Come with me
and you’ll be
in a world of total desecration (of a beloved story and film).
Netflix’s Wonka’s The Golden Ticket — in addition to having a title that leaves a bad taste in your mouth — is the black licorice of confectionary competitions: the Smarties to The Great British Baking Show‘s SweeTARTS and the candy corn to Is It Cake?‘s, I don’t know, actual corn. The glitzy new series, set in the world of the 1971 classic movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, continues Netflix’s artless business strategy of investing in insipid reality competition shows to fill in the yearslong gaps between new seasons of its scripted programming, and it’s not going well.
But its biggest crime is how badly it misses the mark about what has made Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory such a revered family-friendly film. Do you remember the kids in the movie backstabbing each other, having stress-related emotional breakdowns that reduced them to sobbing messes, or puking as they put their bodies through sadistic challenges? (Yes, in The Golden Ticket, someone actually throws up during a challenge, and NOT from eating too much candy.) Me neither. But it seems that’s what Netflix thinks happened.
In The Golden Ticket, competitors and their partners of choice live in a massive re-creation of Willy Wonka’s famous headquarters, where in the film, wonder and imagination ruled supreme, but in Netflix’s show, it’s more like Saw. The set bears more than a passing resemblance to Netflix’s other franchised reality show, Squid Game: The Challenge, or Prime Video‘s Beast Games, both of which are savage reminders of where we as a society have gone wrong and how far away from salvation we are. The Golden Ticket‘s sadistic challenges, many of which are lazy games of chance that contain little or no room for strategy, leave players with heartless choices to crush each other’s dreams or step on each other’s throats for miniscule advantages, all for “a lifetime of money,” a six-figure salary for 30 years (or roughly $3 million before inflation forces the winner to take another job after year two). But don’t worry, because it’s all set against the backdrop of pastel gumdrops and lollipops!
Wonka’s The Golden Ticket
- Who doesn’t like candy?
Dislike
- The total airball on capturing anything that the movie stood for
- The relentless cruelty
- The lack of anything remotely resembling a well-thought-out game
That sugary facade, a parade of Oompa-Loompas (now in multiple shapes and sizes), and some iconic Willy Wonka details, like lickable wallpaper and a chocolate river, are really the only relation The Golden Ticket has to the film. Whereas the film, based on Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, was a tale of Charlie Bucket’s unflappable morality overcoming four of the Deadly Sins of his fellow ticket winners (the greedy Veruca Salt, the slothful Mike Teavee, the prideful Violet Beauregarde, and the gluttonous Augustus Gloop), through seven of the season’s nine episodes, The Golden Ticket not only rewards selfishness, it encourages it. Grandpa Joe would never.
Though it’s true that the sets can be spectacular, in a haunted house built by Spirit Halloween kind of way, any appearance of authenticity is ripped to shreds right from the start as we must endure watching the cast lose their everlasting sh– when they open up candy bars and find their Golden Tickets, conveniently when Netflix cameras and the partners the contestants choose to go with them are nearby. Netflix’s nauseating self-promotion of its “brands” — also recently seen in its live sporting events, such as Bert Kreischer’s embarrassing Netflix-branded kayak ride on MLB Opening Night or Kreischer’s embarrassing screaming on MLB Opening Night or Kreischer’s general embarrassing existence — is sprinkled in, with Dinner Time Live‘s David Chang and Hot Ones: Extra Heat‘s Sean Evans not receiving Golden Tickets and original Charlie Bucket actor Peter Ostrum also coming up empty. What should be the show’s time to immerse the audience in this world only reveals artifice, like when an adoring crowd is gathered outside the factory to welcome the contestants, only to be revealed as just a couple busloads of people when the camera pans out too far. Did we not learn anything from Trump’s The Great American State Fair?
Everything you need for fall TV:
The solutions to make this watchable were easy. Why not cast contestants with some similarities to the original characters? (To be fair, Ava — an influencer type with a competitive streak — is a near-perfect Veruca Salt and one of the few interesting contestants.) Why make most games so mysterious and nonsensical that contestants don’t know how to properly play them? Why make some challenges favor the fit and young and then invite some geriatrics on the show to compete against gym rats? Why make things so stressful that everyone — including totally yoked grown men — weeps under the weight of the barbarity they’re compelled to deliver? Shouldn’t this be fun? Isn’t this a game? Did their tears dissolve the sugary set pieces?
I haven’t even gotten to the most egregious violation of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Through the black sorcery of artificial intelligence, Netflix re-created the voice of the late, great Gene Wilder, the original Willy Wonka, to narrate the action and boom instructions to contestants through the factory’s loudspeakers. Wilder’s haunting from beyond the grave does not have its intended effect, unless Netflix was going for “eerie reminder that celebrities will never die thanks to a daisy chain of Nvidia GPUs.” Netflix is proud to explain that Wilder’s voice was electronically exhumed from the great beyond with the blessing of the Wilder estate, but it only makes one wonder why Gene Wilder’s living relatives hated him so much or how much they were behind on their bills. It’s an inexcusable tragedy. And hey, fellow Wonkas Johnny Depp and Timothée Chalamet are still alive! (Kidding, I’m kidding! I think.)
Studios snatching up popular IP to bait viewers is nothing new, and it’s not even always a bad idea. But butchering it beyond recognition by candy-coating a stale center of a bad show in some nostalgic imagery just makes it rotten. The elevator may ascend sky high in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but in Wonka’s The Golden Ticket, it goes straight down to hell.
Premieres: The first seven episodes are now streaming on Netflix. The final two episodes stream Wednesday, Sept. 30
Who’s in it: Gene Wilder’s ghost, original Oompa-Loompa Rusty Goffe
Who’s behind it: Chris Culvenor, Paul Franklin, Rikkie Proost, David Tibballs, Alison Holloway, and Emer Harkin
For fans of: Saw, The Stanford Prison Experiment, Squid Game
Episodes watched: 7 of 9
