Time to dust off those green track suits and white slip-on sneakers, because we’ve got your exclusive first look at one of the new games in Squid Game: The Challenge season 2.
“We’re super excited for everyone to see season 2 — weirdly, more excited than [we were about] season 1,” executive producer Tim Harcourt tells Entertainment Weekly.
Netflix’s reality competition spinoff based on scripted Korean drama Squid Game isnreturning with 456 players battling it out in simple games and tests for the $4.56 million grand prize. But while the reality show producers once again used Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk’s series as inspiration, they reveal that they didn’t totally copy the scripted drama’s games.
Pete Dadds/Netflix
“Expect lots of fresh games and some old favorites,” Harcourt says. “Some repeat games from season 1, some games that you will recognize from the world of the drama, but we’ve also got some of our own fresh ideas as well.”
Squid Game repeated Red Light, Green Light in season 2, since it’s an easy way to eliminate a lot of players right at the beginning. But will the reality show bring it back as well? “We can’t reveal that,” executive producer John Hay says before adding, “We love Red Light Green Light, that’s all I’ll say.”
While the producers don’t want to give all the surprises away, they do reveal one of the season 2 games is Pentathlon — which was first seen on Squid Game — with a twist.
“We have our own little spin on Pentathlon,” Harcourt says. “It’s slightly different from how it is in the drama, where two teams of five were competing to do their mini games in the rainbow circles against the clock, and if they didn’t complete it, they’d all die. We simplified it slightly: the first team to finish will survive, and the team that finishes second, or doesn’t finish, I should say, are all eliminated.”
Another difference from the original version of Pentathlon is what the five mini games will be.
“We use some, but not all,” Harcourt reveals. “One of the games within our Pentathlon is the House of Cards. They have to build this giant stack of cards, and it seems very easy to do with friends or if you’re playing drinking games, but actually, in the pressure of the game? I mean, watching people with sweaty hands do it whilst everyone around them wills them to do it, it’s some of the tenser stuff we’ve seen in reality TV.”
And if you loved season 1’s fan-favorite mother-son duo Player 302/LeAnn Wilcox Plutnicki andPlayer 301/Trey Plutnicki, the producers have good news: “We’ve leaned into relationships even more in this season than we did in the first,” Hay says. “That’s one of the most powerful things about the drama and it’s powerful for us too, and so that ups the stakes.”
The producers were so pleased with Trey and LeAnn’s ultimately tragic arc that they wanted to replicate it even more in season 2 by casting lots of real-life loved ones.
Pete Dadds/Netflix
“We have siblings, we have parents and children,” Hay reveals. “The Trey and LeAnn story was very powerful and surprised us all at the start. Having seen it play out, you then wonder what would happen if there were more pairs, more siblings, more parents and children, and lo and behold, that has been really, really interesting in the way it’s changed the dynamics of the game.”
However, don’t expect Trey or LeAnn — or anyone else from season 1 — to return to the game this season, unlike how Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) played a second time on the scripted series.
“There are no returning cast members from season 1 in season 2,” Harcourt says. But, he adds, they’ve found 456 new players that are just as entertaining as last season’s cast, including one villain in particular: “There’s one incredibly big character who dominates a lot of the show who some people are going to love this character, some people are going to find grating.”
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And the biggest difference between season 2 of the reality spinoff and the scripted drama? No unexpected births.
“I can reveal that no babies were born, not to my knowledge, during the filming of the show,” Harcourt says with a laugh.
Squid Game: The Challenge season 2 premieres Nov. 4 on Netflix.
