‘Wonka’s The Golden Ticket’ review: enter a world of pure humiliation

It makes sense to turn Charlie And The Chocolate Factory into a reality TV show. After all, it’s a beloved piece of IP that’s recognised the world over and the whole premise of the book hinges on a competition format. The stuff writes itself. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to be any good.

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Wonka’s The Golden Ticket, Netflix’s latest reality TV show, is very, very loosely adapted from the 1971 musical Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory which was based on Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. This bingeable series takes 24 Americans and puts them in a real-life recreation of the magical chocolate factory we all know and love. Some serious money has been thrown at it, too. The set is littered with gadgets and features a faithful recreation of the famous main room, complete with edible blades of grass and a ‘chocolate’ river.

At stake is enough money to pay the winner a six-figure salary for the next 30 years (or around $3million). To claim it, the contestants have to undergo a series of challenges and survive being eliminated. With that much cash involved, things predictably turn nasty very quickly.

The problems with Wonka’s The Golden Ticket are many and varied. But let’s start with Wonka himself. Nothing says late-stage capitalism like the Netflix powers-that-be setting their AI generator to ‘Gene Wilder’ as the voice of this whole endeavour. Wilder died in 2016 so even though his estate gave permission for his voice to be used, it feels sinister. Netflix isn’t here to preserve the legacy of the actor either. Wonk-AI is blatantly cruel. Get ready for your childhood to be ruined, because this madcap chocolatier (who we never actually see) delights in making contestants embarrass themselves on-screen before turning on one another.

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The word “twisted” is used too many times to count throughout the show – and every single challenge comes with bad consequences – even for the winners. Some of the tests are funny, at least to begin with. “Everything became different when my brother was trapped in the gumball machine,” competitor Hunter laments at one point. However, they stop being amusing pretty quickly.

Three episodes in, we get the ‘honeycomb’ test, in which the contestants have to run up a slippery slope to free their team-mates. Seeing grown adults flopping like landed fish on what is essentially a giant pink slide feels like a humiliation ritual. The Wonka from the books was ultimately a benevolent figure; this feels like the Squid Game version.

There’s a lot of Squid Game’s DNA in this show, actually. The twee candyland aesthetic, the sinister helpers (here, they are Oompa-Loompas) and the cutthroat politics all feature. Contestants are all too happy to backstab each other to make sure they, and their allies, stay in. It also ends up undercutting the very point of the IP it has so cheerfully butchered. Roald Dahl’s book was one giant cautionary tale. Any of the misfortunes the children brought on themselves was due to their own greed or stupidity.

Here though, greed and stupidity is very much encouraged in the name of entertainment. The nicer contestants are quickly weeded out. Instead, we’re left with calculating operators, all of whom look pretty dead behind the eyes – such as Ava, whose dad “almost never says no” to her. She takes charge of the competitors with the ease of a matador; pity poor Poppy Ray and his grandson Jackson, who seem very sweet but lack the killer instinct needed to succeed.

Though some features from the original books and film – such as the Half-Office and the Wonkavision studio – have been faithfully recreated here, it doesn’t make up for seeing the wonder and whimsy of the original be so wildly misappropriated in the name of drawing in viewers. Just like AI-Gene Wilder, the soul of Wonka’s Golden Ticket is missing.