Poster for the ENA short-drama directing survival show ‘Directors Arena’, premiering on the 15th. Photo ENA
Koreans are talented. They do not hesitate to show their flair in front of others, and they are earnest about competition. There is an audience that thrills to the personal stories and individual dramas that emerge from these contests. There is a reason variety formats, especially the survival format, keep arriving without pause.
When ‘Superstar K’ on Mnet became a hit in 2009, after the first period since ‘National Singing Contest’ when the whole country was stirred by music alone, programs known as survival or audition formats continued without letup. This subject matter was at times reworked into hip-hop, dance, and trot, and expanded beyond music to influencers, outdoor survival, and survival in romance, yet the premise that competition provides tension and fun held firm.
Now the subject matter is expanding in even more unexpected directions. Programs that have recently been planned, begun airing, and become talking points make that trend even clearer. Fortune readings, fake news, and even directing ability have become targets for survival competition.
Poster for the Wavve original variety show ‘Betting on Fact’. Photo Wavve
ENA will air a new-format survival program, ‘Directors Arena’, starting on the 15th. Contestants from diverse fields, including actors, creators, and artists, plan and direct short dramas themselves to compete. Within a limited running time, they showcase their own directing and storytelling abilities, presenting new visual grammar suited to the era of the short-form content boom.
Serving as panelists to help the competing directors are director Lee Byung-heon of the ten-million-viewer film ‘Extreme Job’, actor Cha Tae-hyun, ‘Asia Prince’ Jang Keun-suk, and comedian Jang Do-yeon. Announced contestants already include comedian Jo Chung-hyun, a ‘900,000-subscriber YouTuber’, actor Lee Joo-seung who has also been active on variety shows such as ‘I Live Alone’, and actor Lee Yoo-jin, who left an impression as a PD in ‘Be Melodramatic’.
Another notable show that has placed even the realm of directing on the survival stage is the Wavve original variety program ‘Betting on Fact’, which released its final episode by the 8th. Billing itself as a ‘reality news game show’, it takes ‘fake news’, one of the major social issues today, as its theme, and has participants live cut off from the outside world while they determine the truth of news items.
Poster for the Disney+ original variety show ‘Fate War 49’. Photo Walt Disney Company Korea
Featuring not only entertainers such as Jang Dong-min, Lee Yong-jin, and Jung Young-jin, but also scholars such as Jin Joong-kwon, as well as Ye-won, Park Sung-min, and Kang Jeon-ae, the program ultimately became a survival that evaluates abilities in psychological deduction and social inference, concluding with a victory by Jang Dong-min, who is specialized in this field. From missions that judged the veracity of individual news items to situations in which groups had to exercise collective intelligence, fact-checking units from established media, including Yonhap News and OhmyNews, participated to boost credibility, opening a new horizon for the survival genre.
Teaser image for the upcoming Netflix original variety show ‘Devils Plan 3’. Photo Netflix
Due to the nature of its subject matter, it became controversial for handling provocative incidents, but the very fact that the fortune tellers’ divination domain could be placed on a survival stage was assessed as providing an opening for many future survival programs to break taboos in terms of subject matter.
In the second half of the year, survival shows will return as deepened installments of existing hit series, including on Wavve a ‘Game of Blood’ spinoff and ‘Ideology Verification Zone: The Community Season 2’, and on Netflix ‘Devils Plan Season 3’. The world of survival, growing deeper and broader, looks poised to become the biggest topic in broadcasting this year.
