Transform Project (2024)

Since there aren't any other reviews so far and there's also not a lot of info on MDL, I'll start out with a quick summary of what this is:

Time Fengjun (aka TF, shi dai feng jun, sdfj, etc.) is a company that is primarily known for creating boy groups. Their first group was TF Boys, a group of 3 middle school aged kids at debut. This group was wildly successful, although maybe a little too successful as the three of them rarely do group activities anymore these days. After this, TF tried to replicate this success with additional generations of trainees, whose progress audiences can follow starting when the trainees are fairly young. The second generation ultimately debuted as a group of 7 older teens, becoming popular boy group TNT.

Transform Project is specifically about the debut period of the third generation of trainees at TF, as they approach the final selection of which of the trainees will become part of the third gen boy group, later T.O.P. The 13 trainees in the show started training together at a very young age (mostly, with a couple exceptions who joined later). Note that the final selection is not part of the show, and happened at a 2-day concert in Kuala Lumpur, which was livestreamed and can be found separately on Youtube under 登陆时刻.

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For the actual review part:

So...I went into this as a fan of T.O.P. who was doing some fan archaeology to learn more about their past, for a couple of reasons. First, they make some vague mentions in their Call Me By Fire appearances to their debut being a painful experience. And second, fans sometimes make vague negative mentions about the debut. I also had a little experience with the majority of the other 3rd gen guys due to a concert earlier this year.

Watching the show, I felt like I got a much better idea of who the whole group was, and got to see how the T.O.P. five interacted with the rest of the group before debut. And all of the boys are largely really cute and dumb and lovable! Some of the best parts of the show are watching them hang out, especially outside of the competitive elements, like the dorm scenes. The group has an overall slightly rebellious vibe, and I loved that they start to just disregard the rooming arrangements because they like hanging with their bros.

Some other things I liked:
- I enjoyed most of the mentors, who are largely very helpful and make good points.
- The quality of performances is decent for where the trainees are (although they are not pros, so there are still some flaws)
- There are some fun random games the boys do with the mentors that are entertaining
- I learned about a lot of new songs from this, and most of them were pretty enjoyable

The biggest issue with this show is the same issue I have with most reality competition shows: it attempts to manufacture drama by purposely pitting the contestants against each other in ways that go beyond just competing on talent. My dislike is magnified because this is a bunch of 16-18 year old boys who are clearly codependent on each other and are visibly stressed about these competitive elements, and on top of that, the competitive elements feel clumsily implemented to me. There are several times where one of the boys has to choose between his friends, and the rule is sprung on them, but instead of drama, the person picking is just sad and stressed, the person who got picked feels bad for replacing their friend, and the person who didn't get picked tries to put on a brave face while feeling hurt.

I overall do not like how the company treated the third generation boys, and I especially do not like the shenanigans the company pulled in this show to try to generate drama. I get the sense the company really wanted to get the boys to be emotional and cry, but often the way they try to achieve this just feels mean. It's set up to regularly remind the boys that aren't as highly ranked that they're doing badly. Their method of splitting up the boys into groups almost always just groups the trainees who are not doing well in one group. At one point, they set up a rule that seems to just be there to knock down a successful contestant a peg, for no real reason that I could see. The show pushes trainees to prepare for performances with very short timelines which, while maybe realistic to their potential future career as a boy group member, also felt like it was purposely too challenging based on the level the trainees were actually at.

In summary, the show combined with how the concert and debut ultimately went (which I wont' spoil here) kind of felt emotionally abusive, in my opinion.

Some other things I didn't like:
- The episodes sometimes dragged a bit. I felt like there could have been stricter editing that would have resulted in tighter episodes
- The points didn't really feel like they mattered, as there was never really a rubric, and the final scores were almost always affected by voting from the audience. This also felt a bit staged, as sometimes one group would do really well but then get pushed down due to other groups getting a ton of points from the supposed voting
- Ultimately the show doesn't even actually directly affect the debut. This is not an elimination show, they just compete miserably for 9 episodes, then do a concert that ends with the final debut, which was aired separately. As far as I've been able to tell with the actual selection, it's not correlated with specific wins in the show, so I'm not 100% sure what the point of the show actually was

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So...should you watch this? I would say, only if you really love idol competition shows, or you really love T.O.P./another of the 3rd gen trainees and want to know more about their experiences. It's been very informative to me as a fan of a lot of these guys, but it was also imo a pretty miserable experience to watch them be so sad the whole time, and the show results don't even clearly correlate to the final debut selection.

The performances are fine, but having seen most of them perform this year (nearly 2 years later) and do much better, I don't think the stages are worth rewatching the whole show for, plus you can probably find the individual stage performances as their own videos.

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