Netflix's Wonka's The Golden Ticket, a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-themed reality competition in which 12 golden ticket winners and their partners enter a chocolate factory in Australia to face "games, tests and temptations designed to test the competitors physically, mentally, and morally," debuted at number two on the English-language TV chart with 4.6M views in its opening week, according to Deadline. The prize: a lifetime supply of money.
Sixty-odd years after the book, the most profitable children's property in print has stopped selling candy and started selling itself. The Candy Factory now has an unscripted hit on Netflix, and it opened on par with season ten of Love Is Blind, which also pulled 4.6M in week one. A cartoon candy bar now outsits a show about actual people falling in love. Roald Dahl would be proud and mildly nauseated.
The scale is the part that gets worse the more you look. The factory set in Queensland is the largest set ever built in Australia, per TV Tonight, and Deadline concedes the show is "a more expensive show to produce." So they spent actual money on actual architecture to film actual strangers being tempted morally, and the show they got paid for is the tempting. The lifetime supply of money prize means the format is a job interview: suffer on camera, get paid in perpetuity, the factory keeps your footage.
Then the renewal math. "The numbers bode well for a renewal" of the Eureka-produced show, says Deadline. A two-part finale lands tomorrow, and the estate that made a children's novel about a con man now runs a renewable reality franchise with a factory, a gates sequence, and a brand. Charlie got the ticket. The Franchise got the factory.
YOUR TURN: What would be the temptation that makes you walk out of the factory?
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