Most viewers on the planet today have watched or at least heard about the blockbuster Korean Netflix Series Squid Game. Since its release on 17 September, 2021, the series has carved an indelible mark in Netflix history, with over 130 million people watching it worldwide.
According to Bloomberg, Netflix extended a budget of $21.4 million (almost $2.4 million per episode) for the production of the nine-episode series but ended up earning almost $900 million, with each episode worth around $100 million.
Many would wonder why Squid Game has soon become a massive phenomenon, from people re-watching it a number of times to teens choosing Halloween costumes based on characters from the show.
The Netflix series highlights the economic precarity borne by Koreans and how contemporary Korean society is supported by the pillars of cutthroat competition, inequality and educated unemployment through a violent game and its enigmatic players who indirectly represent various facets of human nature.
This is where the title of this article becomes relevant. Enter yet another Netflix Original series, Extracurricular, which was released on 29 April, 2020, when the world was grappling with the newly presented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Extracurricular, whose Korean title literally translates to Human Project, is not much different from Squid Game in its subject matter, barring the sadistic games and subsequent bloodshed.
The series revolves around the protagonist, Oh Ji-soo, who is ostensibly an excellent and obedient student but runs an illegal business of providing security to women engaged in “compensated dating”, the Southeast Asian counterpart of escort work. However, the story takes a turn when one of Ji-Soo’s classmates, Bae Gyuri, who belongs to an affluent family, learns of his “job” and wishes to join in.
Bae Gyuri’s character is very similar to Cho Sang-Woo, a Seoul University graduate and investment banker in Squid Game. Both of them are strategists, extremely calculative and possess sharp minds. They are very unpredictable in terms of predicting their next move and may even deceive one of their own to advance their interests.
Although Squid Game and Extracurricular vary immensely in terms of their plots, the message both of them convey is rather similar.
Oh, Ji-Soo describes his “dream” as “expensive”. Though he never explicitly reveals what his dream is, it could be observed that a handmade poster with the words “SKY only one step above” was put up. This suggested that Ji-Soo dreamt of attending SKY—the popular acronym for Korea’s top three universities: Seoul University, Konkuk University, and Yonsei University.
Parents engage their students into hagwons or cram schools and make them study till almost 3 a.m. in study rooms so that they can secure admission into either of these universities. This implies the level of competition young students are exposed to at a tender age when they should be encouraged to experiment with things they like.
Moreover, these universities provide expensive education, which takes us back to Ji-Soo making money through illegal means in order to fulfil his dream.
In the first episode, viewers learn that Ji-Soo lives alone. Though not much is implied about his mother other than an old family picture, we know that he lives separately from his father, who eventually steals and loses all of Ji-Soo’s hard-earned money as cryptocurrency. This resonates with Squid Game’s barbaric gameplay, wherein players are willing to kill one another in order to progress further in the games and win the prize money.
The act of Ji-Soo’s father breaking into his sons’ house and fleeing with bags of money is a bittersweet scene to ponder upon pertaining to how the man’s son lived alone and paid for his own expenses, thus, proving that ties of blood and humanity have no involvement when material wealth is concerned.
And finally, one more aspect which connects the two series is the involvement of “VIPs” or extremely rich people. In Squid Game, Oh Il-Nam, an old man who was among the developers of the games, and participated in them himself, says:
“Do you know what someone with no money has in common with someone with too much money? Living is no fun for them. If you have too much money, no matter what you buy, eat or drink, everything gets boring in the end.”
Furthermore, he goes on to describe that the games were a means of entertainment for the extravagantly rich VIPs.
In Extracurricular, Bae Gyuri had nothing much to achieve out of Ji-Soo’s security business. However, she makes it entertaining by roping in a rejected idol from her parents’ entertainment company, encouraging him to join compensated dating, and even proposing forming an alliance with a gang leader.
Even though Extracurricular did not enjoy the same level of success as Squid Game, which has become an international sensation, it deserves equal recognition and applause. It immaculately depicts the lives of teenagers dabbling in crime to make a living, surviving in a world based on the foundations of the capitalist conundrum.
As someone in her late teens, I found Extracurricular easier to relate with than Squid Game. The direction, screenplay and aesthetics are impeccable in both of the series. They are a must-watch for viewers.