Look, I could open this post by telling you Squid Game is a masterpiece. I could also open it by saying Season 1 was lightning in a bottle and everything after was Netflix squeezing money from a finished story. Both of those takes exist somewhere on the internet.Neither of them is quite right.
Here's the version I actually believe: Squid Game is a genuinely great show that made some bad strategic decisions, and a lot of the frustration around Seasons 2 and 3 has less to do with the quality of the writing and more to do with how Netflix chose to release it. We'll get to that. But first, let me tell you who made this thing and why it almost never happened.
Hwang Dong-hyuk first wrote the idea for Squid Game in 2008. He was pulling from his own financial struggles and from the kind of class inequality that was baked into South Korean society in ways that were hard to talk about directly. He took the script around to studios for years. Nobody wanted it. Too bleak, too strange, too violent. He eventually shelved it and moved on to other projects. Then Netflix came looking for international content in 2019, picked it up, and the rest of it is one of the most surreal success stories in the history of television. Season 1 dropped September 17, 2021. It hit number one in 94 countries. It pulled 265 million views in its first 91 days. By the time Season 2 launched in December 2024, Season 1 had 330 million viewers and 2.8 billion hours watched. The stress of making it cost Hwang six teeth. Six actual teeth.
This post contains minor spoilers for Netflix's Squid Game
What makes Season 1 untouchable
The surface concept, people playing deadly children's games for money, is not what makes this show work. That's the hook. The actual argument is something sharper.
The games in Season 1 are Red Light Green Light, honeycomb carving, tug-of-war, marbles, glass stepping stones, and the title game. These are things Korean kids played in the street. They're drenched in nostalgia. And the show takes that nostalgia and weaponizes it completely, dropping adults at their economic rock bottom into a structure designed for childhood play, then watching them tear each other apart for a prize worth 45.6 billion won that most of them won't live to collect.
It works because the desperation is real before anyone steps into an arena. Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) has gambled away everything. He borrows from loan sharks, misses his daughter's birthday, can't stop even when he knows he should. He's not a good person. He's not supposed to be. And the show is smart enough to fill the other 455 spots with people who each have their own version of that same story. A North Korean defector trying to get her family out. A man with terminal cancer who figures this is the only gamble left worth taking. A Pakistani migrant worker owed wages he'll never see through normal channels. Season 1 builds an ensemble that feels like a cross-section of everyone the economy has already failed, and the stakes hit differently because the show slows down enough to make you care about specific people before it starts killing them.
The visual design is doing a lot of work too. The dormitory looks like an enormous pastel-colored playground. The guards are in identical pink coveralls and animal masks. The administrators are all sharp angles and black suits. There's something genuinely wrong about how beautiful it all looks, and that wrongness is entirely the point. It's one of the most visually coherent shows I've seen.
Where it starts to slip
Hwang was always clear that he conceived this as a standalone story. He reportedly didn't plan for more. But Netflix had a show that generated an estimated 900 million dollars in value for the platform, paid him his flat contractual fee for it, and then came back with an offer to continue it. He's been pretty open about the fact that his compensation from Season 1 didn't match what the show was actually worth, so coming back for Seasons 2 and 3 was partly about correcting that. Can't blame him for it. But the seams show.
Season 2 dropped December 26, 2024. Gi-hun is back in South Korea, determined to find the recruiter and get back into the games to take them down from the inside. He does. He organizes a rebellion among the players. It fails badly. Seven episodes, a fresh cast of players, and then a cliffhanger ending that left everyone waiting six months for Season 3.
The season has things going for it. Some of the new players are actually interesting. The dynamic between Gi-hun and the Front Man gets sharper. But a lot of the season drags. The games take forever to start. And that ending left people angry in the wrong way, not the "I can't wait to see what happens" way, but the "this feels like a content calendar decision dressed up as a cliffhanger" way.
Season 3 arrived June 27, 2025, and picked up exactly where Season 2 stopped. Which confirmed what a lot of viewers suspected: Seasons 2 and 3 are functionally one 13-episode season that Netflix split into two release events. Hwang and his team filmed them together. The pacing only makes sense when you understand that. Watched as separate seasons with months between them, it's a momentum killer.
