"We took THE MOST socially complex species ON EARTH and gave them NO INCENTIVE to act individualistically, and in a GROUNDBREAKING TWIST, they all... uh... worked together..."

Hearing Jimmy be incensed over the squid game comparisons and then seeing clips in which the beast games staff wear the exact style of mask that the rich investors wear in the show is truly peak comedy

As everyone knows, smart people are never colorblind.

"I picked 100 fish and 100 dogs to compete in a race! It's going to be a 2-mile run followed by swimming across a 30-feet wide pond. It's got challenges that cater to both so it's an absolutely fair competition!"

They assumed strong people can’t be smart and vice versa. So the smarts are only those who are both smart and not athletic while the strongs can be both. Flawed premise.

"But even if we accept that the laws of gravity are too nuanced for Chandler and the boys to comprehend..."

Oh I could watch 7 hours of this

“Beast Games conceives of smart people from the perspectives of a group of guys who never went to college and think high school is obsolete trying to pander to an audience of 9 year olds” is, on its own, enough of a criticism to destroy the entire project and Dan delivers it as barely an aside because it’s not even the most glaring issue

Jesus Christ

I have no way to prove this, but I'm 100% convinced that while planning the dodgeball challenge someone said "well, dogdeball is actually both a strong and a smart challenge, because like, the smarts could like, calculate in their head the right geometrical vector to throw the ball at"

Seeing that co-host say he expected the smart players to guide the strong players as if the strong players were idiots was ridiculous. Like it's just such a weird way to view people as if they are just NPCs with one personality trait.

This is Chandler. He’s got my back. I’d advise not getting mogged by him - his Lamborghini traps the souls of its victims.

It’s wild that Jimmy is simultaneously obsessed with pitting people against each other, and simultaneously very bad at incentivizing it.

So as Dan said, Beast Games wants to be mainstream, they want to make characters because that’s what a mainstream audience wants, so it focuses on the Jim/Monika romance, but it has a core audience of children that does not want that, which leads to my real world example of listening to the ten year olds I work with complain about how this show is beast games, not the bachelor.

Games of intelligence that are trivial, games of strength that are impossible, and games of subterfuge that have no incentive to do so. How completely juvenile.

“It’s not even malicious, and that lack of malice kind of makes it worse.” That sums up Mr. Beast’s whole brand. A type of evil so passive and thoughtless and stupid that calling it evil feels like an overreaction, even though its a giant machine that exists purely to waste astronomical amounts of money to torture people for no benefit to anyone, including the people ostensibly making money off it.

My theory is that the "we extensively tested these games" thing is actually true, it's just that they got, like, the five people who designed the games to play through them and make sure you could actually get the ball where it was supposed to go, and because they all knew how the game was Supposed To Work none of them tried to do something to break it or make sure it was actually fun if you weren't playing a no-stakes version with people who already knew what all the implied rules were.

Only Beast Team could take 41 days to film this season while also needing to film like 3 games the night before Survivor because they were short on time

This whole "Look, a smart, get him!" dynamic feels like a boring YA dystopia

I for one am SHOCKED that a group of strong men would gang up and discriminate against nerds and women.

Turns out you can get an exhaustive, well-produced, 4-hour-combined critique of your creative project from Dan for only about $2500. Insane value!

"They said that we couldn't tell stories, we couldn't build characters. And what better way to do it in season 2 than bring back the people we failed to build as characters last time?"