Beast Games, Amazon Prime Video’s reality competition series hosted by the YouTuber known as MrBeast, is not a well-made show. It is certainly an expensive show, something Mr Beast, the alter ego for 26-year-old Jimmy Donaldson of Greenville, North Carolina, likes to frequently remind viewers. The series is a feat of scale shocking to audiences outside the realm of YouTube, and especially Donaldson’s fiefdom: 1,000 contestants, filmed by a system of 1,107 cameras, battling each other for a $5m cash prize – the largest in entertainment history, according to Donaldson. For the competition, Donaldson and his posse designed a warehouse war zone modeled on the Netflix dystopian series Squid Game, constructed a bespoke city and purchased a private island (also to be given away, along with a Lamborghini and other lavish prizes). Contestants eliminated in the first episode are dropped through trap doors to unseen depths; there is a pirate ship with cannons.
Yet for all the ostentatious displays of wealth, the show still looks terrible – garishly lit, frenetically edited, poorly structured, annoyingly loud and tackily designed. Many have pointed out that the show’s central conceit – broke Americans duking it out and playing psychological warfare for luxury prizes, many in the name of paying their bills – is as dystopian as the Netflix series it’s based on, a depressing spectacle of aggro-capitalism for our neo-Gilded Age times, with Donaldson as a self-styled Willy Wonka figure.
For sure, Beast Games has a rotted, though grimly compelling, core, but its surfaces are also telling. On a stylistic level, the show erases what line remained between YouTube and television. Beast Games has a higher production budget than any of MrBeast’s YouTube videos, which run anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes and reach upwards of 360 million subscribers. (Almost all take some base-attention magnet concept – being stranded at sea, stuck in the Great Pyramids or helping blind people see again – to their most extreme and hyperbolic ends.) But it maintains the same aesthetics and incentives of addled attention. It looks like YouTube content – content being the operative word (Donaldson also made the first three episodes available on YouTube).
And it is popular. Beast Games is now Amazon Prime Video’s most-watched unscripted series ever, reaching 50 million viewers in 25 days (although it’s worth noting that Amazon does not disclose what counts as a “viewer”). It reached number one on Amazon in 80 countries. Squid Game, for reference, reached 142 million households in 2021, according to Netflix. The show is not a sea change – plenty of reality shows look terrible, and many Americans have long consumed YouTube videos as their primary source of entertainment – but it is a line in the sand, as television shifts both in form and function.
What is television in 2025? Is it a device? A style? A format? It’s hard to say – the content is shifting from linear to streaming platforms, while use of the device shifts to YouTube. In the US, people watch YouTube on a TV more than any other device, causing CEO Neal Mohan to proclaim, in his annual letter this month, that “YouTube is the new television”. YouTube is not making television, per se, but is serving as such; global viewers streamed over 1bn hours of “content” on their TV screens last year, according to the company, including 400m hours a month of supposedly audio-only podcasts. The company shut down its Originals division in 2022, though it is now making a push into children’s entertainment, recruiting a dedicated head of family entertainment and learning in late 2024.
Functionally, YouTube may not be the new television so much as its next evolution. Formally, they’re converging. Even though digital-native influencers like YouTube talent (and TikTok talent, for that matter) have struggled to break into Hollywood despite huge numbers of fans, the ethos of the platform – the incentive structure of more eyeballs, the ring light glare, the maximalist aesthetic for maximum viewership – dovetails with evolving Hollywood logic.
As one MrBeast director told Time: “These algorithms are poisonous to humanity. They prioritize addictive, isolated experiences over ethical social design, all just for ads. It’s not MrBeast I have a problem with. It’s platforms which encourage someone like me to study a retention graph so I can make the next video more addicting.” In other words, value-neutral entertainment over art. Content as a means to an end. Which is not that different than the business logic of a streaming platform. Hollywood has its own race to the bottom for viewers, with its own aesthetic effect – the rise of mid TV, the predominant cheap Netflix sheen, the endless scroll of a “content” library – that mirrors the lowest-common-denominator attention economy ethos of a MrBeast.
Donaldson, after all, now leads an Amazon show, styled after a Netflix original series, that is explicitly fixated on “entertainment”. The show is all about, as he says, “making entertainment history” – being the biggest, the brightest, the most shocking, the most entertaining. As in, a product devoid of complexity or values or even narrative, for the one value of capturing attention. With the MrBeast-ification of entertainment, as Vox’s Rebecca Jennings put it, the lines between content, entertainment, television and influencer are even blurrier than they already were. He has crossed what divide remained – will Hollywood subscribe?
