Today, Explained - How Squid Game won Netflix

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

And whether the show’s message is being lost in the shuffle. Today’s show was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore. It's got everything. Netflix's hottest show is Squid Game. It's got everything. Pink stormtroopers, hundreds of people in matching tracksuits, honeycomb shape-cutting,

and a giant animatronic robot girl who will have you shot if you move out of turn. Oh, and this Korean drama just became the biggest series launch in the history of the platform. It is about a group of heavily indebted South Koreans who are sort of tricked into participating into this survival game where they show up and they're told they're going to have a chance to win money and it's going to be a series of challenges.

Here is the first game. You will be playing Red Light, Green Light. But at the start of the first challenge, more than half of them get killed. Green Light! Red Light! Player 324 eliminated. And then they briefly decide to leave this game because they are scared out of their minds.

But then upon going back to their own lives, ultimately decide that trying to compete and win money is better than the sad state of their lives. Come on, let's finish this thing. I'd rather stay and keep on trying in here than go back to the bullshit out there. It is very much about capitalism, class, inequality, and that is a recurring theme not only in this show,

but I think in a lot of the entertainment that's very popular right now. Lucas Shaw has been reporting on Squid Game for Bloomberg. So Squid Game has had the most successful debut in the history of Netflix. They released a stat on Tuesday saying that 111 million people had watched the show

in I think the first 25 days for context. the most popular show before that was Bridgerton. My name is Lady Whistledown. You do not know me, but I know you. Which had 82 million people. So this is the most popular debut in Netflix's history by, like, an order of magnitude. And needless to say, no one saw this coming. Nobody saw it coming because, one, there's never been a show, I think, that's reached that many people that quickly in the world before. And certainly, there's never been a show from South Korea that reached close to that many people. I like to think

that a lot of the Netflix shows are sort of accidental successes. Many of the most popular ones have caught the company by surprise. But this one is a whole other level. You know, Netflix tends to not invest a lot or sort of push its hits until after they come out. It's very different from how Hollywood traditionally markets it, where they sort of pick their hits in advance and they spend a ton of money to market it to make it a hit. Netflix tends to let the people decide what's popular,

and then when something is popular, they sort of pour gasoline all over it. And that's definitely what's happened in the case of Squid Game, where, you know, within a week or two of it being released, all of a sudden they're selling Squid Game t-shirts and trying to figure out Squid Game Halloween costumes. What are the Squid Game Halloween costumes? To be honest, I haven't seen them yet,

but I have to imagine they are coming. Anyone who's seen the show knows that there's these characters in it who are dressed in like red jumpsuits with masks. That seems like bound to be some kind of Halloween costume. So a bunch of people this Halloween season will be buying costumes to celebrate a show about the perils of capitalism? I think that's the hope, right? I mean, Netflix wants to set that up. Netflix has made a major investment in trying to figure out consumer products and merchandise. But if it doesn't happen, I still think it's a missed opportunity. Perfect. How did a Korean sci-fi show become the biggest show in the world in like a couple weeks? It speaks to the biggest impact that

Netflix has had on pop culture all around the world, which is, you know, previously you'd have a show that got really popular in the U.S. or for like NCIS, most popular show in the U.S. What makes NCIS the number one show on television? I have a list if you're interested. Evil perps, big slur. Over the course of a couple of years, it might become popular in France and Germany and some other places,

but it had to be released slowly and systematically. Or the opposite of it, you'd have a show that's really popular in Korea or Japan, and then what would probably happen is someone in the U.S. would decide to make an English-language version of that show, and so people in the U.S. would never even see that. Netflix has flipped this whole dynamic on its head where it will take shows from all over the world and release them all over the world at

once. So I think that's the most basic shift. And really, since 2014, 2015, Netflix has been investing more and more in original programs from outside the US, original programs in foreign languages. It really started with shows in Spanish from Mexico and in Portuguese from Brazil. It's made shows in France and Germany. In the past few years, it started to make more from places like India and Korea and Japan because Netflix is trying to make shows that are popular in potential areas of growth, right? And most of its growth in recent years has been outside of the U.S. One byproduct of that is that because it still has such a huge audience in the U.S. and Europe, it has tried to make it so that people in those markets want to watch all these

shows it's making from other countries where they previously hadn't. And that's the kind of the foundational layer for this. We've seen, especially over the past couple of years, a growing number of international hits blow up. And that's how I started calling myself Tokyo. The one looking at my ass is Berlin. A wanted man all over the world. La Casa de Papel, Money Heist from Spain, I think was the first truly massive hit. But then just earlier this year, we had Lupin, which was a show from France, which had the second biggest debut of any show in Netflix history.

