Squid Game's Hwang Dong-Hyuk making a show about overwhelming overnight success
The Best Show On The Planet is a satire based on the uber-relatable "experience of forging an overnight global hit"
Write, as they say, what you know: Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-Hyuk, whose Netflix dystopia unexpectedly launched him from “commercially successful creator largely unknown outside South Korea” to “The Squid Game Guy on an international level,” is apparently working on a TV show about how absolutely fucking bewildering that might be.
This is per Deadline, which reports that Hwang, a veteran of the South Korean entertainment industry who based the Netflix series, in part, on his own earlier economic anxieties, is reportedly now developing a series called The Best Show On The Planet. Details on the series are light, but it’ll apparently be “a satire based on his personal experience of forging an overnight global hit.”
The Best Show (and somewhere, we can just sense Tom Scharpling getting annoyed about that) is one of three projects Hwang is apparently developing at the moment, with one of the others being a film, Killing Old People Club, apparently based on an Umberto Eco novel.
And then, of course, there’s the second season of Squid Game, which—somewhat shockingly, given the first season’s massive success—still has not gotten an official, technical greenlight from the streamer. (Weird, because we have to imagine all involved are extremely nostalgic right now for the days of late 2021, when the headlines were all “Netflix has huge hit with Squid Game,” instead of “Netflix done pooped the bed again.”)
But, yes, Hwang Dong-Hyuk is aware that people are at least ostensibly interested in getting more Squid Game. (We’ll get parenthetical here for a moment to interrogate that premise, though: Do we want more Squid Game at this point? The series’ cultural staying power kind of feels like it fell faster than a poor hapless player getting shoved through a plane of non-tempered glass, right?) Regardless, Hwang is apparently hard at work thinking up more cruel games to subject the poor to at the hands of their cruel capitalist masters, and also hopefully to finally explain why Lee Jung-Jae’s Seong Gi-Hun decided to cosplay as Ronald McDonald there in that final episode. (Inquiring minds want to know!) Per Deadline, Hwang is apparently hoping for a Halloween 2024 launch for a hypothetical second season of the series.