Can you believe that I’ve been doing this for eight months now? Neither can I. But SBS’ Running Man is the type of show that rewards such patient viewing and dissection; even if the banter grows old and tired, even if the games are blatant retreads of all that have come before it, there’s still a certain weird charm to watching it every Monday (or Sunday if you’re actually Korean) — a weird charm in watching six middle-aged artists doing their damnedest to make a fun programme and appear “with it”, and the token MZ representative trying their damnedest to not roll their eyes. I might be watching it out of pure force of habit these days, but that doesn’t mean that the show isn’t any good — and with this third article, I hope to convince some of you to give it one (more?) chance as well.
Anywho, you join me just as the show returns from a long summer hiatus imposed by the Paris Olympics; there’s been a spate of alright episodes in recent months, which is still a change from a run of terrible ones earlier in the summer. Will the show pick up the pace, or is it merely coasting along waiting for its inevitable death sentence? Let’s have a look, shall we. (Also, I’ve decided to stop listing Ji Yea-un as a guest each time; they treat her as a seventh cast member already and honestly I think she fits in this bunch as well.)
Updates at around 23:00 Hong Kong time/midnight Korean time every Monday!
Episode 717/1 September
Guests: Joo Hyun-young (actress), Kim An-young (improv comedian)
First off, I really hate the emoting game: it’s not that the guests are bad at it, but the decision from the production team to spend so much time milking each close-up shot for entertainment just puts me off, and this time round only saw a slight improvement. That aside though, this was a very enjoyable week and the addition of two people who have a legitimate claim (but no more) to being MZ representatives worked surprisingly well. Emoting game aside, there were many good innovations and gimmicks in this episode as well; we caught a glimpse of what this programme is best at when they turned a simple game of dice into a 10-minute long thriller which had me unashamedly rooting for Jaesuk. But what worked best for me was the banter between the three girls; Hyun-young and An-young played off each other brilliantly, and Yea-un — at long last acknowledged as the show’s eighth member — showed just why she deserves a spot on the show (and isn’t just a proxy for Somin, too). There are moments when I think that the teasing is sailing very close to the wind, but she defuses them so well that you come away thinking just how suited she is to the show.
Grade: B+
MVP: Ji Yea-un
Episode 718/8 September
Guests: none
Look, I know that this show doesn’t pay for itself. I know that they don’t do much except eat food, talk about said food, and sometimes shill for that food and other products. I’ve made my peace with that for some time. But this week made me feel that the show has no idea how to do ANYTHING else: it was shilling, and arguing, and more shilling, and eating, and more arguing from the cast that just went on and on in an endless loop while production tried to make it seem like they were “discovering” a district. I lost interest half an hour in, and it’s really only due to the VERY occasional joke that I hung on till the end. I just hope that the energy picks up next week again.
Grade: C-
MVP: Song Jihyo, on account of how she caught all those shuttlecocks and spoke a lot more. And that’s about it.
Episode 719/15 September
“This’ll be a funny round,” said my parents as we got round to the foreign language round. And it was: the chaos of Jun-ho’s complete incompetence at English (Sechan is probably relieved that for once he wasn’t the one on the firing line), followed by Seokjin’s inexplicable interpretations of the questions — everything just converged into a perfect task that sent our entire family rolling on the floor. But the ingenuity of this episode wasn’t limited to just mangling sayings from afar: there was also the tension of the clam-opening round (honestly, whoever designed this week’s games should get a raise), and then the hilarity of the cooking section; all in all, a pretty well-rounded episode, and a rare occasion where I got just what I wanted from Running Man. Could they be onto something?
Grade: A-
MVP: Yang Sechan
Episode 720/22 September
Guests: Kwon Eun-bi (singer), Jonathan Yiombi (wait where did Yea-un go)
In recent months, the most interesting thing about Running Man isn’t which celebrity they’ve convinced to come on the show, or the new and exciting games they’ve devised. It’s how they’ve been able to turn their obviously-diminishing budget to their advantage and come up with something new; and this episode certainly does its best with what little they have. Of course occasionally the threadbare nature of the tasks — “use stationary to do cosplay”? Come on — is wildly apparent, but the QR code game of tag was undeniably inspired, and it did make for a thrilling (and labour-efficient!) final setpiece. Jonathan Yiombi is showing an excellent ability to adapt to the show’s kinks and twists; if they’re thinking of recruiting somebody for the long-term, he and Yea-un would make excellent cast members.
