Squid Game Season 1
Overview
Red light, green light was never supposed to be scary. Then a giant doll swivels its head, the gunfire starts, and you understand exactly what kind of show you've pressed play on. Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is a chauffeur with a gambling habit, a mountain of debt, and a daughter he's failing. He signs up for a secret contest alongside 455 other desperate people, all in matching green tracksuits, playing childhood games on candy-colored sets for a prize pot that grows every time somebody dies — which is often, and always by rules nobody explained up front. The players make it hurt: Sang-woo, the golden boy gone rotten; Sae-byeok, a North Korean defector playing to reunite her family; old Il-nam, who seems to be enjoying himself most of all. Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote it out of his own money troubles, and that bitterness is the show's fuel. It works as a nerve-shredding thriller and as a pretty furious argument about who gets chewed up by the economy. It became Netflix's biggest launch ever, won Emmys, and had dalgona candy selling out worldwide. Not bad for a script that got rejected for a decade.
