The MrBeast Reality Show Allegations Shouldn’t Be A Surprise

Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson is in the news lately, following a report from The New York Times alleging negative treatment of participants in his upcoming Amazon competition show. This comes on the heels of some other recent controversy, and, taken together, it’s tempting to see all this as a sign that the MrBeast empire is–maybe at last, depending on your opinions of him–crumbling. But, really, none of this is anything new; instead, it’s the system in which MrBeast operates working as intended.    

According to The Times, contestants on MrBeast’s in-development reality competition show, Beast Games, experienced mistreatment including lack of access to medicine, hygiene supplies, and food (the Times notes that “on a few occasions, the production staff passed around small Feastables chocolate bars, a brand created by Mr. Donaldson, and filmed some people eating and praising the candy.”) Participants also said they experienced sleep deprivation and injuries. In one very reality TV moment, a “bruised and bleeding” contestant who was eliminated claimed she

was handed $1,000 in a stack of dollar bills as a consolation prize but said she had to hand the money back to producers after the cameras were off. Competitors were told they would receive their real payments later, she said, but as of publication time, she had not yet been paid.

Several contestants told The Times they had since been contacted by the production team and offered an additional $1,000.

Part of the problem seemed to stem from the fact that while participants believed there would only be 1,000 competitors, there were 2,000 in this first round, which will air on MrBeast’s YouTube channel before the second round airs on Amazon. MrBeast has blamed the conditions in part on “the CrowdStrike incident, extreme weather and other unexpected logistical and communications issues.”

But these kinds of conditions are endemic to reality TV. In recent years, multiple Love is Blind contestants have sued Netflix over their treatment on the show. Cast members of the Real Housewives series have spoken up about their negative experiences. Contestants on Survivor experienced discrimination from other cast members. Netflix’s Squid Game: The Challenge reality show–which draws fundamentally misguided inspiration from Netflix’s scripted Squid Game, which also feels like it inspired Beast Games and, obviously, MrBeast’s Squid Game recreation show–saw contestants allege similar mistreatment to Beast Games participants.

A contestant on Squid Game: The Challenge told Rolling Stone, “It was the incompetencies of scale — they bit off more than they could chew.” This sounds similar to what some Beast Games participants who spoke to The Times said of their experiences, with The Times writing that contestants found that the staff members were “often not helpful and appeared disorganized… Contestants felt that the staff was overwhelmed by the volume of competitors.” This is also tragically par for the course in reality TV: staffers across shows have spoken up about overtime, low pay, and other negative working conditions. While there’s no excuse if staffers failed in their duty of care to participants, staff and participants alike are caught in the ugly system of reality TV.

Reality TV has grown in popularity over the years, especially during the writers’ strikes of 1988 and 2007, when it rose to fill the programming gaps of scripted shows. These kinds of shows have been vectors to stardom both for rich people like the Kardashians and everyday folks who win competitions like American Idol. But even if they don’t feature actors saying scripted lines, most of us know they aren’t actual reflections of reality. They’re framed and edited to heighten the drama and try to carve out narratives. And competition shows like The Voice, So You Think You Can Dance, and their grittier counterparts like Fear Factor, Squid Game: The Challenge, and MrBeast’s Beast Games tell a grim story of how a person finds success these days: either by getting lucky enough to be picked out of a crowd, or putting away all the narrative artifice and simply risking your safety for money.

MrBeast is the current golden boy of a growing version of reality TV, one that doesn’t take place on TV at all. He’s famous for his acts of largesse, giving money to homeless people and funding surgeries. But he’s not alone: Dramatic acts of charity and “pranking it forward” are all over our feeds these days. If I click through more than a couple YouTube Shorts or Facebook Reels, I get mired in an inescapable flood of this kind of stuff, all carefully edited to highlight the gratitude of recipients. On the one hand, videos like these stand in contrast to the nastier stuff on YouTube; as content creator Josh Liljenquist, who films himself buying huge amounts of food for the homeless from local businesses, told Minnesota’s Star Tribune about why he started doing his videos,

I was scrolling through a few days ago, and some person was doing public content. He goes behind somebody and just sucker punches him in the back of the head. ... That's the type of stuff that kids are looking at… Would you rather have that, inspiring kids to do that? Or by doing good by feeding homeless people?

On the one hand, it’s hard to argue with Liljenquist’s logic. If these videos help people while also making acts of charity or kindness appealing, or put copycat ideas in young people’s heads, that’s not a bad thing necessarily. But as Wired wrote in 2022, thanks to altruism stunts on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, 

We are now so used to viewing the world through our screens that many of us forget to question the fact that a camera is rolling at all… Should vulnerable people have to perform for viewers before they’re deemed worthy of help?

People have criticized MrBeast before over these questions. Plus, if he’s really motivated by doing good, why film it? But at the same time, he wouldn’t be able to do any of this without the money he’s making from filming it. MrBeast’s brand is a unique combination of the illusory down-to-earth parasociality of YouTube and the good vibes of his stunt-based altruism. As Patricia Hernandez described him at Polygon, “His branding is at once self-aggrandizing yet selfless,” doing things for others that are primarily about how he is doing them. This has made him the head of a financially lucrative empire and one of the major employers of his hometown.

But there’s nothing unusual about what he does, both in the world of reality TV and the world of content creation on the internet. And, depressingly, there’s nothing unusual about the dark reality behind these veneers, either. When watching MrBeast and creators like him, it’s easy to be either too cynical or too credulous. But all of this–from the fame he generates to the uncomfortable position recipients of his generosity find themselves in to the chaos behind the scenes–are just an entertainment engine spinning the way it's always spun, and doing just what it's designed to: capture our attention and funnel money to the top, be that TV executives or the MrBeast empire.

The accusations at Beast Games further bring to light the realities behind competition shows, which badly need an overhaul for the sake of staff and participants alike. And taking some of the shine off MrBeast could serve to put him in context: less a feel-good exemplar of humanity and more, at best, a bandaid on bigger systemic problems like lack of access to medical care, housing, and food. People shouldn’t have to hope to be picked out of the crowd by YouTubers or reality show producers for help. What MrBeast and other creators like him do isn’t some new, feel-good frontier; it’s a symptom of how much our systems have failed us. Even the example of MrBeast’s success reminds me of nothing so much as how bleak the job market is, where maybe it’s better to try to make a living selling pieces of your life and the lives of others on the internet (itself a harmful grind) than trying to make a decent living by simply working in helping professions. 

The grim realities undergirding reality TV is something the original Squid Game explored very well, which is of course why companies like Netflix and Amazon, who benefit from it, completely miss the point in their versions. If the artifice around reality TV has to crack, it should do so around one of its most famous examples. The sooner we see all of this for what it is, and the sooner we do away with it, the better.