After I watched that mess of a show called Unpretty Rapstar 2 (for Wonder Girls' Yubin), I told myself never to watch an Mnet reality show again. And when the teasers and first performance of Pick Me aired, I was still balking. Until they announced that Kahi was going to be on the show as a dance trainer. So I ended up watching it, not knowing how sucked into the show I would eventually become.
The whole premise of the show was that 11 girls were going to be picked from 101 trainees from various entertainment agencies in Korea via online voting to form a girl group that would be active for a year, after which they would go back to their respective agencies to either debut in another girl group or continue training. ONE HUNDRED AND ONE GIRLS. Sounds crazy right. With a short run of 11 episodes, there simply wasn't enough time to adequately show 101 girls, so about half of them never received proper screentime, which was a pity.
The show started with company evaluations, where the girls from the same company would put on a performance and were sorted into groups with ranks A, B, C, D and F, depending on their skills, by the trainers. The trainers they got were actually really legit, which is surprising for Mnet. The dance trainers were Kahi and Bae Yoon Jung, who has choreographed some of the most iconic dances in Kpop such as Kara's butt dance and EXID's pelvic dance for Up & Down among others. Vocal trainers were Jea from Brown Eyed Girls and Kim Sung Eun who is a vocal trainer for groups like BTS and Twice, while the rap trainer was Cheetah. Oh, and the show was hosted by 'Asia's Prince' Jang Geun Suk haha.
For the company evalutions, there were some really good performances, like Jellyfish's Something New, and some really bad ones like Yoon Seohyeung's cover of IU's Good Day and Kim Sohye's cover of DIA's Somehow. (Coincidentally, 2 former DIA members were on the show too.) Kim Sohye was a very controversial girl throughout the whole show because she's from an acting agency, trained in acting, and somehow ended up on a show for dancing and singing. She had zero skills, but due to the huge screentime she got, managed to land herself in the final group.
After this preliminary sorting, they had to learn a new song and dance, the legendary Pick Me, and be evaluated via a video performance in 3 days! This was the first real test of their abilities since they had a long time to practise for their first performance. We also got a glimpse of Bae YoonJung (the other dance trainer)'s legendary fierceness lol.
After this video test, the girls were re-sorted into groups, and this was to be the final grouping for their Pick Me performance on MCountdown. The center for the performance, Choi Yoo Jung, was initially in D and managed to move up the ranks because of her awesome video test. And she ended up being a really amazing performer and ended up in the final group :)
Their second mission was a debut song mission, where each girl in the A team had to choose debut songs from 10 girl groups and their teammates and 2 teams would battle it out with the same song. Girls from the winning team would receive a benefit of 1000 votes (which ended up being pretty useless because the show was massively popular and votes were in the tens of thousands or more.)
There was one group, created by Ki Heehyun of MBK (one of the former DIA members), that had almost all the already famous trainees (Heo Chanmi had previously debuted, Jeon Somi was in Sixteen, Chaeyeon was another DIA member) and were nicknamed the Avengers. But their performance was marred by Chanmi cracking during her high note, while the rival team had an amazing main vocal in Yoo Yeonjung who pulled them off flawlessly. This situation was quite sad because Chanmi got heavily maliciously edited by Mnet, and her votes dropped drastically. The good side though, was that Yeon Jung managed to showcase her talent and eventually landed a place in the final group.
This was also the episode that introduced me to my eventual favourite, Stone Buddha Im Nayoung!!! That Stone Nayoung nickname will stick with her forever haha.
Honestly, I didn't actually like her that much during this clip. I thought she looked scary haha. But somewhere between her performance for this mission and the next, she won me over. For this debut song mission, she covered Ah by After School. She's from Pledis, so she probably learned the song before. But she did really really well in the performance and ended up overall 3rd for the live voting! She was eventually 10th overall and thus earned a place in the final group, which is probably the only reason why I'm following I.O.I haha.
