The explosive success of “ ” in 2021 took even Netflix by surprise, as the South Korean drama quickly scaled the ranks and dominated its most-watched list. Now the show returns for a , which premieres on Netflix on Dec. 26, and the chord it strikes with its dystopian vision of class conflict might say as much about a changing America as it does about its host country.
When “Squid Game” first took off, the central premise — desperate people willingly engaging in a life-or-death contest for a cash prize, while an audience of shadowy, mega-rich patrons looked on — tapped into the very real deep-seated apprehensions of South Korean anxieties amid a crushing economic crisis. Those sharp class divisions, of people “ ” as NPR described it, echoed through other South Korean productions, from the Oscar-winning movie “Parasite” to the futuristic “Snowpiercer” to an even darker series, “Bargain,” in which unsuspecting people get lured to a hotel, drugged and killed in a scheme to auction off their organs. In these dramas, life is cheap — in “Squid Game,” the winner-take-all payout translates to roughly $84,000 per player — and the poor, laboring under crushing debt, are seen as expendable.
Exploring class isn’t completely foreign to Hollywood — after all, we’re treated to encores of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Carol” annually around this time — but in the U.S., we’ve seen fewer contemporary hits tethered to the concept.
