Format

The date is finally set. Beast Games, the highly anticipated reality competition series from Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson, the most influential social media superstar, will premiere on Prime Video on Thursday 19 December: with over 300 million subscribers, he is the most subscribed individual on YouTube and the second most subscribed channel overall, after Indian record label T-Series (by comparison, Netflix has 282.7 million subscribers worldwide as of Q3 2024).
The format can be described as 'super reality', where everything is BIG: the number of contestants (1,000) and, above all, the final prize, which is the biggest in television history (US$5 million in cash, beating the previous record of Netflix's Squid Game: The Challenge, which had a prize of 'only' US$4.56 million).
Not much else is known about the format, other than that the 1.000 contestants are put through a gruelling series of physical, mental and social challenges, and must use their strength and wit to stay in the game. Oh, and that in recent weeks Mr Beast himself has been named in court documents alleging that contestants have been "shamelessly exploited".
We will see what the format will be like on air and especially what the results will be. In any case, television reality - and TV in general - has entered a new era.
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