You know the handcuff trick? The handcuff one. Well, now you know it. Hey, guard, we're finished. Now third, because of what Squid Game has done, in terms of its specific appeal and sort of how that happened, the show exploded, I'd say, three or four days after it was released. It wasn't instantaneous,

but as it started to grow in popularity in Korea and across Asia and then eventually in the U.S., it just had this snowball effect, which often happens with Netflix, where people start talking about it, and because it's available everywhere, and because everyone seems to have Netflix, it just goes crazy viral, and something goes from being watched

by a small subset of people to being watched by everyone in a way that really few other TV networks can make happen. And that's to say, even if the show is in a foreign language. Yeah, well, there's two dynamics to that. You know, I think that because Netflix and YouTube and other global services have familiarized more people with watching and listening to things in other languages, you know, there are more people doing that in general, you know, using subtitles, for example. But Netflix has also invested a lot of

money in dubbing, whereby you have voice actors re-record what's happening in different languages. And so I haven't seen any data released by Netflix, but I would imagine that there are a lot of people who are watching Squid Game in English, and it's dubbed for them, or in whatever the language is in their local country. Because in Europe, for example, dubbing has always been more popular. And so I would imagine that there are a bunch of people in England, France, Spain, watching it in their native tongue. It's safe to assume that 80 to 90% of the people are watching it dubbed. The US has always been more of a subtitle market. I think that balance has begun to shift, but the majority of people here tend to still watch with subtitles.

I go subtitles. How about you? I have gone subtitles for the first couple of episodes, but if I'm watching a foreign language show at the end of a long workday and my brain is tired, I am not above dubbing. Fair. Obviously, this is not the only Korean culture that sort of struck gold worldwide, yeah? Yeah, I mean, it's really remarkable to watch

the impact that Korean entertainment has had on a global level over the last decade. Something that they started investing in really in the mid-90s, something called the Hallyu, which I'm sure someone who actually speaks Korean would tell me I just butchered that. But this kind of Korean wave where there are a bunch of media companies, specifically then kind of music management companies, that tried to develop these pop acts that would travel the world. I think now most people are familiar, at the very least, with BTS.

Smooth like butter, like a criminal undercover Going pop like trouble, breaking into your heart like that K-pop has become, along with, I'd say, reggaeton, like one of the two big global genres that has spread everywhere. And then Korean TV has taken a little bit longer, but it is now probably the most popular genre across a lot of Southeast Asia, a lot of East Asia. When you have streaming services going into those countries

and trying to sign up customers, they're often relying on licensing Korean TV or commissioning original K-dramas. Even in the U.S., we had sort of a niche service called Drama Fever that caters to people who love that. But this is the first Korean TV

show, I would say, to break out in a big way in the West. Do we think that the immense success of Squid Game will change how entertainment companies strategize the way they think about foreign stuff? Or has that change already taken place? That change is in process, I would say. You know, Netflix has been far and away the most aggressive company at investing in programming and other languages.

You look at some of the other global streaming services, whether it's Disney+, or HBO Max, Apple TV+. They're all planning to do it or are doing it, but on a smaller scale, partially because their audience is still more concentrated in the U.S. and Western Europe. But it is inevitable over time that all of these companies are going to be trying to find big hits in Korea, both because Korea is such a strong market for their streaming services and because those Korean programs will help them unlock customers across a lot of the world. How much remains to be seen,

but we're going to see millions of dollars flow from American companies into Korea to try to find the next Squid Game. Cool. I will watch it with subtitles. You know, I'll watch it however my brain decides is best for me that day. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Thank you. every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Green light. Red light. Kyung Kim is a professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. I'm also author of Hegemonic Mimicry, Korean Popular Culture of the 21st Century.

And he did not have the same initial reaction a lot of people around the world are having to Squid Game. Hwang Dong-hyuk and I, the creator of the show, I mean, we're the same age. And so these are the same type of games that I used to play when I was in Korea. So this is kind of a nostalgic home. And that's why I was really, really frustrated and actually devastated. How could you turn the sweet memories of mine and nostalgic dreams that I had of my homeland into this bloody, ruthless, violent, merciless thing? That's not what the game was about but by the time he finished the series he had decided there was more to it than blood and gore it's set against the

background of of the harsh realities of you know liberal capitalism and that's one of the i think appealing draw to the show that it talks about harsh realities before it goes on to this kind of, you know, happy, creepy kind of dystopian, you know, space of an island. And this is after like the last Korean thing that everyone watched, Parasite, was also about gross income inequality in South Korea, the haves and the have-nots. It's a story about family. The son goes into a rich house as a tutor, and the story unfolds from there.