Another noteworthy performance was Irony. Both groups were actually super good, but the 1st group had Kim Sejeong from Jellyfish, whose voice and stage presence for this performance were PERFECT. She ended up being no.1 for this round, and the eventual no.2 for the whole show.
One more performance I want to talk about is Siyeon of Pledis doing APink's I Don't Know. She actually started training at a really young age and I recognised her because she used to cameo in After School MVs and stages. She grew into such a pretty lady! She's actually a rapper, but ended up being the main vocal for the song because the original main vocal they chose couldn't reach the insane high notes. And wow Siyeon really slayed it. Unfortunately, her popularity never really took off plus there were a lot of Pledis trainees so she didn't make the top 22.
After this second mission, the 1st eliminations came where the 97 girls (4 left due to other reasons) were cut to 65 girls. Almost half gone! But truthfully the ones that were eliminated hardly received screentime, which was pretty unfair to them but also the rule of the game where you won't get screentime if you don't stand out.
The number 1 of this elimination was Kim Sejeong was Jellyfish. I really teared up when she was announced as no.1. She was completely unknown before this, and managed to build a huge fanbase in just 3 episodes, AND had the talent to back up that popularity.
The third mission was a position evaluation, where the girls had to choose whether they wanted to do dance, vocal or rap, as well as the song. One winner would be selected from each category, and they would receive a benefit of 150000 votes. But the really stupid thing was that every song under each category had different number of people, and naturally the groups with fewer members would benefit from simple calculations. So yeah, Mnet being shady and stupid again.
Firstly, the vocal performances. There was Monster by Big Bang, Me Gustas Tu by GFriend, Zion.T's Yanghwa Bridge, John Park and Huh Gak's My Best and EXO's Call Me Baby.
My personal favourite overall performances were Monster and Call Me Baby, but individually, Sejeong in Yanghwa Bridge really got to me. She ended up winning no.1, partly due to her massive popularity by then. Some say Kang Sira who did My Best deserved it more than her, but I thought it was a completely deserving win.
For the rap performance, there was Turtle Boat from Show Me The Money, iKon's Rhythm Ta and Verbal Jint's You Look Good. Kim HyeongEun won with You Look Good, and this was very deserved too. People were crying because of the lyrics!
And finally, the dance performances. They were all AMAZING and really overshadowed the other 2 categories imo.
The standout was Bang Bang, which even appeared on Jessie J's facebook. Kim Chungha choreographed most of this and finally got the attention she deserved, which eventually got her a place in the group! However, she only got 4th within her group for this, even though I think she should have won not only within her group but for the whole dance category.
Growl was also really really good. It was unfortunate that these girls were all in lower ranks and only the leader, Park Soyeon, who had a higher rank, managed to escape the 2nd eliminations. (Because the vocal performances aired a week earlier compared to the rap and dance performances, and voting closed immediately after this episode, so their performances didn't help to win online voters at all.)
I also really really loved Say My Name. My fave Nayoung choreographed this, but she ended up 2nd within the group behind Mina, who also won the overall category.
This is Nayoung's individual cam for this performance. Each girl had an individual cam for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th missions.
2nd eliminations for the top 35! My girlie broke into the top 11! This was also the round that several noteworthy trainees were eliminated and when I really felt its impact since previously I didn't know most of those who were eliminated. In particular, Kang Siwon was 36th :((((( She was an individual trainee too, meaning she had no company to go back too. But thankfully, she managed to get signed to a company after the show. And this is why I love the whole concept of the show despite some messy execution here and there. It really helped individual trainees like her and a few others get signed and be closer to their dreams.
The 4th mission was a concept evaluation. They were gifted 5 songs of different genres by various noteworthy kpop producers, and the girls could choose which song they wanted to perform. The winning team would win 150000 votes, so about 22000 additional votes per girl. This was when they changed the online voting from 11 girls to 1 girl per vote, so 22000 was extremely significant. There was some messy stuff regarding how to kick members out so that each song would only have 7 girls, but that was only to add drama.
