The Box Review: Chaos Comes Without Instructions

Confusion is the central production value of The Box. Ten celebrities are loaded into enormous yellow containers, transported somewhere they cannot see, then released with minimal guidance and expected to work out what the programme wants from them. Gary Lineker watches from a distance, calmly explaining that the contestants have no idea where they are or what they should be doing. The statement doubles as an accidental diagnosis of the format.

This six-part ITV adaptation of a Norwegian show gathers a familiar British reality-TV assortment: Joey Essex, former Commons speaker John Bercow, JLS singer JB Gill, The Chase star Jenny Ryan, Graeme Souness, Ranvir Singh, Sara Davies and content creator Danny Aarons among them. The casting gives the series an immediate ecosystem of established television identities. Essex panics. Bercow narrates his bewilderment with parliamentary grandeur. Souness treats physical tasks with competitive seriousness.

The problem is that The Box repeatedly mistakes uncertainty for an entertainment engine. Television can make confusion funny, tense or revealing. Here it often leaves everyone waiting for the format to arrive.

A Game Show Searching for Its Game

Those giant yellow containers are the programme’s most marketable visual and its least necessary device. Their practical job is simply to hide each destination from the contestants before release. A blindfold could achieve the same thing, but a blindfold would deny ITV the image of Essex exploding from his box in alarm or Aarons flailing inside his metal enclosure while complaining that he “can’t hear the skies.”

Those moments show what the programme understands about contemporary reality television. The format may be incoherent, but the clip must travel. Once the doors open, the challenges rarely justify the elaborate setup. Essex smashes wooden crates while searching for hexagonal pieces.

Souness helps Ranvir Singh cross water. Sara Davies tackles an egg-and-spoon-style task. Contestants find shapes, place them into corresponding holes and attempt activities under vague time pressure. Teams are eventually formed, everyone returns to a specially constructed house, and one celebrity leaves at the end of the episode.

What connects these stages remains strangely difficult to grasp. There is no significant prize to sharpen the competition, and challenge performance does little to create an intelligible dramatic hierarchy. Success happens, elimination happens, yet the causal link between them feels weak.

That matters because reality competition television depends on viewers understanding why an action counts. The Traitors turns simple missions into fuel for alliances and suspicion. Taskmaster gives absurd instructions such precise boundaries that contestants reveal themselves through the ways they misread them. The Box strips away so much structure that personality has to do the work rules normally perform.

Randomness Without Rhythm

The second episode’s sing-off shows how strange this approach can become. John Bercow ends up performing Pink’s “So What” before a tent full of holidaymakers who loudly encourage him to take off his shirt. Bercow obliges the surrounding chaos with the intensity of a man chairing an especially unruly Commons session, eventually deploying the inevitable “Order!” while the spectacle grows increasingly unmoored. It is undeniably memorable television. It is also memorable largely because Bercow commits to the situation with startling enthusiasm.

That distinction exposes the weakness in the programme’s comic construction. Strong entertainment formats create conditions that reliably produce funny behaviour. Here, producers appear to place celebrities inside odd circumstances and hope their pre-existing personas will generate the necessary footage. Sometimes they do. Essex’s nervous energy works instantly against the solemnity of his metal box. Bercow’s ceremonial diction becomes absurd when attached to talent-show humiliation. Aarons’ frantic physicality gives an empty container an unexpected comic pulse.

Yet randomness has no internal rhythm. A strange task followed by another strange task can flatten into routine surprisingly quickly. Without clear escalation, the show’s bedlam becomes less surprising every time it tries to surprise everyone.

There is an industry logic behind the design. British entertainment television increasingly relies on recognisable personalities placed inside modular formats that can create short, shareable moments. The Box seems almost engineered around that economy. The episode may feel shapeless, but the isolated clip of Bercow singing Pink has a life of its own.

Lineker Watches the Format Wobble

Gary Lineker is probably the person least endangered by any of this. He brings the same controlled ease that defined decades of football broadcasting, standing apart from the action with binoculars, mild amusement and the expression of someone who knows he will never be asked to crawl through the water.

His presence carries extra weight after his departure from Match of the Day. ITV has effectively positioned The Box as part of Lineker’s transition from sports institution to broader entertainment figure. Yet the programme gives him remarkably little material with which to build a new screen identity. He observes, chuckles and explains rules that remain hazy even after explanation.

That steadiness does help. A louder host might turn the show’s confusion into outright noise. Lineker instead provides a fixed point while Essex, Bercow and the others ricochet through challenges of uncertain importance.

It is revealing that the host’s main function becomes reassurance rather than orchestration. The Box sells itself on removing information from its contestants, then withholds enough structure from the audience that everyone ends up sharing the same condition. The celebrities are bewildered because the rules demand it. The viewers are bewildered because the rules barely seem to exist.

The Box premiered on Amazon Prime Video in September 2026. The suspenseful crime thriller follows an elite team of investigators locked inside a high-security interrogation facility racing against time to extract a confession before a catastrophic event unfolds.

Full Credits

• Title: The Box

• Distributor: Amazon Prime Video

• Release date: September 2026

• Rating: TV-MA

• Running time: 45 minutes

• Director: Steve Shill, Dani Deprez

• Writers: Eric Forestier, Gaëlle Bellan

• Producers and Executive Producers: Marc Herpoux, Antonin Martin-Hilbert

• Cast: Michelle Fairley, Marc Zinga, Laura Sepul, Lubna Azabal, Hélène Theunissen, Kevin Janssens, Angelo Bison, Pieter Genard

• Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Christophe Nuyens

• Editors: Ewin Ryckaert

• Composer: Hannes De Maeyer