consisted of a series of six children’s games, from red light, green light to a tug of war. But in these games, which it turned out were being run by a group of rich VIPs for their own entertainment, losing meant death.

The set-up wasn’t new – not just The Hunger Games, but films from Rollerball to Hard Target have cast human beings as quarry – but the aesthetics were. Bright tracksuits for the contestants, soldiers in masks, hard candy sets and symbols like squares and triangles everywhere all spoke to Hwang’s overriding philosophy.

“The circles, the Xs, the soldiers in those masks … we thought of various versions of them all. But I wanted the simplest kind, the simplest symbol that could transcend all barriers. I’m trying to keep to that in season two as well.”

Squid Game stripped storytelling back to basics. When I visited the set of Squid Game earlier this year for the filming of season two (its shot in a huge studio complex in South Korea’s Daejeon district, an hour south of Seoul by bullet train), what was most striking was the clarity of its ideas.

The pastel block “Maze Stairs” set, where the players travel between the various games and their lodgings, is bigger than last time but still basically the same. The dormitory set, with its stacks of beds (that diminish throughout the series as the players are killed off) is again a tiled room that feels a bit like a motorway tunnel.

“The themes of the show are reflected in the spaces,” says production designer Chae Kyoung-sun, who won an Emmy for her work on season one. “I thought of the dormitory when I was driving in a road tunnel. No end, no beginning, a feeling of being trapped.”

It all points to how the second series of Squid Game will be, in some ways, a reprise of the first. Lead actor Lee Jung-jae, who plays the audience’s eyes in the form of put-upon everyman Gi-hun, says, “There’s a scene where I open my eyes in the new set in this season. To film that scene, I had to step foot in the set again after so long filming there for season one. When I took my first step onto the set, I was like, ‘Wow, seriously? I’m back here?’”

As the trailers suggest, Gi-hun, who claimed the 45.6 billion Korean won ($49.8 million) prize in season one and was all set to board a flight to see his daughter, instead returns to the games to get his revenge on the organisers. Director Hwang is tight-lipped, as you’d expect, as to what children’s games are going to get the win-or-die treatment this time around, but as we tour the set, he points to a box of Os and Xs in the costume department, sitting alongside rails and rails of the show’s famous green tracksuits.

This, he explains, is part of a new voting mechanism. At the end of each round, the players (the ones who aren’t dead) will vote on whether the games continue or not – a form of contorted democracy, like turkeys voting for Christmas. If season one was about class differences – the rich toying with the poor – then season two, Hwang says, is about polarisation and division.

“If you watch the news all over the globe,” he says, “we have various conflicts in smaller regions, and then we have bigger-scale wars as well. So we have these divisions, and that all starts from people siding with people and drawing that line between you and others. I wanted to bring that in the form of a symbol in season two.”

It is a stern capitalist critique that offers another reason why season one may have struck such a chord in 2020. Lee Jung-jae says that Squid Game has prospered because it has always come with an explicit message.

“In order to make sure that the audience enjoys it for the entire series, we need more than just entertainment. There needs to be an overarching theme. Only when that happens can people resonate with the entire narrative and the themes, and that’s the only way we can really communicate with the audience.”

Hwang’s overarching theme in both series of Squid Game is capitalism and its discontents: “I lost my father at the age of five,” he says, “and so our family was not the most well-off, to say the least, and my mother had to go through a lot to bring her children up. I think I can safely say that I had a lot of experience of having a tough time making ends meet. Through my life, I just thought a lot about political messages and the theme of capitalism. That kind of background has led me to become a filmmaker who’s drawn to the issues of global inequality and capitalism.”

Hwang appreciates the irony that the first season of Squid Game was quickly co-opted by Netflix in to a reality show.

“When it comes to reality shows, it doesn’t really need to contain a serious message, as I intended with my series. And I think the way that it is replicated and reproduced and consumed, it all actually makes sense within the mechanism of capitalism… which is what I intended to reflect in Squid Game. So I think looking at it in the bigger picture, everything is understandable.”

Understandable, maybe, but still, he admits, surprising. Hwang says that he barely noticed the reality show – Squid Game has taken over his life ever since that moment when viewers worldwide first heard the eerie music and were immersed in the bizarre iconography.

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“Honestly, I’ve just been working nonstop, preparing for this subsequent season and creating it. I have been living and breathing in Squid Game world for the past five years, since 2019. So I didn’t really have the time or room to experience much else.”

But he has, he says, witnessed the aftershocks of his creation.

“The biggest surprise for me was just how fast and wide the show has reached all over the world. I watched a YouTube video of African children playing red light, green light – despite the fact that this is a series [R rated] that kids cannot watch. That really let me know just how fast and wide and intricately content affects all of us – and how far and fast it travels.”

Squid Game: Season 2 screens on Netflix from December 26, 7pm AEDT.