They once again had to perform in front of a live audience, and one performance in particular stole the show. In The Same Place, composed by B1A4's Jinyoung, of the girlish pop genre. This was AMAZING. There was simply no fight. From the song, choreography and stage effects, this was a clear winner and thankfully they did win, because other songs had more popular members.
The other songs were Fingertips (girl crush genre...whatever the hell that is lol), Don't Matter (Hip Hop), Yum Yum (Trap Pop) and 24 Hours (EDM). I personally liked Fingertips and Don't Matter a lot too but their performances weren't as memorable, and 24 Hours is a great jam.
3rd eliminations, to the top 22! Because of the benefit received, members of the In The Same Place team that won benefits all climbed up the ranks drastically, and one member managing to survive the elimination solely because of the benefit. I was really sad that Siyeon got eliminated this episode, but Nayoung managed to climb the ranks to 9th! On the other hand, because of the 11 votes to 1 vote change, many girls experienced significant drops, partly due to the lack of bandwagoning on someone else's votes. Jellyfish was one significant example, where the other 2 members, Kim Nayoung and Kang Mina were constantly accused of riding on Sejeong's popularity, and they dropped from really high ranks within the top 5 to 15th and 18th respectively, although Mina did eventually climb back up and made it into the top 11.
Pinky/Zhou Jieqiong from Pledis also suffered a really unexpected huge drop from 6th to 19th, which could be because everyone was so sure of her popularity that they voted for other faves, especially (Im) Nayoung aka my fave, who was also from Pledis and at a dangerous position of 11th the previous round. The international Pinky fans started this really hilarious campaign to get people to vote for her, which included tweeting Donald Trump to vote for Pinky in exchange for voting for him for US President, which then had Trump antis saying they would vote for her as long as the person doesn't vote for Trump LMAO. There was also chatting up people on Omegle and Tinder solely to get people to vote for her lol.
Kim Doyeon from Fantagio also suffered a drop from 7th to 11th (but 15th without her benefit votes from being in the winning team), and her fans started the trend of exchanging forum money for votes on OneHallyu haha. The extent to which fans will go.
And then the finals came! It was live and sms voting during the live show counted for 7 votes each, which was to be a huge game changer. The 5th mission was to perform a song called Crush, and the performance was actually great but did little to impact the votes since there was only about half hour left for voting after the performance aired.
They also performed Pick Me again with other eliminated trainees, and another song by B1A4's Jinyoung and I loveloveloveee this performance. It was just so beautiful and the girls looked so ethereal.
And finally, the results! Jang Geun Suk would always announce the second last position first to build anticipation for the last person to make it in so he announced 10th first and it ended up being my favourite. I just full on sobbed. I have never bothered much for voting but for this, I voted with multiple accounts, created new twitter accounts, used my dad's fb account and got my friend to vote too. And despite crying so much, she managed to give a really coherent and well articulated speech and I love her even more haha. The rest of the members can be found with a quick google search so I won't recap but I'm quite happy with how the final group turned out. Despite a lot of people saying they're very visually heavy and lacking on the talent, 8 out of 11 girls were from the A group after the first Pick Me re-evaluations, which is a testament that these girls may not be the best dancer ever or the best singer ever but they can hold their own.
Omg what a long recap. But I just love this show so much. I swear it is impossible to watch the show and not find a favourite. Other than helping individual trainees find companies, it also helped a lot of trainees gain visibility and fans, which is extremely valuable when the Kpop world is so cutthroat now that dozens of groups debut a year but only a handful survive. And now the next generation of kpop female idols are all friends with each other! How amazing is that!
And I love that it introduced me to my girl Nayoung, and I'm eagerly anticipating for her debut in Pledis Girlz (currently consists of 7 people, of which Pinky also made it into the group!) after I.O.I disbands after a year.
As for now, I'm lapping up the insane amount of promotions I.O.I are having! They've already done loads of photoshoots and CFs and haven't even debuted properly yet! They're set to debut May 4th, so this post is just in time haha.
