#195 Wed (1/4/23) - Singles Inferno and Busted!

 I have been binging two Korean shows - Singles Inferno and Busted! (Another one I watched, Korean No. 1 stars the same two leads as Busted! and is more about culturally relevant challenges; weaving traditional cloth, making traditional sauces, etc.)

Singles Inferno is like The Bachelor meets Terrace House. Singles are sent to an island resort, forced to play games for advantages and win prizes like a dinner together or a night in a luxury hotel (Paradise). The end result is to form mutual couples and leave the island together.  In some ways it is like Squid Game.  It is weird watching models, fitness trainers, entrepreneurs, chefs and business owners compete for anything. It is also hard to relate to young and pretty people suffering over rejection.  Yet, I still find myself liking the underdogs. Update: The comparison to Terrace House may be wrong, that show featured a lot more introverts whereas SI has a lot of hunky plastic surgeons and Navy Seals to compete. All the men have insanely good physiques. All the women seem to be models, CEOs of cosmetics companies, or students studying brain surgery. This is not a representative sample.

The oddly named Busted! has a group of comedians and personalities working as a squad of detectives to solve mysteries and escape rooms. It is a clever design, but unfortunately, the emphasis is on the detectives solving the challenges, not the audience, and so sometimes we just have to follow along without sufficient information to try and solve anything ourselves.  It is a fun concept but perhaps could have been done better. Maybe more like an ARG with audience participation somehow?  Their is probably a social media component that I am missing because not in Korean.  Not entirely sure what the goal here is, except to watch smart and funny people work through some conceptual puzzles, and then solve them. 

Spoilers: In Season 2 Li Seung-gi arrives and becomes one of the detectives only to emerge later as the arch-nemesis they are hunting - The Flower Killer.  In retrospect this is not really a surprise at all, since Li Seung-gi is a master gamesplayer and routinely wins these kinds of shows (see New World and Twogether).  Also the previous episode of Season 2 featured a handsome intern who turned on them and was revealed to be the artifact thief, so betrayal is a standard for this show.  The detective team must have felt utterly gutted to have been so totally outplayed. Jae-suk seems not up to the challenge as leader even without the haphazard Kwang-soo and most of the puzzles end up being solved by Min-Young. I think Li Seung-gi returns in Season 3, either as the same arch-nemesis or perhaps in a new role. 

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