Around 67 hours before filming began on Beast Games, his now-blockbusting reality competition series for Amazon Prime Video, the YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, sank down deep into an ergonomic chair in an office somewhere near the soundstage and hauled his legs on to a set of metal drawers. He looked beat. “I gotta figure out what we’re doing,” he said to Samir Chaudry, a fellow streamer who was documenting the making of the show.
It was early August 2024 and the New York Times had just run an exposé of the allegedly dire conditions endured by the programme’s aspiring contestants during its “audition” round, in which they were whittled down in number from 2,000 to 1,000. The publication of the report was badly timed news for Donaldson – and the crisis would only snowball in the following weeks. On 16 September, five of the aggrieved participants filed a class-action lawsuit against the show’s makers, accusing them of the negligent infliction of emotional distress, a failure to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment from occurring, and more. (The case is ongoing, and Donaldson has tweeted that the on-set problems were “blown out of proportion”.)
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