Why the English in Squid Game Is So Bad
and why I think the awful dialogue made the series better
I was scrolling through Netflix when the title came up: Squid Game.
Some of my friends were already raving about it in our group chat, and my sisters had been asking me if I had watched it yet. Like many others, I was curious about this Korean series which had suddenly become an international sensation — it’s not often that a non-English series becomes so popular, and I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride to see an Asian show break those barriers.
I won’t share any real spoilers, but if you’ve seen Squid Game you know that the VIPs, or the English-speaking characters, have very poor dialogue. Not only is the writing bad, but the acting is quite cartoonish — a jarring change for a show that up until that point was incredibly nuanced in word choice, well-written, and acted to such a high caliber. I found myself cringing,
“Oh my god, why is the English so bad?”
I tried to think of many excuses for the writing and production team, but failed to find something that satisfied this drop in quality. They had an incredibly high budget so there was no reason they couldn’t hire English-native writers or better actors, and even if they didn’t, the show’s writer-director had earned an MFA…
