Survival Shows

my beloathed

Some days, survival shows feel like a necessary evil in the K-pop world.

They’ve given us so many amazing groups:

• KARA

• SEVENTEEN

• TWICE

• I.O.I

• MOMOLAND

• fromis_9

• STRAY KIDS

• iz*one

• Kep1er

• i could keep going probably

  But they’re also kind of the meanest thing I’ve ever learned about.

There’s, in my head, 3 kinds of Survival Shows:

1. “We are creating a legitimate group” Shows

   1. eg: Sixteen created Twice, who have been performing for 10 years

2. Project Shows

   1. eg: Produce 48 created Iz*One, which performed for 2 years and then disbanded

3. Bragging Rights Shows

   1. eg: Road to Kingdom/Kingdom Legendary War (yes we’re gonna talk about KLW again) where the participants were all established groups

“We are creating a legitimate group” Shows:

These shows are produced by the company. We’ll keep using Sixteen as our example.

Sixteen’s goal was to create a girl group for JYP Entertainment, so it was produced by JYP Entertainment and all contestants were being managed by JYP Entertainment. easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Project Shows

Unlike their “legitimate” brethren discussed above, project shows are put on by a television broadcasting company who may share the production with a record company. The most common broadcasting company I have seen is Mnet (Music Network, things are starting to make sense).

Mnet is responsible for such hit shows as the Produce series, Finding Momoland, the Queen/Kingdom series (which we’ll get into later), the I-LAND series, the Girls/Boys Planet series and groups like I.O.I, IZ*ONE, Kep1er, and Zerobaseone.

Mnet Survival Shows now are to South Korea what American Idol was to the US in the Great Recession. A valid way to make it into the music industry at the cost of your very soul.

But because the show is not put on by one record company, trainees from any company can try and enter. This means while your final group has a contract under the broadcast company’s record label, the individual idols have their own contract with the company who trained them. difficult difficult lemon difficult.

So, when the contract from the show is up, negotiations get messy and 9 times out 10 the group will disband.

Well, more like 99 times out of 100, the only group I’ve heard of continuing past their contract expiration is Kep1er and they lost two members (from the same original training company).

Bragging Rights Shows

These are fun.

I mean, if you like watching a group you have already come to like be put through The Horrors¹ with the only other teenager/young adults who understand what they have already sacrificed to become K-pop idols.

Then yeah, fun.

Shows like the Queen/Kingdom franchise change a little every time, but at their core they are about securing more promotion for your group. And promotion that your company doesn’t have to pay for so double win.

With a few notable exceptions², Bragging Rights Shows don’t usually include an elimination mechanism in the show. However many groups start the show will be the number of groups that end the show.

Commonalities

Voting: Remember when I talked about award shows and showed the tables of how they weight opinions and choose winners and how batshit confusing it was.

Yeah, they do that here too.

I watched all of Kingdom: Legendary War and would recommend it as an entertaining show. I can not tell you how they knew who won.

Apparently, there is a total number of points that are distributed each round and the ranking of how many points a group gets is based on:

• 25% Self-evaluation

• 25% Experts’ voting

• 40% Global voting

• 10% Performance video view count

But, there are extra points up for grabs for the team that does the best? maybe. unclear.

That self-evaluation segment is important to note, because it is very common in survival shows of all types.

Contestants are asked to rank each others performances, often in real time, with the knowledge that if someone does better than them, they may never debut. As you might expect, this does not result in honest evaluations.

Activities: These shows are usually, at most, 10 episodes long. And if you watch enough Korean reality shows, you’ll start to get used to one “day” of activities taking up 2 episodes. Or like one episode having 2-3 “days” of activities.

Korean producers cut the activities in really interesting places.

So, while there may be 10 episodes, the groups may only do, like, 5 activities.

Almost perfect case in point, in Kingdom: Legendary War, there were 10 episodes but 5 rounds of performances (and one round of a field day)((if you watch no other episode of KLW watch episode 6)):

• episode 1 - round 1

• episode 2 - round 2

• episode 3 - round 2

• episode 4 - round 3

• episode 5 - round 3

• episode 6 - Field Day, woo

• episode 7 - round 4

• episode 8 - round 4

• episode 9 - round 4

• episode 10 - round 5 (twice as long as the other episodes)

Thing that is weird to me: More than their western counterparts, survival shows are rigged. Like, so much so they’ve gone to court about it.

That and they bring back people just because they feel like people voted poorly.

Or eliminate people and bring them back for the drama of it all.

I’m under no illusions that American reality shows aren’t rigged. They’re rigged, that’s why they’re entertaining tv. But at least they don’t just wave it in our faces like that. At least try to lie to me.

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All in all, if you like K-pop and watching Lord of the Flies play out in real time, you should check out survival shows. But maybe for your mental health, just ones that are done already. So you can look up who not to get attached to.

1. and the little horrorcitos tambien.

2. Road to Kingdom >.>