Wonka’s The Golden Ticket premieres September 23 on Netflix.
By Elazar Abrahams
Since Netflix acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company, it has occasionally shown what a thoughtful use of that catalog can look like. Wes Anderson’s wonderful short films were lovingly crafted little objects, and it is not hard to imagine other possibilities: perhaps a more expansive take on Matilda, a live-action James and the Giant Peach, or even a long-overdue adaptation of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.
Instead, Netflix has given us Wonka’s The Golden Ticket, a reality competition series that feels like absolute slop. It borrows the imagery, characters, and emotional pull of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, then uses them to prop up a barely coherent game show with no real stakes, no clear rules, and almost nobody worth rooting for.
The premise is simple enough. Twelve Golden Ticket winners and their chosen partners enter a recreation of Wonka’s factory and compete in physical, mental, and moral challenges for a major prize. But the show rushes through its setup so quickly that it feels less like a competition being introduced than a pile of footage being shoved onto your Netflix home page. Contestants are shown discovering Golden Tickets in Wonka bars, as though this was a real public event we were all supposed to have heard about, and within what feels like four minutes, they are already inside the factory.
Good reality television makes you understand who the contestants are, what they want, and why the competition matters to them. It gives you personalities to root for, alliances to track, and rivalries that grow naturally. Wonka’s The Golden Ticket barely seems interested in any of that. The contestants are simply there, moving from one challenge to the next before we have any reason to care whether they succeed or leave.
The competition itself is equally vague. There is little explanation of how the rounds work, when eliminations happen, or what shape the season will take. Instead, episodes often cut off in the middle of a challenge, not because the cliffhanger is particularly exciting, but because Netflix wants you to keep clicking through what becomes a long stretch of empty, brand-approved nonsense.
The show’s most uncomfortable decision is its use of an AI recreation of Gene Wilder’s voice as Willy Wonka. A card notes that it was done with the permission of Wilder’s estate, which may settle the legal question but does not settle the artistic one. Wilder’s Wonka is one of the most beloved performances in movie history, and hearing that familiar voice digitally reproduced to narrate a competition show feels less like a tribute than a cynical attempt to manufacture content.
It is especially shameful because the factory itself looks great. The chocolate river, the Mike Teavee room, the blueberry-colored furniture, and the Oompa Loompas all show real production value and affection for the 1971 film’s iconography. There are flashes of a genuinely impressive Wonka world here. But it is all in service of a reality show that has nothing meaningful to do with it.
Wonka’s The Golden Ticket is glossy, expensive, and full of recognizable imagery. It is also dismal, disposable, and completely hollow. There is no pure imagination to be found here.
I give Wonka’s The Golden Ticket a D+.
