The available reviews describe elaborate chocolate-factory sets undermined by sluggish competition and an unsettling artificial voice. Our provisional verdict is poor; this is an assessment of those accounts, not a viewing-based review.
On the evidence of the three reviews available, Wonka’s The Golden Ticket looks like a poor use of an elaborate chocolate factory. The premise ought to allow surprise, play and the pleasure of watching contestants work something out. Instead, the accounts describe sluggish pacing, humiliating challenges and an artificial voice attempting jokes. We would not recommend it on that evidence, though the praise for the factory itself deserves more than a dismissive mention.
The factory sets receive praise even in these hostile notices, and that matters. A competition benefits from a place that makes each task feel particular, rather than another interchangeable room with a clock. Elaborate surroundings can give contestants things to explore and the audience something to anticipate. The reported failure here is that the games drain the pleasure from those surroundings; the decoration cannot compensate for the experience of watching people compete.
We recoiled at the reported recreation of Gene Wilder’s voice, particularly the description of its attempts at humour. A comic line needs decisions about pace, emphasis and when to stop, and reproducing a recognisable voice cannot supply those decisions by itself. Reproducing a familiar sound also leaves the harder question of what the voice is being asked to say. According to the reviews, its humour makes an already unpleasant competition more unsettling.
Shawn Johnson, Bill Henry and Tatum Sheppard Filegar are among those taking part, and a successful competition would give us reasons to care about their choices. Humiliation is a poor replacement for that work. Embarrassment can be funny when the person enduring it has room to answer back, recover or make a joke of their own. The accounts instead emphasise challenges that demean the participants, leaving us doubtful that the programme offers much pleasure in their company.
The first series has nine episodes, which makes the complaint about sluggish pacing consequential. That is not an unreasonable length for a competition, provided each instalment develops the people or changes the demands placed on them. But elaborate tasks can become tedious when their chief purpose appears to be making participants uncomfortable. The reviews suggest that the trouble extends beyond a few slow passages. That calls the format into question more seriously than a complaint about an episode running long.
There is a limit to this judgement: it rests on three critical accounts, not on our having watched the series. Their agreement supports a strongly negative provisional verdict, though it cannot settle the quality of every challenge or episode. The sets are a recurring point in its favour, and viewers chiefly interested in elaborate environments may find something to inspect. For an evening’s entertainment, we would choose a competition that gives us a better reason to stay than the scenery.
