Netflix is facing enough trouble with its pending password-sharing crackdown, but another controversy is brewing for the streamer. According to Rolling Stone, contestants on the upcoming Squid Game reality series are alleging the show was rigged and produced under “inhumane conditions.”
Squid Game: The Challenge was born from the success of the Korean drama of the same name, with the games of the show brought to life for reality TV. The show features “456 contestants” competing to survive and win a massive $4.56 million prize. As Rolling Stone notes, the show is currently at the start of production and seems to be capturing certain aspects of the streaming hit.
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“It was just the cruelest, meanest thing I’ve ever been through,” one former contestant told the outlet. “We were a human horse race, and they were treating us like horses out in the cold racing and [the race] was fixed.”
“All the torment and trauma we experienced wasn’t due to the game or the rigor of the game,” another contestant told Rolling Stone. “It was the incompetencies of scale – they bit off more than they could chew.”
The streaming reality competition boasted the largest cast and cash prize in history before production started. But according to the allegations told to Rolling Stone, the contestants were forced to take on “Red Light, Green Light,” the infamous first game from the original series. The sources claimed conditions were “inhumane” during the game, with contestants playing in a “freezing airport hangar” for close to nine hours, “unable to move for 30-minute stretches” and “medics rushing to tend” to victims of the frigid air.
Rolling Stone left the sources anonymous, with the former contestants citing NDAs with Netflix. The outlet reached out to Netflix and the streamer cited a prior statement related to medical incidents during production. “While it was very cold on set – and participants were prepared for that – any claims of serious injury are untrue,” Netflix, Studio Lambert, and The Garden wrote in the statement. “We care deeply about the health and safety of our cast and crew, and invested in all the appropriate safety procedures.”
Check out the full report at Rolling Stone. If anything comes from the production, maybe folks will realize Squid Game probably shouldn’t be a real thing.
