Squid Game. When did you first encounter that strange pairing of words? Perhaps it was while idly flicking around the Netflix home page for something diverting to watch over the weekend. Or perhaps it was someone breathlessly hyping it up on your social media platform of choice. Maybe it was in a thinkpiece, ruminating on what the show says about South Korea, capitalism or cephalopods. Or maybe you received a letter from your child’s school warning that some pupils had been caught watching clips of the (at times incredibly) violent series on TikTok. Whatever it was, it’s clear that by now you’re far more likely to be familiar with the phrase Squid Game than not. The Korean-language drama, about a group of down-on-their-luck Seoul residents who are lured into playing a deadly contest, has entered that rarefied space reserved for Game of Thrones-sized megahits, and is currently on track to become Netflix’s most popular show (though – caveat! – this is only according to Netflix, who do not release comprehensive, verified viewing figures for their series). On the face of it, this level of success is pretty surprising. Squid Game after all is a subtitled series with no source material (and, by extension, inbuilt fans) to lean on, next to no advance press around it (at least outside South Korea), a dark, high-concept premise and – as those schools are warning – some truly gnarly violence. So why has it conquered the planet? 1. The Netflix factor Netflix, you might have noticed, is pretty handy at this whole streaming lark. A combination of heavy investment into global production ($500 million in the case of Korea) and a world-beating algorithm that knows what to push to viewers and when, has meant that the streamer has an entire planet’s worth of compelling dramas just waiting to become smash hits. It’s well worth checking out this fascinating Vulture deep dive into their approach with Squid Game. 2. Subtitles are no longer scary “The one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles”, as Bong Joon-Ho, director of another South Korean hit – Parasite – put it, has long since stopped seeming intimidating to most English-language viewers (the rest of the world having treated subtitles – or dubbing – as the norm for decades), a development that arguably began with the Scandi-crime boom of the late 00s. Now they’re so widely accepted that plenty of people stick them on regardless of whether a series is in a foreign language or not. 3. There’s an audience for confrontational TV As the world has begun to feel more confusing and threatening, two schools of TV seem to have emerged: shows that seek to reflect real-life concerns, and shows that seek to provide escapism from them. Both approaches have proved successful: in the former camp you might put The Handmaid’s Tale, which seemed to chime with the fears of women in Trump’s America; in the latter, you’d include the relentlessly optimism of Ted Lasso, or the comforting nostalgia of series like Stranger Things. Squid Game certainly fits into the first column, offering a withering critique of late-stage capitalism, like Parasite before it. 5. That name Yes, it’s daft – but it’s also intriguing, managing to be both childlike and suggestive of something dark and ominous. 6. Shock and gore Chalk it up to autopsy-heavy detective dramas, or the almost routine levels of ultraviolence in Game of Thrones, but it does feel like viewers have fewer qualms about the spilling of claret in their shows these days. The warning message at the start of Squid Game almost serves as a selling point, hinting that the stakes of this series are truly life or – very bloody – death. 7. And crucially, it’s actually good I have a few gripes about Squid Game, though most of them are highly spoiler-ish so I’ll keep them to myself until everyone’s had time to see the lot. Still, on the whole it’s an impressive piece of work – stylishly shot, economically told, and boasting great characters and bite-your-nails-down-to-the-skin levels of thrillingness. If you can stomach Squid Game, it’s well worth diving in. From the archive Before Squid Game, there was South Korean cinema. Here’s the Guide’s Phil Hoad on why it’s world beating: Non-cinephiles probably first started becoming aware that something interesting was going on when Park’s Oldboy was released in the west in 2004. Its bone-crunching violence and dark plot put it in the “extreme Asian” cinema bracket that was already readily exportable. But Oldboy – and the other films in the director’s Vengeance trilogy – had more going on than that. They featured a peculiar blend of tones, absurdist comedy clattering straight into vaulting tragedy, that seemed uniquely Korean. Like protagonist Oh Dae-su, finally freed after 15 years of incarceration, cramming a fistful of live octopus into his gob.