I have never seen the original series of the Mole but I'm familiar with the format. I really enjoyed binging this over the last few days. The challenges they had to do were pretty campy but pretty charming. A lot of the people on the cast were pretty annoying I'm not gonna lie, it kinda made me root against them.
Production:
I really enjoyed the production value of the show. I think the kinds of narrative arcs prod pulled off was well edited. The challenges created a lot of The Circle type moments but without them being directly able to vote each other out it was interesting to see how the players approached the situations. Scenically speaking there were tons of drone shots of the regions in Australia that they went to which I liked for transitions. I just felt like the challenges they were doing wasn't for enough of a cash reward. Some of the objectives they had to complete during missions only got them 1000$ which felt pretty cheap. Prod makes it pretty plausible that anybody can be the Mole and presents all the information they give in a way that you can perceive it as confirming somebody as the mole or as a player depending on however you want to perceive it. IE somebody throws a challenge? thats what the mole would do. Or thats what a player would do to make people think they are the mole. Would the mole want you to think they are the mole or would the mole be blending in? You can tie yourself in knots and the players absolutely did which brings me to the next point.
Gameplay:
Atrocious. Just so so so bad. Some of them would apply strategy and it would be effective on deceiving others in the cast. But they fell in love so quickly with being assholes to each other and went so lone wolf. I think almost nobody communicated about their quiz answers based on what was shown. I felt so disappointed in the way the players would approach accusations they felt like they were being so fake. So many times they would show a player in confessionals bragging about how good they thought they were doing, and then multiple confessionals of others explaining that they were onto their strategy and ruling them out as the mole. It was a messy shit show I was laughing throughout as they just burned money over and over. They would look those few thousand dollars in the eyes and say fuck yall.
Conclusions:
It was so fun to watch. I hope they do a second season and bigger prizes, it would make the marketing so easy just "The stakes are higher! and the mind games are STRONGER!" just be cliche netflix that's literally your thing.
If you haven't seen it give it a watch. Or read the spoiler filled version of the review I'm going to do after this and just flame the cast. I had to restrain so hard for this one.
