This awful load of garbage should never have been made .... Roal Dahl
and Gene Wilder must be spinning in their graves, and Wilder's greedy
family should be ashamed of themselves! :-(



Wonka's Golden Ticket review - this bleak reality show
is all nausea, no sugar rush
------------------------------------------------------
Netflix's new series is the ruthless, hyper-capitalist competitive
take on a kids' book that no one needed. AI-generating Gene Wilder's
voice for it just feels wrong

As the sad-faced Oompa-Loompas who acted in Glasgow's famously
catastrophic Willy's Chocolate Experience in 2024 will testify, if
you come at Willy Wonka, you'd better not miss. There's always a
risk involved when trying to recreate fantastical, fictional
worlds: if you fall short - or miss the point - the bathos is all
the more devastating. Roll up, then, for Wonka's Golden Ticket,
Netflix's twist on Roald Dahl's confectionary phantasmagoria, which
reimagines the story as Squid Game: The Sugar Headache. It gets
messy.

As we join our contestants, they've assembled outside Wonka's
factory, having found Golden Tickets in apparently random bars of
chocolate - although, as a group, they seem fortuitously
demographically mixed and able to bring a range of disparate yet
complementary backstories to the table. A lucky break. But wait!
Is that the voice of beloved Wonka-proxy Gene Wilder?

Almost. As it turns out, the show's producers (with the approval of
Wilder's estate) have rendered the late actor's voice in AI form.
It sounds stilted, indefinably wrong somehow. Like so much AI, it
feels like a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist -
Wilder's "presence" adds nothing beyond a sort of uncanny-valley
queasiness that, of course, should be present in any rendering of
Wonka anyway. The sickly scent of decay is already close at hand.

For a group of grown adults who haven't even ingested anything
sweet at this point, the group seem wildly excited. However, the
true meaning of the enterprise is about to be revealed: "Whoever
reaches the end will walk away with a lifetime's supply of money.
A six-figure salary for 30 years." Oh, the romance and wonder! In
the spirit of the moment, the fact that GeneGPT doesn't tell them
if this money is taxable feels like an omission. From this point
on, this bunch have their eyes firmly on the prize. What follows
is a weird mixture of infantilisation (Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory is a kids' book, guys!) and hyper-capitalist,
last-person-standing ruthlessness.

But first, chocolate. Yes, there is a river of it, surrounded by
edible grass, edible flowers and presumably, though we don't
actually see anyone on their hands and knees licking the floor,
edible paving stones, too. The set-pieces are actually very well
realised, even if the show's value system feels somewhat bleak
and desperately recycled.

The first task involves gumballs, some of which cause contestants
to disappear. But everything unfolds too slowly. The first time a
contender vanishes in a puff of dry ice, it's deliciously
bracing; by the sixth, the producers are just offering you
another bottom-of-the-tin Quality Street on Boxing Day evening.
This rug-pulling surrealism needs a frantic pace to work, but for
the most part, this show wanders around sluggishly. Worse still,
it relies on the kind of reality competition alliance-building
that keeps everything earthbound. It would have worked better as
pure, crazy experience; a metaphorical sugar-addled
eight-year-old charging giddily around a candyfloss playground.
As it is, we get the nausea without the sugar rush; the cavities
without the crunch.

Eventually, everything just feels too familiar and prosaic. The
living quarters are nicer than the austere Squid Games bunks but
there isn't room for everyone. This means negotiation. Emotional
blackmail. Plenty of boilerplate competition show sequences in
which people sit around scowling mistrustfully at each other.
Contestant Ziad bellows "Daddy's home!" upon entering the
bedrooms, presumably prompting a shudder of regret and
self-loathing in everyone who voted to save him from gumball
oblivion. He also has thoughts on where this might be heading.
"Going into Wonka-vision 2.0, I want to be prepared," he solemnly
states. He doesn't appear to be joking. Lighten up, mate, you're
not on The Apprentice. Although actually, maybe you are. So much
of this stuff is basically the same fondant fancy in a slightly
different wrapper. The prize money raises the stakes but,
paradoxically, it often removes the fun.

And so it goes on. There's a TV show within a TV show. A challenge
so gut-churning that one contender threatens to regurgitate their
samples of the chocolate river. Another paints a target on their
back right from the start, but others (a grandfather and grandson;
a devoted father-and-daughter combo) are reality TV-cute.

But finally (much like the challenge version of Squid Game),
Wonka's Golden Ticket seems to point in the opposite moral
direction to the creation which spawned it. Don't expect Charlie
Buckets here - doing the right thing, resisting the everlasting
gobstopper. Instead, resign yourself to a factory full of Veruca
Salts: blithe, easily manipulated, wanting everything right now.
Watch them if you must - but brush your teeth afterwards, and
keep the Rennies handy.

Wonka's Golden Ticket is on Netflix.



<https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/sep/23/wonkas-golden-ticket-review-netflix>






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