Grade: B
MVP: Jonathan Yiombi
Episode 721/29 September
Guests: Kim Dong-jun (singer and actor), Haewon (singer from NMIXX)
Another episode of two halves this time: there was a very funny first half, where the world got to see Yea-un’s latest antics (I know that the jury’s still out on her, but someone with her energy and her ability to absorb everything) and then rattle through a drawing game which produced some truly absurd results. Then we got to a cooking show, and there it was that the show came to a complete halt — where was the peril, the high-octane antics, of the first half? I do like these people when they cook, but as always it does take a little something more, so it would’ve been nice to see something more than just people pottering round a kitchen. But as my parents said, as they watched their first episode in a while: “they’re getting long in the tooth. Give them some slack.”
Grade: B-
MVP: I really do think the others are great, but… it’s Ji Yea-un again.
Episode 722/6 October
no guests
Even by bottle episode standards, this was very low-budget: the only props we ever saw on this episode were a couple of playmats, a few plastic stools, and some ddakji — hardly things which require a show to dig deep. But you know what, it still worked alright: the cast bickering and backstabbing this week was very well done, and the leaders’ constant frustration at having their authority undermined and trying to play the tyrant was quite funny to see. The food porn was extremely well-done for a show that can be quite hit or miss (and makes me think the show really should go and visit Central Asia); I haven’t enjoyed a show like this for quite some time. Way too simple? Yes. Way too enjoyable? Getting there.
Grade: B+
MVP: Ji Seokjin (his temper tantrums were so delightful, you know?)
Episode 723/13 October
no guests
One of the most common complaints I’ve heard about Running Man these days: these people are neither “men” (as in the fit, young variety) nor do they “run”. This week’s episode goes some way to redressing that accusation: not only do the cast members visit a gym, but they also do a lot of moving around, and what a refreshing twist it is to see these people completely destroying their reputations (as well as our eyeballs) to make us laugh — I’m not getting those various images of Sechan out of my mind for a l-o-n-g time. But my favourite part is still the bit where Jaesuk and Jongkook bicker their way uphill: longtime viewers will perhaps recall that they won “best reality couple” a couple of years ago; and here they bring back some of that magic, putting on their outdoor Korean version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and it is glorious. (Jaesuk would make a very good Martha. Just saying.) Never mind the hamfisted attempts to pair up Yea-un with other people, this is the chemistry we need.
Grade: A-
MVPs: the married couple
Episode 724/20 October
Guests: Woo Do-hwan, Lee Yoo-mi (actors)
There are two ways you can look at Ji Seok-jin when it comes to Running Man. On most days, he is the biggest prat in the programme and perhaps in the nation, a pretentious, doddering fool filled with a desperate desire to reclaim his glory days and a stubborn old man entirely out of step with the other cast members. This is a view I have expostulated time and time again on these pages over the past few months, and indeed the show has been leaning into this angle since the pandemic years — and indeed, Seok-jin hasn’t exactly stopped feeding this idea either. The other view, however, is that he is the savviest performer of the bunch, a man who knows precisely what his audience thinks of him, and who knows just how to maximise that image for the greatest entertainment value.
This is a view I couldn’t help returning to this episode: witness his impotent fury at being bullied, his inordinate luck and subsequent bluster when cutting the gourds open, and his absolute masterclass of a temper tantrum when he discovered his hard-earned brass coins had been stolen — and of course, the inevitable embarrassment that followed. Although all the cast members tried hard during this episode, it’s Seok-jin’s behaviour that stands out in my mind by a country mile; and it made me think that, behind all the hollow swagger behind the onscreen persona (and of course these people are all putting on personas), there lies a canny entertainer, with 30 years’ experience in the industry, who knows just which buttons he needs to press. Late in the programme, he “accidentally” doomed himself to an empty-handed awards season — what irony that this may very well be the performance that, at long last, nabs him the big prize he covets.
Grade: B+
MVP: do I even need to say?