It's just a funny and scary movie. Is this just a dominant theme in a lot of Korean popular culture, or just the stuff that's making it over to North America and the rest of the West? I think Korean cinema has a tradition of actually being socially engaged over the last 20, 30 years. Korean society, after it opened up, democracy after 1980s, have really specialized in making socially engaged films. Now, those of you who actually know Korea from K-drama and K-pop would hardly think and conceptualize, well, that's not the Korea I know in popular culture. But

Korean cinema, where Squid Game also comes from, it's more of a cinema tradition that actually has influenced the making of Squid Game rather than Korean television. It's definitely been more socially committed kind of content that is specialized over the last 20, 30 years. For people who aren't familiar with the realities on the ground in South Korea, what's the economic inequality like there? How bad is it? I'm sure Americans listening to this are pretty familiar with how bad it is here.

It wasn't as bad. Remember, Korea had sunk into the world's worst poverty after the Korean War in the 1950s and 60s. It did rebound, 70s and 80s, and that created one of the world's most famous economic miracle stories. In order to spur economic growth, the military regime founded the Economic Planning Board, giving it unprecedented powers for planning, allocating the budget, and for attracting foreign capital. Now, if you look at just pure GDP numbers and the export capital, Korea is right up there in almost every economic index.

But the other side of the coin is it has really over the last 20 years, especially after the what is called the IMF crisis of 1997, when IMF had to bail Korean economy out. Hit hard by the Asian financial crisis, South Korea's government asked the IMF for a $58 billion bailout. It really did push out, I think, the backbone of Korean economy and social strata. That's the middle class. The country wasted no time getting to work on paying it back.

Millions donated precious family heirlooms to be melted into gold bars. It has been nonstop ever since. And it's one of the countries that, yes, you have high economic markers, but underneath it all is the world's suicide rate, top 10. Unfortunately, the world's lowest fertility rate. All of those things add up, making it really grim and bleak for many of the young peoples out there. Is there something specific to Korean culture that makes, I don't know, like financial struggle, something that might lead to suicidal

ideation? Debt is synonymous with shame. And sure, I think there is family shame in many Asian countries, which tend to be more, you know, community-based and family-based than maybe individual-based Western countries. But the neo-confusion idea still holds very true in Korea. And as you have seen also in Squid Game, that's where it begins, right? You know, Gion, the protagonist, he steals from his, you know, septuagenarian mother.

Huh? Pin number changed on you, huh? Guess your mother finally abandoned you hold on how creepy is that right and so uh that pressure i think is probably more acutely felt that sense of again uh guilt and shame that arises out of um of being burdened with debt do you think these profound works of culture, of entertainment, have moved the needle and made it okay to be in this struggle for Koreans, like Parasite or Squid Game? No, but it does reflect present society mood and the sentiments, right? And these works

actually do resonate with many, many Koreans out there who feel just as baffled and frustrated as, you know, I mean, Ki-hoon does, the main protagonist, as well as the Kim family from Parasite. And so a lot of people empathize with these stories. And voila, you not only have Koreans, obviously, empathizing with these characters, but worldwide audiences. And the Oscar goes to...

Parasite. Do you think shows like these change how we feel about capitalism? Or do they just sort of keep us entertained and primed for even more capitalism, you know, to renew our Netflix subscription or to go out and buy a pair of vans because all the main characters in Squid Game are assigned vans. Yeah, or, you know, oh, that's my new Hollywood costume, you know, which was a reaction that I had, of course. And there is enough comedy and enough, I guess, how can I say this, fantasy, you know, elements that are out there to mitigate that kind of a feeling of, oh, this feels awful.

You know, like I've got the same kind of credit card debt, you know, $50,000 or student debt that I can't pay. pay but i think it still starts us to talk about as a global and conscientious citizens if you will you know um enable us to think about and conceptualize even however unrealistic those frames are to provide a certain kind of talking point among us and certainly that's what power of cultural contents or you you know, good movie ought to bring out. Kyung Kim is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. He's also the author of the Zoom play, The Mask Debate. Lucas Shaw, who you heard from earlier in the show, is an entertainment reporter for Bloomberg. He's also got a newsletter.

It's called Screen Time. You can find a link to it on his Twitter. He's at Lucas underscore Shaw. Today Explained is at Today underscore Explained. Our show today was produced by Miles Bryan. He's at Miles underscore underscore Bryan. I'm at Ramos for him. No underscores, but maybe Miles will let me borrow one of his.