adevyish | under nineteen (Reply)

This whole Lelush situation with Produce Camp / Chuang remembered me of that time a contestant of Under Nineteen, another idol factory/bootcamp reality show, staged a revolt and tanked the entire show.

As the name suggests, all of the contestants were 19 or under. However, unlike most of these idol factory shows where 90%+ of the contestants were already in the music industry as trainees or already debuted idols, a significant minority of the contestants on Under Nineteen had never been in the music industry before. This was exacerbated by the way U19 seemed to change directions midway through — the rappers had clearly not expected to learn how to dance, nor the dancers how to sing. Worse, U19 provided no real mentorship, leaving a bunch of teenagers to mentor each other.

From the beginning, U19 had set up one contestant to be a star: Choi Soomin. He was an underground rapper recruited for his online popularity, and popular with his peers as well. As U19 neared its climax, he had an injury. It wasn’t clear how serious it was, but iirc he managed to get out of part of the competition legitimately. However, the show started making it look like he was faking the injury, including staff chewing him out onscreen for non-participation.

Perhaps because of this, Soomin proceeded to deliberately break the rules (iirc he went to a party) and got kicked off the show. The episode immediately after was incredibly awkward.

As other contestants were eliminated from U19, they would immediately show up in his Insta stories hanging out with him and/or making music. All of them were also popular contestants. It was so ubiquitous among the contestants that it almost seemed… organized.

U19 did not have a second season.