I dunno if anyone here is a fan of the cult Korean gameshow
The Genius, but the UK version of it is absolute dogshit (and AFAICS all the episodes are up on YouTube if you want to see for yourself - more like The Tedius, amirite?).
But the spiritual successor
Devils Plan on Netflix is fucking 🔥🔥🔥.
Here's my thoughts why:
OG Genius had novelty value so when someone figured out how to solve a game on the fly, the way the show was edited meant they could pull off big reveals in real time so the people not in on a plan saw it unfold when the people not in on it did too, and then did a flashback to where the plan got rolling. For example, in Ep 2 of the first season, one of the players seems to be sat on his arse all episode not doing much and accepting his fate of being outvoted. Turns out he pulled an Ozymandias and had all his shit lined up
half an hour before the game even fucking started.
It also mostly used famous people (Korea makes a lot of celebrity challenge type shows, so theres a lot of faces people already think they know - in the same way UK TV has a lot of comedy panel shows with a rota of regular faces).
The UK version has no famous people (the closest is a youtube comedian
) and is mostly random students and business people.
Its also over a fucking decade since the OG version was out, and at least one of the players is a big fan of the original, so recycling games from the OG version means some people know top tier strats to break it wide open, but not in a cool twist ending kind of way - in a "do what I tell you and we get a boring win".
So although most of the players are aware that there is a metagame of winning the competition beyond winning the immediate game - which is like, every fucking reality contest show out there tbh in terms of spending social capital and knowing when to fuck someone over to go for a kill and not have it backfire, they're randos off the street so they don't know there's also a
meta-meta aspect which is
to be entertaining (is this not why you are here???) which, you know, celebs inherently get, because its the reason they were booked.
Also, David Tennant as the host is super fucking pointless. The OG had a dude with a bandaged face and wearing The Blacklist hat and trenchcoat combo, with all his instructions coming through a voice distorter so it had this super villain air as a conceit for why theyre doing what theyre doing - its like a Jigsaw vibe, do this complicated game and survive.
UK version has David Tennant on a TV going "WELCOME tae GENIUS GAME!" and cracking lame jokes about lady gaga
Whatever they spent on his cameo, they would have been waaaaaaaay fucking better off with a production assistant in a costume with a voice modulator and hiring some QI or Taskmaster folks to sprinkle in amongst the normies so there'd at least be a baseline entertainment value to the thing.
Which leads to
The Devils Plan which does exactly this, to keep it focussed as an entertainment product first and foremost. And boy is it!
So it being a long fucking time since OG Genius Game, and also a shit ton of pretenders to the throne popping up since then (your The Moles, your The Traitors, and so on), Devils Plan ups its fucking game by adding a
meta-
meta-meta level to the thing, by making the houe they live in into a fucking Escape Room and
not telling anyone about it, so there's a whole extra mystery box layer of some stuff is off and its not explained why until people are finding like, entire fucking secret bonus games where you have to figure a bunch of shit out
just to enter.
Which is some fucking compelling 'oh shit, whats gonna happen next'? motivations to keep watching beyond just the regular game show setup. So good.
tl;dr - if you like 'social game' type gameshows or 'solve the puzzle' type gameshows,
The Devils Plan is some fucking S-Tier TV in that genre.
And fuck you
The Genius UK for using Moby - Extreme Ways which was the leitmotif in the OG for an epic solve or an epic piece of cukery (or both) for your boring ass predictable monotonous game. You're not getting a second season, and you don't fucking deserve one.
(but was partially obscured with decent season arc villains)
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