When we get into the actual games, the smash-kit K-drama finds its feet. But it spends far too many episodes dragging its heels extremely painfully. Series three must do better

One of Hollywood’s many bad habits is the bloat caused by splitting a story in half in a bid to double the profits (cough, cough, Dune and Wicked). Squid Game was always a perfect one-series story. Gambling addict Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) became Player 456, a desperate man who attempts to pay off his debts by taking part in a twisted underground fight-to-the-death competition. He beats the odds by surviving every one of its potentially fatal playground games. When it first appeared, it was horrifying, it was thrilling, and its satirical edge – which examined capitalism and class in South Korea – was clever and acidic. The world took to it in vast numbers.

That it became one of Netflix’s most successful, and therefore most profitable, series of all time placed it in a creative bind. Inevitably, it was renewed for a second and then third series, but even before that, its satirical edge was stress-tested by Squid Game: The Challenge, a real gameshow spinoff. That was far more entertaining than it had any right to be, but its win-big mentality did rather undermine the point of the original, which took aim at the inherent unfairness of an exploitative economic system.