The first two episodes of Beast Games are streaming on Prime Video.

Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson didn’t become the biggest YouTuber in the world because of his charisma, his smarts, or his creativity. The new Prime Video series Beast Games makes it clear that he has none of these qualities. The YouTuber is trying to translate his YouTube channel’s style, stunts and largesse into a longer-term project, but the results – which involve him competing as 1,000 contestants compete in mediocre games for a $5 million grand prize – prove it You that his near-ubiquitous presence on the Internet is merely a triumph of spectacle. Beast Games is similar to a MrBeast video in that it relies on the constant reminder that what you’re watching is “wild” when in reality it’s almost completely tedious.

The MrBeast formula is to burn up the attention span by throwing lots of annoyingly loud but empty escalations at the viewer. The same goes for the way Beast Games dazzles you with refreshers of what’s happening right before your eyes as contestants come together to shoot a ball into a giant cup. The first two episodes are completely averse to the kind of suspense that better reality competitions create, for example by letting us get to know their contestants and/or not with the energy of a teenager taking his first shot, from shot to shot and from Jumping scene to scene Red Bull. One of Donaldson’s YouTube breakthroughs was a 17-hour marathon in which he said the name “Logan Paul” 100,000 times. In doing so, he established a pattern that is also carried over to Beast Games: the volume achieves the most, while the actual volume provides the least entertainment value.

It all feels eerily similar to when Donaldson recreated the Netflix films Squid game for a 2021 video that misses the entire point of the dystopian series, instead positioning the prospect of desperate people competing against each other as something worthwhile. But, as he assures us ad nauseum, Beast Games takes this concept and magnifies it to massive proportions, allowing us to tastelessly see a larger number of real people crying over the millions of dollars they’re losing. It’s a superficial series best suited to existing MrBeast fans, reality show completionists, or people looking for background noise while scrolling on their phones.

And yet something sinister lurks beneath the surface of this disposable distraction. While some of that, yes, has to do with that the troubling allegations of sexual harassment, chronic abuse and more that cast a shadow over the series (Donaldson said this was “exaggerated” and claimed he had as-yet-unreleased footage to prove it) it also has to do with what made it into the final cut. Donaldson frequently interjects to encourage his viewers to scan a QR code for a chance to win what he believes is worth $4.2 million Critics and consumer advocates have already warned could implicate those involved in a payday loan scam. In addition to the ethical nightmare of someone with such a predominantly young fanbase paying shillings for such a predatory enterprise, Beast Games’ partnership with MoneyLion brings everything on the show to a halt. Reading ads comes naturally to MrBeast. In his YouTube videos they are often inserted into the middle of the action. But what’s embarrassing there is even more embarrassing on a series that is supposedly a larger, more serious project by the creator. As is often the case with online celebrities who act in such deceptive ways, It’s about getting the bag at any cost.

But Beast Games isn’t just surprisingly boring. It also contains almost nothing to invest in. Although future episodes will delve deeper into the contestants’ personalities and motivations – the bread and butter of any reality show – the beginning of the series, once their ranks have dwindled, is so impatient and frantic that we’ve barely gotten to know them. Some of this, again, is borrowed from YouTube, where MrBeast’s output often feels like a bunch of TikTok videos crammed together for fear that you’ll get bored if there’s nothing new thrown at you Right this second. But Beast Games is uniquely overmatched. The variety of games is huge – they include contestants trying to convince their teammates to eliminate themselves and a block stacking challenge – but they all emphasize breadth over depth. The ones that might be more psychologically tense have no weight and rush by at breakneck speed, so we get to the next one, then the next, and so on. They all seem like they were made up in five minutes, and there’s nothing memorable about them other than they steal the iconography and callousness of Squid Game.

An ongoing TV series takes more than just a YouTuber skewering its audience with reminders of what’s at stake. Even when Beast Games comes across a potentially fun challenge – like a trivia game where we briefly see the players’ personalities shine through – Each sequence is cut into pieces in such a way that you don’t really feel its impact. It’s more likely to give you a headache than anything remotely shocking or humorous. When Donaldson jumps in and boasts in voiceover that they have thousands of cameras on set (a strange trick if ever there was one), it made me wish he had fewer. An editor who could have given the proceedings some breathing room would also have been nice.

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That brings us back to Beast Games’ biggest problem: MrBeast himself. Donaldson’s overall personality and approach to creating “content” may have cracked the code to generating record-breaking YouTube views, but that doesn’t translate to television. He’s just not funny enough to host a show like this; Everything he does and says sounds like he’s trying to sell you something rather than actually amusing you. If someone else were the focus of Beast Games, it might be more exciting. Instead, we’re dealing with a strange, completely exaggerated recreation of his YouTube videos, in which Donaldson chimes in with seemingly funny comments. In reality, it largely boils down to endless variations of “Can you believe that just happened?”

At the end of the day, MrBeast is a hype man for himself, his brand and his content. He just wants us to keep watching, and Beast Games is another part of that. The show, like the man behind it, is neither imaginative, thoughtful nor entertaining. But it’s there, and it’s there in abundance – with seven more episodes due to arrive by February. It’s a show that parallels the shallow financial enterprise that Donaldson constantly touts: destructive to the culture but perhaps too big to fail.