“People of the world, hold onto your hats, for the greatest competition on Earth is about to begin,” Gene Wilder says in the opening minutes of Netflix’s new reality series, Wonka’s The Golden Ticket.
Except it’s not actually Gene Wilder. He’s been dead for a decade.
“The voice of Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka has been recreated with the consent of Mr. Wilder’s estate,” on-screen text tells us, as if a family greedily leeching every penny they can get from a dead man is something that audiences will be totally fine with.
Wonka’s The Golden Ticket features 24 competitors, including 12 golden ticket winners and their 12 companions—best friends, father/daughters, brothers, grandpa and grandson, etc. The game’s prize is “a lifetime supply of money,” which of course isn’t really true. It’s a six-figure salary for 30 years, which is “about three million dollars,” according to Robot Wonka, because apparently AI can’t do simple math. It’s vague.
Only one person actually wins, which makes the companions utterly useless and makes you wonder why they’re there at all, besides easily manufactured drama.
The narration is constant, and Robot Wonka deadpans every line delivery, because that’s all the AI voice is capable of doing. Moments of excitement sound exhausted. Moments of reflection sound lifeless. It’s an embarrassing and easily avoidable drag that sucks the life out of the proceedings at every opportunity. If they wanted to desperately claw at the nostalgia craze, they could have at least hired an actor to do a voice similar to Wilder’s instead of this slop. The 1971 movie was overflowing with personality—Wonka’s The Golden Ticket has none.
Wonka doesn’t just rely on the miserable failure that is an AI narrator. It also features appearances from “hosts” Nick Cannon, Howie Mandel, and Wayne Brady. They each read their lines like they’re being held at gunpoint, and they might be, since they just appear on screens instead of on the actual set. Would it have been so much trouble to hire anyone to appear in person?
We also get random appearances from Oompa Loompas, including one (Rusty Goffe) from the ‘71 film. They come in all shapes and sizes now for some reason, and one of them doesn’t even have a green wig, presumably because they spent so much budget on… an AI host? They sing just like they do in the film, except the songs lack any lyrical ingenuity and barely rhyme, with lyrics like “epic fail,” a term nobody has used in a solid decade.
All of this adds up to the fakest, ugliest reality show on television. The chocolate fountain looks like it was rendered in Microsoft Paint. There’s an allegedly dramatic moment in the first episode where some teammates are stuck in “gumballs,” which appear in a giant gumball machine. But it’s unbelievably obvious, thanks to appalling effects, that nobody is actually stuck in anything, killing any potential dramatics before they have a chance to start.
OK, so the show looks atrocious, but surely the actual competition element is thrilling? It’s based on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, after all. Nope! Wonka’s Golden Ticket’s challenges include pulse-pounding games like finding coins and spinning around in place. Wow!
This competition show is overly focused on the social element and yet shockingly low on actual activity. The social element is woefully underbaked, to the point where there are hardly any distinguishable characters. People talk about forging alliances, only to break them in typical reality TV fashion. There are so many people involved that we never spend enough time with anyone for them to matter. Given that the show tries so hard to push the social game, it’s baffling that it spends so little time developing the people at the heart of it. It doesn’t help the people with the most potential get eliminated early.
Netflix gets a lot of complaints for being filled with content nobody wants. To its credit, the streamer has some truly wonderful shows and movies. But Wonka’s Golden Ticket feels less like a TV show and much more like hollow, lifeless, and preposterously nasty-looking content that desperately mines nostalgia to make you forget how bad it is.
But in a show that’s this shoddily put together, it would take a lot more than pure imagination to forget.
