The game play from the contestants in Wonka’s The Golden Ticket isn’t anything special, but the set design, and the challenges that the contestants will undertake, will keep us watching.

For the most part, this show wanders around sluggishly. Worse still, it relies on the kind of reality competition alliance-building that keeps everything earthbound.

The effect [Gene Wilder's AI voice] is terrible, a lifeless voice not so much from beyond the grave as buried in it. .... Contestants’ backstories are provided to make you care for some; others show themselves to be less sympathetic. .... For those who are tired of such narratives, the appeal of the show will be in its interpretive stagecraft, which is impressive and clever.

The AI Wilder isn’t the only instance of the contemporary and the retro colliding in unpleasantly discordant ways. Challenges are introduced with “Fallout”-style, ‘50s-esque videos that are aesthetically out of place. .... The device [AI Wilder] grows especially chilling when tasked with delivering jokes, or rather, humor-scented snippets of dialogue that lack a human’s je ne sais quoi.

Makes you wonder whether the executives who bought the rights to the Dahl catalogue in 2021 for an estimated £500m have read the books. .... Gene Wilder appears only as a creepy AI-generated voice. .... The actual challenges in Wonka’s The Golden Ticket are largely anodyne.

Studios snatching up popular IP to bait viewers is nothing new, and it's not even always a bad idea. But butchering it beyond recognition by candy-coating a stale center of a bad show in some nostalgic imagery just makes it rotten.

An unholy combination of "Big Brother," "The Amazing Race," "Squid Game" and a micro-dosed fever dream. And as if that weren't bad enough, the streamer has made this boondoggle worse by using an AI-recreation of the voice of one of the greatest actors of a generation, back from the dead and reduced to a soulless, faceless reality TV host. .... A travesty of a show even before Wilder's voice shows up.