When Squid Game premiered on Netflix in 2021 and became a global sensation almost overnight, the streamer cashed in hard. The worst of it included the god-awful Squid Game: The Challenge real-life show, a wet-fart third season, and an eye-rolling stinger teasing its American spin-off. But what hasn’t sucked is its killer slate of Asian reality competition shows about egoists at the top of their fields dominating one another.
I absolutely adore Siren: Survive The Island, Final Draft, and Physical: 100. As a former track-and-field kid, these shows are my jam because they tap into that primordial itch in the deep recesses of my brain by pitting athletes (and folks from different martial arts disciplines) against one another to determine who is best. What’s more, unlike other competition shows nakedly chasing Squid Game’s clout, they have interesting games and loglines to match their high-budget productions. Allow me to count the ways why I mess with these Squid Game-likes.
Siren: Survive The Island sees 24 female contestants “versed in the highest levels of both combat and strategy” split up into six teams by their profession competing on a remote island. These teams comprise police officers, firefighters, stunt women, soldiers, bodyguards, and a catch-all group of athletes. Aside from setting a personal stake in wanting professions like police officers to get absolutely dog-walked (which they do), what I like about the show is how the producers basically put all these women on an island to play a base-building capture-the-flag game for a week.
After racing through a field of mud with their profession displayed on their flag, Siren’s six teams, in cascading order of who came in first, choose different bases of operations to call home. These bases include a square house, a boathouse, a cabin, a tent, and a shelter. When the siren rings, they must hide their flag, suit up in body-cam tactical gear, with a mini flag precariously placed in a tube backpack, and play capture the flag. Individual players are eliminated from the game (but not the show) when their flag is removed from their bag, and whole teams are eliminated when their base is stormed and their flag is taken.
And these women leave it all on the field when that siren rings. I’ve witnessed stunt performers (who were told they weren’t a threat) break through a window and storm a base; firefighters string their flags in a tree in the middle of their fortified base; and soldiers turncoat, betraying alliances they forged out of convenience in their former allies' faces during their time of need.
When rounds end, whoever claims a team’s flag gains ownership of their base. Remaining teams also get to go to a communal store and use points gained from calories they burned from the previous day to get new items and advantage tokens, like 30-minute base immunity or deciding when the siren rings. Translation: Siren is the most video-gamey base-building reality show I’ve ever seen.
Final Draft is a bit more sentimental than the other two shows. While the show is just as much about egoists, its premise centers on former professional athletes who ended their careers involuntarily or by choice. Through a series of vignettes, we learn the tragic, personal reasons why 25 athletes had to call it quits, as well as their motivation to compete for a 3-million-yen prize to fund their career resurgence. Like Siren, Final Draft plays up the hierarchy and the drive to come out on top. Whoever gets to the finish line first gets to sleep in a comfy glamping spot with lavish meals like king crab and slabs of meat, and whoever places last gets to sleep in a rinky-dink tent, with miso soup as a staple on their dinner menu.
As far as games go, Final Draft is part American Gladiator obstacle courses and Fitnessgram Pacer tests, where athletes dig deep to outdo one another and knock out fast friends and rivals from the competition until they’re the last one standing. I’d be remiss not to mention that Final Draft can get exceedingly silly in a peek-behind-the-veil, immersion-breaking way.
There’s a whole segment in the middle of its games where each athlete has to give a speech-and-debate-esque sales pitch explaining why they think they should win and how they’ll use their funds if they win. It’s also more common for Final Draft’s games to try to be overtly fair when things don’t go as planned, leading to redos for injuries suffered by athletes, with a huge handicap in their favor, whereas contemporaries would opt to call it a wash and move on. It also doesn’t help that this happens a lot and becomes a focal point of episodes, over, y’know, seeing athletes do their thing. The core conceit of a competition is that it will be unfair. There’s still a good show in there if you can overlook all of Final Draft’s grating shortcomings.
Last, and certainly not least, is the crown jewel of Squid Game-likes: Physical: 100. Physical: 100 sees 100 athletes ranging from sumo wrestlers, bodybuilders, strong men, gymnasts, wrestlers, free runners, baseball stars, and more, compete in individual and team-based competitions for a cash prize. Physical: 100 is basically the closest any of the aforementioned shows comes to being the most interesting permutation of Squid Game, in terms of cast variety and inventive games that push its freak athletes to their absolute limit. Likewise, its growing catalog of spin-offs, such as Physical: Asia, features athletes from different Asian nations competing to determine which nation is the best. As a history buff, things get especially spicy when Japan and Korea butt heads, Australia plays the role of oddball heels, and Mongolia and Turkey become the show’s underdogs.
The most brutal of its competitions are games where athletes mud wrestle for a ball, use their collective might to push an entire ship filled with sandbags to a finish line, and hold a giant boulder over their shoulders for hours, Atlas style, until someone gives up. My friends and I popped off quite a few times whenever an athlete German suplexes their opponent.
What sets Physical: 100 apart from its contemporaries is the ego death it inflicts on competitors when they lose. At the start of the games, contestants enter a giant bunker where they see the busts of their competitors’ abdomens prominently displayed. On the surface, this production detail sparks oohs and aahs from viewers and competitors alike as they size up who’s going to be a threat and which of them is a wild celebrity cameo.
But the busts, too, serve as a devastating symbol of athletic pride and vanity. Whenever a competitor is eliminated, they must walk up to their bust and demolish it with a hammer in front of everyone. Occasionally, the show escalates this bit of theater further by incorporating it into second-chance endurance test games, where competitors have to hold their busts by a pulley and outlast each other to get back into the games. That’s some good-ass television.
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Isaiah Colbert
