Make Believe Mailer 22: Space Race (Girls Planet 999 Episodes 1 — 5)
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Some spoilers ahead. For recaps, read Allen Huang’s series over at Asian Junkie.
Girls Planet 999 is just the latest installment in South Korean music TV station Mnet’s Produce series with glow-in-the-dark stars plastered over it. It goes beyond the basic concept, a premise powering a decade-plus of reality competition shows — get a bunch of aspiring performers, have them compete to debut in a group proper — into mirroring the exact structure of Produce. Evaluations, awkward hellos, initial hurdles, challenges being overcome, and then eliminations, with a sprinkling of product placement throughout. All towards the goal of the top nine contestants debuting in a new K-pop group.
That’s not surprising. Produce in its four domestic editions were massive hits, spawning popular groups and beloved personalities, always presented as something viewers (dubbed “national producers”) were determining with their votes. The format traveled to China and Japan, and stood as the peak for this genre of reality entertainment in the K-pop industry.
Then it crashed and burned when fans figured out Mnet rigged the results, something the company soon admitted to. Series over, dreams crushed, democracy a sham.
Still, the idea has juice, so Mnet — hated before any vote-manipulation scandals and now maintaining true K-pop bastard status — has brought it back, to the point of near replication. What’s surprising is how much Produce has come up in the first five episodes of Girls Planet. I assumed the producers would do all they could to make viewers forget about a show that landed people in jail. Nope. Judges mention it. Contestants reflect fondly on former iterations. They even show clips from prior editions. It feels like Mnet winking at the camera — “Don’t worry, we know what you actually wanted, we gotcha” before putting an astronaut helmet on their head.
Though Korean viewers have, up until this point, mostly not tuned in at the same numbers as any installment of Produce. Could change, but seems like domestic audiences hold longer grudges (or aren’t fans of pain).
The beats come from the Produce series at large, but Girls Planet most closely orbits the third season, Produce 48. That’s the one where Mnet brought in Japan’s AKB48 into the mix to create a “global girl group.” Girls Planet asks…can China be part of this too?
Yet the tone has changed. Among the remarkable details of Produce 48 when viewed in 2021 was Mnet acknowledging other Asian pop industries beyond the world-conquering one within their borders. While the show’s decision to use AKB48 as representatives of all J-pop as a cheap way to build a “look, we can overcome cultural differences to make a pop group!” ultimately just made the group look largely clueless in comparison to the home team, it still admitted that other pop industries were flourishing in their own ways on the continent. K-pop wasn’t the center of Asia.
Girls Planet stresses from episode one that K-pop is the center. The Japanese and Chinese participants aren’t coming as exchange students taking notes on a whole new way of life, but as existing fans. They gush over BLACKPINK, ITZY, and TWICE, often in Korean. It’s not simply about coolness, but about opportunity, because Mnet is right. Korea stands as Asia’s contemporary musical powerhouse, and the last few years (including Japanese contestants post Produce 48) have underlined that it’s not just a way to become a star in your home region, but beyond.
So the show, five episodes in, has enjoyed and suffered from a relatively frictionless atmosphere. The Japanese participants — hailing not from the traditional J-pop constraints of AKB but from a jumble of labels and agencies closer to slick dance-pop than colorful idoldom — are, gasp!, really good (cue Mnet’s footage of Produce 48). Initially, China is presented as the AKB of the season during the early evaluations…but this road is largely abandoned by focusing on all the top-level talent. Everyone is ultimately a pretty fantastic performer (shout-out the chaos twins for keeping the studio on edge, though), with judge disappointment mostly stemming from “I expected even more.”
I, high off of a recent re-watch of Produce 481, expected even more of a mess owing to the triangle of bad vibes shared between the countries central to Girls Planet. Save for some classic language gaps shared between contestants though, the show rarely spends much time exploring differences. Everyone, after all, is united by K-pop. The most novel development in this iteration of Mnet’s flagship competition show was the use of “cells,” wherein a Japanese, Chinese and Korean trainee were put into a group together2. They’d have to advance together, and bond to do so. The best parts of the show’s first few episodes were literally just watching these cells hang out in their dorm — or seeing them take part in YouTube-exclusive games.
Meet Yurina Kawaguchi, your current #1 rank on Girls Planet 999. Also, meet the NHK language-learning experience.
The first five episodes of this show offers neither a paradigm shift in “reality” talent competition nor a total shitshow. They’ve felt familiar, reassuring and at times stuck in a loop.3 The space theme is pure distraction that even Mnet can barely muster up excitement over (and, by the end of one episode, mutates into a “save the planet” line of messaging). Girls Planet 999 IS Produce, with all the sights (non-descript training area) and sounds (slowed-down theme song conveying pathos) present. Mnet just tightened the screws a bit so the whole endeavor won’t collapse in on itself…they think, for now, fingers crossed.
As relatively calm as this initial run of episodes has seemed, the show is now entering the choppier portion of Mnet reality programming. Five eps in, and a lot of girls have been cut, meaning Girls Planet now turns more to individual personalities. Lots could still go haywire — the threat of real world politics leaking in is always present — but Mnet’s ironing out of the Produce approach makes that unlikely. There’s no clashing fan cultures set up to disrupt Mnet’s flow and transform weekly vote reveals into app-based tug-of-wars, as was the case with the never-stable results of Produce 48. Here, everything is filtered through K-pop, and conflict…between contestants, and between online communities…seems less intense than in the past.
Right now, based off episode five’s top nine ranking, the debuting pop group from this show would be perfectly balanced — three Korean, three Japanese and three Chinese contestants. For a show emphasizing the K-pop industry’s central place in Asia, that' would be as perfect an end result they could hope for — especially given the uncertain state of idol pop in China right now. That’s the story Girls Planet 999 would love to tell.
And yet…this is still Mnet, and this is still just a new edition of Produce once you get the stardust out of your eyes. We’ve seen how this has gone before…and maybe that’s all the tension one needs moving forward.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
Follow the Best of 2021 Spotify Playlist Here!
New episodes of POD48, still to come! We are busy people, but it’s all recorded!
Speaking of smoothed-over tension, Mnet has wisely installed a variety of safety mechanisms to keep the show from descending into chaos. The cells kept nation-centric voting in check, while the show has also put slightly less emphasis on the public vote (at least in comparison to Produce). They even introduced “planet passes,” which just allowed the judges to pick three contestants to survive episode five’s first elimination regardless of how their cell fared.
Though, disclaimer, watching all of Produce 48 again in the last couple of months didn’t help on this front either. Those mission training sequences turn real endurance-like after you’ve practically watched one every week for four months.