Episode 725/27 October
Guests: Seo Eunkwang, Lee Min-hyuk (members of boyband BTOB), Kim Ah-young (you’ve seen her before)
On the surface of it there’s nothing really wrong with this episode: it ran through the hits, delivered a few laughs and a few notable Internet moments, and remembered to serve up some spicy lovelines in the process. I can’t fault it for that. But after the really good run of episodes we’ve had in the past three or four weeks, this one can’t help but feel a little unambitious, a little stale: we already know that Yea-un is weak, that Seok-jin makes things worse, that the cast are uniformly terrible at net-foot-ball. But then what? I don’t have an answer to that, and neither, it seems, does this show.
Grade: B-
MVP: Seo Eunkwang
Episode 726/3 November
Guests: Hong Kyung, Roh Yeon-seo and Kim Min-ju (actors)
Sometimes when I write these reviews, I can’t help but wonder: am I seeing new trends that weren’t there? What separates last week’s B- from the B+ two weeks ago? But there are a few factors that should help distinguish two episodes from one another: the originality of the games, for instance, or the chemistry of the cast and guests. This week’s succeeds on the first but fails on the latter: the games are very nice and I’m surprised that they’ve managed to come up with different twists on some old classics… but at the same time this is all slightly dampened by how forced the chemistry was this week. Episode storylines are set up, only to be forgotten later: I can’t be the only person who was expecting Min-ju’s claim that she “never threw temper tantrums” to be shattered before 90 minutes were through? This episode simply felt like a show that was hopping from setpiece to setpiece, never really caring what might develop in between the lines, and as a result it feels like a very boilerplate episode, and a sadly missed opportunity.
Grade: C+
MVP: Kim Jongkook
Episode 727/10 November
Guests: Kim Dong-jun (perennial Yea-un crush), Rami and Rora (members of girl group BabyMonster, or however you would like to write it)
I’m not exactly sure what to feel about this episode — yes it has an undeniably fun vibe and there were loads of stuff that clicked. I laughed quite hard during the curb-stomp volleyball match, and Dong-jun’s knack for this show has only increased with time. But everything seems to have been edited without any thought to balance — what feels like it would have been the most exciting part of the episode (Jongkook riding roughshod over the contestants once again, the two BabyMonster kids having it out with each other) was skipped, in favour of a quiz show that didn’t really have much going for it beyond “the cast make funny faces while being forced to drink awful things”. We caught only the tiniest glimpse of the BabyMonster kids’ personalities, while getting far too much of HaHa and Sechan’s shenanigans (yes the former can be funny at times, but more often than not his attempts to appear “with it” can just be cringe); the editing felt so disjointed this time that I honestly think it may have dragged down my perception of it singlehandedly.
Grade: C+
MVP: for the third time in six weeks, and despite my serious misgivings, I have to give it to Ji Seok-jin again
Episode 728/17 November
Guest: Joo Hyun-young (please stop calling every recurring guest “family”)
It is a well-known fact that whenever something appears more than twice in a Running Man episode, then the production team will immediately latch onto it and call it a “trend”. This explains the five-a-side football spree they went through in the spring, as well as the “examination” of the “phenomenon” of Seokjin being an irascible and easily provokable old man. And yes, as the year has gone by it feels more and more like they are sinking into desperation and/or a lack of ideas; but if it don’t broke then why really fix it? (It’s not like they have much money to fix things these days.) The game of telephone was funny enough, and there were enough twists during the final drawing the game that I managed to wrench myself from the phone to focus. This show doesn’t feel like it’s doing more than surviving right now, but I suppose it’s good enough as things go.
Grade: B
MVP: Joo Hyun-young
Episode 729/24 November
Guests: none
It happens once a year. Every year there is one episode where Running Man does nothing but go round in circles, and the cast members, normally so good at gelling with one another, somehow become unbearable bleating children who you’d like to kick on the behind. For the past eleven months they’d been remarkably good at avoiding that pitfall, yet this week saw almost all of them on autopilot, trying to be entertaining and instead coming across as some of the most insufferable people on the planet. This is not the only episode that’s spent 45 minutes just table-setting for a simple task, of course, but when those 45 minutes are solely sustained by endless squabbling, then it becomes intolerably irritating. The scenes in the clothes store, which basically boil down to them stubbornly disagreeing on what clothes to wear FOR A SIMPLE PHOTO, are painful to watch: if it’s manufactured, shame on them for having to resort to such unlikable, pitiful techniques; if it’s genuine, shame on them still, for failing to resolve this kind of petty disagreement like normal human beings and instead dragging it on for an interminable amount of time.
