The Devil’s Plan: A Preview
One show I consider to be an accomplishment of reality TV is the 2013–2015 Korean reality show The Genius.
On the one hand, a competition equal parts The Liar Game and the best parts of Big Brother, a cutthroat, strategically complex game where the best and smartest players prevail by being two steps ahead of their witless competition. The Main Matches featured on the show are intelligently designed, and many of them hold up on their own as board games. Games like Food Chain, Minus Auction, and Today’s Menu allow the players to develop strategies and counterstrategies to each other, where even people cast aside in the minority can use their strategic understanding to win the day.
However, in the heavy praise of the strategic discussion of the strategic elements of the show, people tend to forget to praise how good the other elements are. The show’s editors turn what would otherwise be adults playing a toned-down board game into a cinematic heist. The show has a heavy use of flashforwards and flashbacks to keep the audience on its toes. Like any other player in the game, the editors make their decisions extremely strategically and know when to show their cards and keep information close to their chest, turning the watcher into an active participant trying to avoid the wool being pulled over their eyes.
Since The Genius ended 7 years ago, there has been a gap in the TV market. Rumours of adaptations in various European markets have largely been fruitless, with the rights being purchased in the UK, Denmark, Norway, and France, with a half-baked version eventually coming out in the Netherlands in 2022, while many spiritual and thematic successors to the original program in its homeland, such as Time Hotel, Society Game and Game of Blood, have had a bit more success at recapturing the je ne sais quoi that led to the original’s success.
Devils Plan, out today on Netflix, seems to be the true successor series people have been waiting for. The trailer shows that the set is identical to the building The Genius was played in almost a decade ago. Much of the off-air talent has reunited for this outing, except this time on Netflix with theoretically a Netflix budget. Even watching the limited amount of promo material allowed in English, many of the elements foundational to The Genius seem to be returning to Devil’s Plan. Garnets are now Gold Pieces. The same mix of pro gamers, celebrities, and academics make up the cast. Even the mythic “Bandage Man” from The Genius has seemingly returned wearing a dark hoodie and a neon mask, which wouldn’t stand out during The Purge.
In one view, my expectations of this show might be overly high. Netflix has a history of inconsistent adaptations, and, specifically, the shift of release schedule from a weekly release to releasing three to five episodes a week provides a source of pessimism. One thing that I am particularly nostalgic for in reality TV is the weekly elimination: the good old days of the mid-2000s when I was guaranteed to watch one person go home every week, spend the week on forums or on Twitter or Reddit reading people speculate about who was next, and then watch the episode live to watch everybody else’s immediate thoughts. A strict sticking to an episodic format has become increasingly rare in reality TV, whether that is because episode counts have exploded, requiring non-sensical non-eliminations to be dished out frequently, ala RuPaul’s Drag Race, or an extremely loose definition on when episodes begin and end or where eliminations happen. On Physical 100, another Netflix-produced Korean reality television show that was released this year, eliminations would seemingly occur randomly, with there being several three-and-four-episode blocks without a single elimination happening in a show that started with one hundred contestants, making sure that dozens of contestants would be unceremoniously eliminated at a time, removing the emotional impact of each individual’s story. In the rare episode where an elimination would happen, eliminations would occur at the beginning or middle of the episode, ensuring that episodes would end without a proper denouement for the sake of favouring an anti-climactic cliffhanger.
Netflix also has a reputation for dumbing down its shows. Watching the first episode of the reboot of The Mole, where the native Dutch version has a similar reputation amongst strategic reality TV fans, and even in America, the Anderson Cooper-led seasons are considered some of the greatest reality series of all time, had the intellectual stimulation of the one-hundredth TikTok algorithmically recommended to you. For every conversation that happened on The Mole, we had both sides of the conversation repeated to us by both members, with maybe an added sting of the person accusing the other of being the mole, where neither confessional served to add any nuance, story, motivation, or depth, except to make sure that anybody scrolling on TikTok did not miss anything important that happened on the show. While The Mole did get better with time, and the show became more confident that the viewers were paying attention, post-game interviews and posts by the cast have revealed that the game had significantly more strategic depth than what was presented on screen, putting a question on whether Netflix is particularly interested in having a strategic game on its service.
To some degree, this might be a casualty of the streaming era. The shows that do well on streaming can be watched alongside the one-hundredth TikTok, where the laptop or television is the second screen to whatever the audience deems more important, whether this be The Office, Stranger Things, or even the Big Brother live feeds. The Genius could be a product of the early 2010s as much as The Mole was a product of the early 2000s, and Devil’s Plan could feel out of place on Netflix. A local review of the first episode of the recent Dutch adaptation of The Genius led with the headline “The Genius — Nobody Fucking Understands It”. While I would argue the confusion largely stems from the producer’s inexplicable decision to keep the cast in the dark about the level of strategy that would be required of the show while immediately presenting them with one of the most complex challenges in the show’s history without giving them any support in understanding the rules, maybe this review has a point. The Genius aired a decade ago, and much of its non-Korean fanbase watched it online without dubbing, where they were forced to pay undivided attention to the show and its rules on its own terms. Would an audience that watches the show much more casually follow along?
However, when I play the trailer for Devil’s Plan again; I feel hope. I noticed one of the dealers returning from the original program. I noticed the familiar production design with cartoony animals. It feels like The Genius I remember from nearly a decade ago in a new form. For that, I am optimistic.
And, like, it can’t be worse than the Dutch version, right?
