"Scare Pewdiepie" is the natural product of the Internet's obsession with reaction videos, of our willingness to waste hours of our lives watching other people be shocked, joyful, sad, or scared.
The show's conceit is that, for ten episodes, you get to watch YouTube celebrity Felix Kjellberg get scared by a variety of artificial haunted house setups intended to shock him or gross him out. Except most of these situations don't scare him so much as startle him.
They don't creep him out or frighten him, they merely provide a series of unending and uncreative jump scares. In four of the episodes -- the first, second, eighth, and tenth -- the producers don't even bother trying to scare him at all. The first and tenth episodes are essentially con man schemes, with the producers tricking him into believing he's either attending a doctor's visit or a wrap party before shocking him with weird characters, twists, or events, while the second and eighth episodes place Pewdiepie in an "Alien: Isolation"-esque environment and a mock-"Call of Duty" game, respectively. Points to the second episode are warranted, however, because although it isn't frightening for him, it's one of the only episodes that truly feels like he's living a video game.
If that was the goal of the entire show, then most of the other episodes fail miserably. The rest, particularly the third and fourth, feel too much like walking through a haunted house, which would be entertaining if anything was intended to scare the audience.
Watching Felix traverse these dull, repetitive horror mazes on his own would be torturously boring were it not for the infrequent guest star. It's no coincidence that the show's most fun, most entertaining, and most effective episodes are episode 2, "We're Not Alone," featuring Markiplier, and episode 6, "The Ultimate Hang," featuring Arin from Gamegrumps and Matpat from The Game Theorists. (Yes, I know I said episode 2 wasn't scary, but it was more entertaining than the scary ones.)
Felix wandering around alone in these episodes is like watching Lou Costello aimlessly stroll through an Abbott and Costello movie without Abbott. Pewdiepie is naturally goofy and silly, but he's also terrible at video games, and having someone around to call him out on his s--- feels essential to the show's structure. When a season 2 gets made, I would only tune in if there was a guest star in every episode because without that banter, it really is just one 20-minute reaction video after another, with very little innovation or attempts at comedy.
I could go on and complain about the repetitive episode structure, the bad acting, the lame visual effects, or the lack of consequences for Pewdiepie's constant f---uppery. But you know if you want to watch this show. It's called "Scare Pewdiepie." If you don't already like him as an entertainer, then there's nothing here for you.
This was made exclusively for Pewdiepie fans, and its second and sixth episodes are genuinely excellent. One just wishes they put more thought and care into the production, and didn't rely so much on the title. Because as Felix himself says in the fourth episode, it's not really "Scare Pewdiepie" as much as it's "Mindfuck Pewdiepie," and when your namesake star starts smelling the bulls---, you know something's gone wrong.
