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Alison Herman
TV Critic
aherman2006 See All
Courtesy of Netflix In reviewing “Wonka’s Golden Ticket,” a competition series from Netflix loosely (and I mean loosely) based on Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” it’s tempting to simply copy and paste my write-up of “Squid Game: The Challenge” from nearly three years ago. After all, the shows share similarly misguided concepts. In trying to kickstart in-house IP into a scalable franchise, the streamer fast-tracked an unscripted offshoot that misunderstands and perverts the original story. The point of both the South Korean drama and the beloved children’s book is that forcing human beings — particularly, in the latter case, children! — into lethal competition over scarce resources is, to be blunt, very bad. Any attempt to rerun these social experiments as straight entertainment rather than cautionary tales, even while removing the chance of bodily harm, is poisoned at the root.
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