Dear Wonka’s Golden Ticket: You lose! Good day, sir!

The biggest offense of Wonka’s The Golden Ticket is not the disembodied voice of Gene Wilder, resurrected 10 years after his death via AI. The Netflix competition has recreated and reimagined spaces from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with impressive scale. If only someone had given as much thought to game design and character development.

Before the players—paired, as in the novel and The Amazing Race, with people they know—even arrive in the chocolate room, Wonka’s The Golden Ticket immediately starts splitting them up and terminating them, one by one.

There’s no structure to the game, just a series of random decisions. Whoever wins $3 million will be the person who survived producer-driven chaos.

Players choose other players, sometimes for teams and sometimes just to send them out of the game. People are shocked and horrified, crying as if they’re best friends who are choosing who to eat to survive, while I struggled to remember who their partner was.

What the show entirely misses is that, in Roald Dahl’s novel and in competent reality TV competitions, we actually get to know and care about people. That makes their decisions matter.

Some of these social games might work in The Mole or Big Brother, shows that build up to the challenges, giving them roles in the game.

Wonka’s The Golden Ticket tries to let the set do the work—and the result is tedium, not wonder. To get to the second challenge, the players board the Wonkatania boat, go about 20 feet, and get off just inside the tunnel. Perhaps a fun experience for them; useless to watch.

For an example of how The Golden Ticket overindexes on wonder and underdevelops character and game design, consider the episode in the grand empty expanse of the TV room.

Five people are eventually “transported” to a game show set, where Nick Cannon appears on a screen, giving AI Gene Wilder a break so he can still be dead.

But there’s no game. Players spin a wheel, and after 20 minutes—about half of a regular hour-long TV show—we end up with five people selected at random to be eliminated by another person whose fate was selected by the wheel. That is not a challenge. So much time and so little done.

From Squid Game: The Challenge, we know that Netflix is not interested in the themes from source material. Yet it’s a baffling missed opportunity to not make these a series of moral and ethical tests, with partners accountable for each others’ actions.

The Golden Ticket gets closest to its potential in episode four, when the players return to the TV room for the most well-developed challenge of the first five episodes. (I stopped watching at the start of episode six.)

Half of cast goes to the game show set, where they see images of cities and countries, and buzz in to identify them. The twist: buzzing in forces their partner to answer.

Get the question wrong, and the buzzer has to eat a piece of gum. Get it right, and they choose another player to eat the gum. One piece is exploding gum, a termination effect that is my favorite of the series so far. (Too many of the effects are clearly for our benefit, not the players, who have to wait for production to, say, switch out a giant gumball that rolled down a ramp with one that has a person inside it.)

What unfolds is comedy: Kayla’s dad Bill rings in, she gets the question right, and then Bill chooses Hunter—stunning Kayla, because she’d just told her dad they can trust Hunter. That begins a back and forth between Hunter and Bill—until Ava’s dad, Jeff, jumps in, horrifying his daughter that he’s put himself at risk.

There’s the show: spoiled children and their clueless elders, both forced to deal with the others’ decisions. Test them with challenges to see if they’ll misbehave—can they be tempted by greed? Follow rules? Will they heed warnings?

But Wonka’s Golden Ticket moves back to Big Brother-style veto and HOH ceremonies, people choosing others to be eliminated.

As to Gene Wilder’s voice, it sounds less like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Matthew Broderick than it did in the trailer. Yet it’s also a post-production addition, because after the first few minutes, the players never respond as if they’re hearing him.

Instructions for their challenges instead come on written cards, sometimes handed to them by Oompa-Loompas—including one actor from the film, Rusty Goffe—or are shared with them by a disembodied female voice (Siri? And who they might also not be able to hear) or a washed-up game show host (Nick Cannon, later Howie Mandel).

Seeing Goffe on screen is lovely, though he is not permitted to speak throughout the series, unless you count a line in a lip-synced song.

Peter Ostrum, who played Charlie in the 1971 film, does get a line in his brief cameo in the first episode.

He pops up in a montage of people pretending to open chocolate bars, which includes Drew from Big Brother 28, who, alongside a woman, opens a bar and says “no golden ticket.” So yes, Drew from BB28 gets more dialogue than Rusty Goffe.

The opening scenes feel so fake, and the first half-hour is so tedious, that the wonder of the sets may not be enough to keep people from terminating their Netflix tour right away.

Beautiful sets can’t compensate for a lack of a coherent game D

What works for me:

• The set design
• The practical special effects

What could be better:

• The game design and challenges
• Developing characters
• Finding more inspiration from the film(s) and book than just the environment
• Leaving Gene Wilder alone

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