The VIP characters, the obscenely wealthy spectators who fund the whole operation and watch it for entertainment, remain one of the show's most persistent weaknesses across all three seasons. The idea is right. Rich people treating human suffering as a spectator sport, it's exactly the kind of critique the show should be making. But the characters are so thinly written and so unconvincingly performed that they end up undercutting the commentary instead of driving it home. Season 3 reviewers called them out specifically for feeling almost artificial, and that's fair. When your symbol of capitalist evil is less convincing than the furniture it's sitting on, something went wrong in the writing room.
The Front Man, played by Lee Byung-hun, is where Season 3 most clearly wastes its best card. Lee Byung-hun is a compelling actor. The character is one of the show's most layered: a man who once played the games, won, and then chose to serve the machine rather than burn it down. He's the dark mirror to Gi-hun. The confrontation between them is supposed to be the thematic payoff for everything that comes after Season 1. Season 3 barely uses him. He disappears for most of it and comes back for a finale that doesn't give that confrontation anywhere near the weight it needed.
What holds up anyway
Here's the thing though: the show never got lazy about what it looks like. Production values stayed extraordinary across all three seasons. Season 1 cost around 21 million dollars. Season 2 jumped to 84 million. Season 3 had 69 million for just six episodes. That money is on screen. The game environments stay inventive. The color work stays sharp. It still makes something deeply ugly look strangely beautiful, and that contrast still does its job.
Lee Jung-jae holds every season together. He won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for Season 1, the first Korean actor to win in that category, and his performance across the full run earns it. Gi-hun is stubborn and grief-soaked and doesn't become heroic cleanly, and Lee never lets the character get reduced to a symbol. Even when the writing gets soft around him or the plot asks him to do something that stretches logic, the performance stays true.
The class argument never disappears either, even when the execution wobbles. Every season keeps returning to the same core idea: the game isn't the problem. The game is just a more honest version of the world these people already live in. The arena kills you fast. The world outside kills you slow. That idea, which Season 1 states plainly and Seasons 2 and 3 try to complicate, is why this show resonated globally. Debt and desperation aren't uniquely Korean experiences.
The actual problem with Seasons 2 and 3
Here's what I think: a lot of what people read as creative failure in the later seasons is actually structural failure caused by how Netflix released them.
Season 1 dropped all nine episodes at once in September 2021, and the world binged it together. That communal experience is part of why it felt like such a moment. Season 2 dropped seven episodes on December 26, 2024, ended on a cliffhanger, and made viewers wait until June 2025 for the rest. Six months. For the back half of what is functionally one story.
That's not a creative decision. That's a subscriber retention strategy. And it worked commercially: Season 2 hit 68 million views in four days, breaking the premiere record that had been held by Wednesday. Season 3 hit 106 million views in ten days, the fastest any Netflix series in any language has ever reached that number. The numbers are great. Netflix wins.
But the storytelling takes a real hit. Momentum matters in serialized narrative. When you split one story in half and force a six-month gap, you're asking the audience to carry emotional investment that the narrative wasn't built to support across that kind of distance. Viewers forget who characters are. Subplots that were building slowly in Season 2 feel cold when Season 3 picks them up. The continuity breaks in ways that make the writing look weaker than it actually is.
So should you watch it?
Yes. Start from Season 1 and watch through Episode 6, the marbles episode, which is one of the best single episodes of television in recent memory. If the show hasn't grabbed you completely by then, it probably won't. If it has, you're finishing it.
The later seasons are imperfect. The release strategy was cynical. The VIPs never worked. But Season 1 alone is some of the best TV of the decade, and Seasons 2 and 3 watched back to back, without the enforced wait, are a better experience than most people who watched them as they aired will give them credit for.
Did the ending satisfy you, or do you think the show used up everything it had in Season 1?
Let me know in the comments. I'm especially curious from anyone who binge-watched the whole thing straight through whether the later seasons felt different that way..
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