The Guide #113: Could the Squid Game spinoff usher in a new era of big money gameshows?

The first UK gameshow to offer a cash prize was a more modest spectacle than the “smoke-machine and pounding bass” affairs that pass for the genre in 2023. Each episode of Take Your Pick!, which began airing on the then brand new channel ITV in 1955, would begin with the “Yes-No interlude”, which consisted of little more than contestants attempting to answer host Michael Miles’s questions without saying the words yes or no. Get through a minute of that ordeal – most contestants, judging by what little footage still exists of the series, barely lasted a few seconds – and you’d win four shillings, as well as the chance to select a box with a mystery prize in it, or if you weren’t feeling lucky, trade it for a cash sum. As I discovered in Joe Moran’s Armchair Nation, the variability in quality of the prizes in those boxes was pretty extreme: washing machines or Mediterranean cruises in some, mousetraps or – and this is about as vividly postwar a prize as you could imagine – bread with dripping in others.

Nearly 70 years later, a rather different gameshow is about to premiere, Squid Game: The Challenge – the reality contest spin-off of Netflix’s smash hit, ultraviolent drama – was filmed (in part) on a vast London soundstage, but otherwise you’re unlikely to mistake it for Take Your Pick. The stakes for SGTC, with all due respect, are a little higher, not to mention the ordeal contestants have been put through being rather more severe – reports of contestants needing medical attention, complaints over a scene filmed in dangerously low temperatures, exploding squib pack vests showering contestants in blue ink. Higher too is the prize on offer for all this torture: the last person standing will receive $4.56m, the biggest sum ever awarded in gameshow history.

Netflix isn’t alone in getting out the chequebook. Over on Amazon, there’s the recently launched 007: Road to a Million, a quite bizarre Brian Cox-hosted reality-slash-gameshow that clumsily smooshes together James Bond and Race Across the World. The winners of that one receive £1m, not quite Squid Game levels but still more generous than pretty much anywhere else on TV.

This sudden spate of big money prizes feels a bit surprising, because before their arrival, the era of TV prize largesse – that 90s-00s period where shows would offer, or in some cases guarantee, a million pounds or dollars – had seemed to have passed. Big prizes do still exist, but the carrot of seven-figure sums seem to be dangled far less frequently than it used to be: in the UK there have been four million-pound plus winners in the past 10 years, compared with nine in the 10 years before. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire – the most likely show to mint new millionaires in the 2020s – seems to air infrequently or not at all (it hasn’t aired at all in 2023). Meanwhile, it’s striking that a show like Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel – primetime, glossy, celeb-packed – has only once paid out a six-figure sum. The decline of big prizes is perhaps best seen in Channel 4’s quizshow The Million Pound Drop, which after a three-year hiatus returned in 2018 with a new name: The £100k Drop.

So what happened? Well, in many ways that 90s-00s period of million pound/dollar gameshows might just be an outlier. For much of British TV history there had been an unease around handing contestants huge piles of cash, not just on the BBC – where it was seen as incompatible with the licence fee model – but even on commercial channels, which in their early years faced stringent caps by independent regulators. That explains all the fitted kitchens and cuddly toys offered instead, and also why the titular prize in 50s US quizshow The $64,000 Dollar Question became a £1,000 prize in the ITV remake Double Your Money. Some countries less wedded to capitalism went even further: when Double Your Money visited the USSR in 1966 for a pair of special episodes featuring English-speaking Russian contestants, Soviet authorities barred the producers for mentioning money (contestants instead earned points that were converted into prizes), and the winning prize was a TV set.

Even in the more relaxed US, there were still strict restrictions on how much shows could award their winners, a rule brought in the wake of the massive gameshow scandals of the 1960s (famously recounted in Robert Redford’s 1994 film. Quiz Show). But, the arrivals of Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK changed everything: massive deregulation led to limits on prizes being scrapped (the UK did away with its limits altogether in 1993), bringing with it the “million” era of gameshows. The most successful of these of course was Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, a show whose premise was pretty unoriginal (essentially the same as The $64,000 Question), but became an event purely through the shock and awe of the prize on offer, not to mention some genius production quirks – “phone a friend”, the cliffhanger endings of episodes, that thudding, incessant soundtrack.

Perhaps the sheer ubiquity of these shows contributed to their downfall. Suddenly the award of a million pound prize ceased being a “stop the presses” moment. The arrival of the national lottery in the UK, delivering cash prizes far bigger than any TV show could offer, probably didn’t help, nor did the fact that the becoming a millionaire became a far less exotic, unobtainable notion – 2.85 million people in the UK had that status in 2022.

Still, surely what really did for cash prize was demise of old-fashioned appointment TV, as viewing figures dwindled over the past 15 years. The result has been a sort of doom loop: lower viewing figures brought with them lower revenue from advertisers, the backbone underpinning those big cash prizes, and lower ad revenue meant less money on offer as prizes, which in turn has made gameshows less of an event.

But now we have two new shows bucking the trend of dwindling cash prizes. Notably they’re made by deep-pocketed streamers, the same companies that helped accelerate the demise of appointment quizshows in the first place. It will be interesting to see where Netflix and Amazon can recreate that boom-era of big money shows. More than most genres, gameshows thrive on a sense of a communal spectacle, of liveness, even though most of them weren’t actually live (though some do a pretty great job of pretending to be).

Can Squid Game: The Challenge capture that same feeling as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, that collective national gasp as a contestant goes for broke? Or will it be the equivalent of opening that prize box and being greeted with a plate of bread with dripping?

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