In this piece · 9 sections+
Yes, if you've somehow never seen season 1. That season is a genuine event. Seasons 2 and 3 are a different story, and how you feel about the whole thing depends entirely on whether you can stop after nine episodes.
Season 1 is the reason Squid Game became the biggest Netflix show ever. It's a tight nine-episode gauntlet about broke people playing children's games for money, and it works because the games are simple, the characters are specific, and the show actually has something to say about debt. If you stop there, you've watched a great season of TV. If you keep going, you're signing up for two more seasons that stretch the concept until it starts to squeak.
The quick verdict
Yes on season 1. It's genuinely great television and one of the few Netflix originals that earned every ounce of the hype. Seasons 2 and 3 are a mixed bag that some people love and plenty of people bounced off. If you want a self-contained nine-hour thriller with a clear ending, watch season 1 and pretend the rest doesn't exist. If you can't help yourself, know what you're walking into.
What Squid Game is actually about
A broke gambler named Seong Gi-hun gets tapped on the shoulder in a Seoul subway station by a stranger who wants to play a game for money. That leads him to an island where 456 people, all of them drowning in debt, agree to play six rounds of Korean children's games. Red Light, Green Light. Tug of war. Marbles. The catch is that losing means you die, and the prize pot grows every time someone does. The players signed up willingly. They can leave any time. Most of them stay.
The tone is brutal but not cheap. Yes, people die in creative ways, but the show isn't really a gore delivery system. It's about class, debt, and what people will do when the outside world is worse than the arena. The violence is loud and the sets look like a preschool built by a serial killer, but underneath the candy colors there's a real point about how a rigged system produces desperate players and then blames them for playing. Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk spent a decade trying to sell the script before Netflix bit, and you can feel that in the writing. It has more on its mind than most of what Netflix puts out.
The math on time
Three seasons. 22 episodes. Episodes run roughly 50 to 65 minutes. If you watch the whole thing, that's around 20 hours of TV. A long weekend if you're going for it, two weeks if you're normal.
Season 1 alone is nine episodes, about eight and a half hours. That's the commitment I'd actually recommend. Season 2 is seven episodes and season 3 is six, and they're really one story split across two release windows, which is a very Netflix thing to do to you.
Here's the honest calculation. Season 1 is worth the eight hours by any measure. Seasons 2 and 3 together are another 12 hours, and whether that's worth it depends on how much goodwill you're willing to extend to a show that already gave you a great ending and then dug it up.
What it gets right
The casting in season 1 is close to perfect. Lee Jung-jae plays Gi-hun like a man who has already lost everything before the show starts, and he won an Emmy for it because he's doing the actual work of playing a coward who occasionally finds a spine. Park Hae-soo as his old friend Sang-woo is the quiet center of the season. HoYeon Jung, who had literally never acted before, plays the pickpocket Kang Sae-byeok and just walks off with several episodes. The show pairs unknowns with veterans and it clicks.
The production design is the other reason it hit. Those pastel staircases, the neon dorms, the guards in pink jumpsuits with geometric masks. It's iconic on purpose. You could describe any scene to a stranger and they'd know what show you meant. Almost nothing on TV looks like this, and it made the Halloween costume aisle unusable for six months in 2021.
The pacing of season 1 is the real trick, though. Each episode is basically one game plus the fallout, and the show is smart about how long to sit with the aftermath. The marbles episode in particular is a self-contained short film about betrayal and it's the best hour of the entire series. If you make it to episode 6 and don't feel anything, you can bail with a clear conscience.
What doesn't work
Okay. Season 2 spends most of its runtime setting up a plot that doesn't pay off until season 3, and season 3 doesn't pay off the way you want it to. Gi-hun goes back into the games with a plan, and the plan is dumb, and the show knows it's dumb, and it keeps going anyway. There's a subplot about a rebellion inside the arena that is neither as tense nor as tragic as it needed to be. Characters make choices that feel written rather than lived. If you loved season 1 for how tight it was, seasons 2 and 3 are baggy in a way that feels like the writers were told to fill a certain amount of Netflix.
The ending is divisive on purpose, but divisive isn't the same as good. Without spoiling anything, the final season swings for a big thematic statement about hope and complicity, and it lands somewhere between brave and unearned depending on the viewer. I found it frustrating. Plenty of people found it devastating. Just know it's not a clean send-off.
The front-facing detective subplot from season 1, with the cop searching for his brother, also never quite gets the payoff the show teased. If you were watching for that thread, prepare to be annoyed.
Who should watch it
If you liked Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, or Alice in Borderland, yes, watch at least season 1. If you liked Parasite and want more Korean class rage delivered with better production value than most American prestige TV, yes. If you bounced off shows like The Handmaid's Tale because the misery got monotonous, you might have the same issue here past episode 4 of season 1, though the games structure keeps it moving.
Skip it if you need shows to be fun. This is not fun. It's compelling and often beautiful, but it's grim, and people you like will die badly. Skip it if you can't stand subtitles, though at this point that's on you. And skip seasons 2 and 3 specifically if you're the kind of viewer who wants a story to end when it ends. Season 1 has a real conclusion. You can walk away.
Where to watch
All three seasons are on Netflix and only Netflix. It's a Netflix original in the truest sense, meaning they own it and they'll never let anyone else have it. No rental option, no purchase option, no ad-supported free tier version last I checked. You need a Netflix subscription. Sorry.
If you want the source material adjacent stuff, there's the official companion book on Amazon and a soundtrack that includes the very cursed pink guard theme, but the show itself lives on Netflix and that's the only way in.
✅ WORTH IT
FAQ
Is Squid Game overrated?
Season 1 isn't. It was the biggest show in the world for a reason, and it holds up on a rewatch. The overrated conversation usually comes from people who watched the later seasons and back-projected their disappointment onto the whole thing. Judge season 1 on its own merits and it's genuinely one of the best single seasons of TV in the last ten years.
Does it get better after season 1?
No, and this is the honest answer most recaps won't give you. Season 2 is a slow setup for a season 3 that most viewers found underwhelming. There are strong individual scenes, some new characters worth caring about, and moments that recapture the season 1 feeling. But as a whole, it doesn't hit the same. If you loved season 1, temper your expectations hard before starting season 2.
Is it too dark or too violent?
It's very violent, but it's not torture porn. The deaths are frequent and often shocking, but the show cares about the people dying, which is the line between meaningful violence and gratuitous violence. If you handled Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, you can handle this. If graphic content genuinely upsets you, this is not the show to push through on.
Do I need to watch season 2 to understand season 3?
Yes, they're basically one story split in half by Netflix's release strategy. You cannot skip season 2 and pick up season 3. You can, however, skip both entirely and treat season 1 as a complete standalone show, which is what I'd recommend for most people. Season 1 has an ending. Use it.
Watch season 1 this weekend. Nine episodes, one long Saturday and Sunday. Stop when the credits roll on episode 9 and decide from there whether you want more. That's the play.
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