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? Continue reading...