Don’t Hate The Player

Over the weekend we’ve ended up watching all four eps of Adventure Line’s new French Netflix reality show Don’t Hate The Player (Mauvais Joueurs – Bad Players – in French). In it, a cast of 13 players hosted by Claude off of Koh-Lanta travel to Mexico to take part in a “social experiment”, one winner will walk off with €150,000. The catch? Some of them will live in a luxury villa, whilst the rest will have to make do in a jungle camp. The people in the villa have safety, the people in the camp can be eliminated. To be in with a shot at winning the money, you have to be in the villa at the end of the game.

If this sounds a bit like Netflix’s other show Surviving Paradise (Studio Lambert for Netflix) you’d be absolutely right, it’s the same premise. But what happens during these shows feels rather different to the point where I’m trying to work out if they’re the same format or not. We also watched a few episodes of Surviving Paradise when we were dog sitting over the weekend and it’s really standard voting and alliances stuff, as overwrought as you like. Don’t Hate the Player feels much more playful, a bit more game-y, a bit more aware – the players talk about it being a game much more and regularly talk about it as a production. Eliminations (so far) are based on challenges – the first one is basically Mega Carrot-In-A-Box. Most interestingly, the decisions (“predicaments”) offer some genuinely challenging strategic decisions, there’s a proper throughline that those with the power to make a decision must be prepared to sacrifice something – there’s opportunity aplenty for power to shift and for people to move about. There is an element that it feels basically a bit like a reality show by Monopoly Chance card. But it also feels a bit like the sort of show Rise and Fall could have been. There’s quite a nice transitional shot of the sea turning upside down to represent the action going from the Villa to the Camp.

It’s not the next big thing, but it’s fun enough (the contestants are there to play) and there was one episode which suddenly finishes and I wondered where the time went which is probably about as good a recommendation as there can be – eps are 35-45 minutes, and new episodes drop on Wednesdays. Episodes are subtitled.