Next month marks 3 years since RUNext? aired in June 2023. If you aren’t familiar, RUNext? was the survival show that debuted ILLIT. It was originally popularised as the girl group sequel successor for I-Land in 2020, with original development scheduled between BE:LIFT and MNET in 2021-2022. However, due to a mix of COVID and internal issues within labels, the show commenced filming and aired on JTBC through June-Sept 2023 as a summer show.
The show’s internal delay was further emphasised when looking at the timeline of all 22 contestants’ training periods. Majority of the contestants had moved from Source Music to BE:LIFT in 2021, (which we now know was due to MHJ embezzling Source to develop ADOR, leaving Source no choice but to drop GFRIEND abruptly as well as most of their trainees.). However, the other half of RUNext’s contestants were freshly scouted. Elisia from UNIS stated that BE:LIFT scouted her at an ENHYPEN fansign around February 2023, leading to believe the delay in production had a lot of contestants dropping out and BE:LIFT was scrambling to find contestants.
This left a major gap between skill sets on the show, as girls such as Wonhee, Seoyeon & Yewon who’d only trained for around 2 months were competing with girls such as Jeemin, Youngseo & Yunah with 3-6 year training periods. This contributed heavily to the show’s eventual controversies.
RUNext’s 1st episode eventually aired June 30th 2023 on JTBC with a 0.678% rating in Korea, peaking as the shows most watched episode. For context, Produce 48’s lowest rating was 1.768%. RUNext’s ratings lingered around 0.3% for the rest of the show, labelling the show as domestically unsuccessful; especially coming from HYBE. This was emphasised by the lack of MNET production, as well as no subtitles available on the live stream, and the full tv show to date is still incredibly hard to watch. Still, ‘Bad Girl Good Girl’s performance quickly performed well on socials, serving as a major source of the shows publicity and viewers; especially for global audiences.
The show quickly garnered a reputation for being dishonest and shady with it’s favouritistic editing and unfair treatment to contestants. The show’s performances were aired and released with no full cams, multiple takes snipped together, and a lot of blatant audio editing. This was most obvious during the Semi Finals, where Chanelle, a globally loved contestant who’d had a bad edit for multiple episodes, was suddenly eliminated due to “unstable shaky live vocals” and “poor performance” during ‘Eleven’. This left viewers rightly outraged and confused, as the performance had no errors whatsoever, leading to believe that the vocals were entirely airbrushed. Fan cams from viewers that attended the live rounds also proved that the contestants sang completely live, yet the aired performances were highly edited, removing unstable vocals and choreography mistakes entirely.
This was also further evident with the more known finale voting scandal, where the show was advertised as “the next global group” with 50% global votes and 50% domestic votes. However, during the finale, the final lineup was determined by 80% domestic votes, 20% global votes, and only 2/6 of the final girls would be determined by votes. This meant that global voting was essentially invalid.
However, the most interesting part of RUNext to me is the 180 switch mid show on what the final debut group would look like. Despite the show’s signal song and initial concept surrounding summer soft vibes, familiar to ILLIT’s current concept, any viewer could identify the rapid shift in the show’s perspective. The first half of the show, prior to public opinion, has a heavy focus on darker concepts, however once the episodes began airing, a cuter lighter concept swiftly arose.
This is further reflected with the first few episodes heavily reflecting older brother I-Land/Enhypen’s dark vampire concept, pushing performances like ‘Bad Girl Good Girl’, ‘Given-Taken’, heel dancing rounds, and a stark contrast between mature concepts garnering a lot more praise than soft concepts such as ‘Dreams Come True’. Around Episode 7-8, which is a few weeks after public opinions and votes have released, there’s a major distinction between mature contestants who were initially pushed heavily, now being edited out. Jiwoo, a well loved contestant, was titled “the best contestant” by the judges, alongside Youngseo for her outstanding performance and No.1 voted globally. Episode 8-9 airs, and her screentime is cut significantly, more easily seen during her lines in ‘Feel Special’ where the camera is focusing on another member. This tactic was used to iradicate Jihyun’s screentime during Episode 8 as well.
Simultaneously, Wonhee went megaviral domestically for her youthful features and natural charisma; despite being negatively edited in the first few episodes. My personal theory is that BE:LIFT didn’t anticipate the show to get such a low public viewer response, so upon Wonhee’s popularity, they decided to pivot their entire direction to cater towards her popularity in hopes of viewership and garnering views. Yunah recently revealed that the label initially solely recruited girls with “a sharp bold look”. However, Wonhee was naturally the opposite of BE:LIFT’s tall and sharp looking girl ideology, which meant the whole final group had to be entirely reoriented.
This is why Moka, a contestant who had been up for elimination for majority of the show, all of a sudden ended up garnering a major push in screentime and praise during and after Episode 8. All of a sudden, bright/cute concept performances such as ‘Scrum’, ‘SSWFL’ & ‘Aim High’ began having high screentime. This is also why public voting was also essentially removed in place of judges picks, where Moka & Yunah were announced for the final lineup despite placing lower than Jeemin & Jeongeun by thousands of votes, and despite majority of the series pushing Jeemin as one of the most debut ready top contestants.
The following is a lot of my own personal theory. The final group was named ILLIT (originally characterised as I’LL-IT), to represent “I’ll be it”, meaning “whatever it is, we will be it”. Kind of forshadowing an ITZY-esque “we can do any concept we want” concept. This is pure speculation on my behalf, but I believe that Youngseo was way too popular to not debut, however the label had no idea what concept Youngseo & Wonhee would fit together; they’d never performed together, one was drastically praised for her mature dark concepts and one for her cute light concepts. Giving ILLIT this “whatever” concept, and giving their initial first group photoshoot a bland “at home” concept literally made the group a blank canvas until BE:LIFT figured out what to do with them.
For months they were teasing a glance into a concept, however, Youngseo spontaneously left the group 3 months after the show’s finale (Dec 2024), which left almost 4 months of radio silence (despite the odd social media post) before ILLIT’s debut. Soon after, they renamed themselves from I’LL-IT to ILLIT, and debuted with a concept that was a lot brighter and cuter than what they’d been seemingly teasing at for months. I truly believe that ILLIT would have debuted completely differently if Youngseo had stayed.
A lot of my perspective is a lot of what I remember, so if there was anything I missed please mention it! What are your thoughts on the show looking back after 3 years?
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