![]() ![]() When he is handed a financial lifeline, he gambles it away. ![]() He steals from his mother and forgets his daughter’s birthday. As we become invested in Gi-hun, we watch him as he lets us down over and over again. In Lee’s performance, we see all the big and small humiliations of capitalism: the feeling of your worth being tethered to your productivity the magical thinking that once you’re rich, you’ll be a different person the embarrassments we are willing to endure to afford what we think we deserve. It’s a villain viewers everywhere can identify.Īt the center of it all is Seong Gi-hun, a chauffeur addicted to gambling and self-sabotage, played brilliantly by Lee Jung-jae. Regardless of the country or language, capitalism is the shared villain in Netflix’s global successes. But these shows also share a common throughline: They all deal with inequality, capture the despair of poverty, and dissect class anxiety. The dizzying success of Squid Game and the triumph of other non-English shows may finally kill the unfounded idea that North American viewers - the largest share of Netflix’s audience - are not interested in watching foreign shows. Out of its top ten most viewed series, two of them are also not in English and boast no Hollywood megastars: the French Lupin sits in second place while the Spanish-language hit Money Heist occupies the sixth position. Earlier this week, Netflix released some of its viewing data. But zoom out more, and the picture becomes clearer. For one, the popularity of K-dramas has grown by 200% among Netflix subscribers in just the last two years. ![]() If the success of Squid Game is a surprise, it’s not exactly without precedent. In two short weeks, it has become a bonafide phenomenon. The internet is awash in Squid Game memes, games, and TikTok challenges. And yet it’s a megahit, with 95% of its audience outside Korea. More shocking still: It boasts no Hollywood megastars and it’s not based on any existing intellectual property that comes with a preloaded fanbase. It’s difficult enough for new shows to break through the noise with so much TV content, but Squid Game’s success is an astonishing feat for a show that was released on the platform less than two weeks ago, to little fanfare. At this point, we are deep in the Squid Game hype cycle, and for good reason: the Korean drama is not only the top show on Netflix in 90 countries, but this week Ted Sarandos, the streaming platform’s CEO, hypothesized that “it might be our biggest show ever.” That’s nuts. ![]()
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