Pointless squabbling is one thing. But what angered me most about this episode was how arrogantly, how apathetically it wore its lack of budget on its sleeve. I do not begrudge the show for having to once more cut corners; I do not mind the fact that it has been eons since they even set foot out of Seoul. But it is one thing to make do and mend, and another to aggressively flaunt the promise of better things in your face while making the entire cast work to serve up something blatantly cut-rate and say “this will do”. Actually take them to Paris or Hong Kong, by all means stretch it out to four or five weeks if it blows a sizable hole in your budget; but don’t have Sechan or Seokjin take a picture in front of a goddamn Myeongdong façade and act like they give a shit. It is an act that smacks of complacency, of actively baiting the viewer, and you would have thought that everyone involved would have known better than this half-arsed, insolently self-denying concept. (Also, I may not have the warmest feelings towards my current hometown, but their imagining of a Hong Kong Christmas physically hurt me.)
The key spark of this show lies in how they have managed to squeeze comedy out of the smallest things; there is always a quip from Jaesuk, a squeal from Yea-un, or a burst of anger from Jongkook to inject life into an inert situation. This episode — the first one I have not been able to bear watching all the way through in almost a year and a half — shows that it’s not a given; that Running Man is a show of delicate balance, and that it could so easily upend all its goodwill and become just another variety show, limping along on its last legs. Watching this episode, it certainly felt like the latter.
Grade: D
MVP: Song Jihyo (by dint of the fact that she didn’t chip in much in this absolute mess)
Episode 730/1 December
Guests: KyuHyun (singer in Super Junior), Dahyun (singer from Twice)
How much chaos is enough chaos for Running Man? Last week was the perfect example of “too many cooks spoil the broth”: everyone tried to get in on the squabbling, with the result that it felt unfocused and even irritating. This week, though, the tension was just right: some good-natured ribbing and/or backstabbing, some twists from the usual suspects, and of course Seokjin throwing yet another temper tantrum. The production was also finely-honed for the most part: sure one might have quibbles about how they decided to start the show in front of a waterfall (?!), but there were some good solid curveballs and I only noticed the blatant indirect advertising once or twice. It’s still sad that this last element distracted so much from the other events, though: sell a gaming centre all you like, but surely the five-a-side football or the language game deserve a much better airing? In any case, I’m just happy that some resemblance of normality has reasserted itself here.
Grade: B+
MVP: Ji Yea-un (look, she’s obviously found her niche, and she’s sticking to it, so good for her and her appetite)
Episode 731/8 December
no guests
Is there anything more to say, after 45 or so episodes? Perhaps not, but credit to everyone for not powering down during the final stretch of the year: whether that’s the production team, who put themselves on the line and also came up with some intermittently interesting games; or the cast, who are still putting their body and soul into playing the games to their utmost. And fan of Jae-suk I may be, but it was still finally nice to see a bit of karma come his way after all the teasing and occasional braggadocio.
Also, I know that there might not have been enough material for 92 minutes, but was it really necessary to tack on the first seven minutes of the next episode for a few cheap laughs at the cast’s strange dress senses?
Grade: B
MVP: the propmaster
Episodes 732-733/15-22 December
no guests
As with so many other things this year, these two episodes were also a revisit of a staple of Running Man and of Korean variety shows in general: that of spending the night in some god-forsaken countryside cabin, and trying to go through the show without tearing each other apart. Of course they failed miserably (what more did you expect?) but at least there was enough difference in these couple of episodes to prevent it from being too dull. There were quite a few fun tasks that they managed to pack in, and much of it felt less like a blatant retread and more like a casual adaptation: they’ve done the “don’t wake up first” thing God knows how many times, but it’s still funny to see Seok-jin trying very hard to pretend he hasn’t already woken up. Was it anything groundbreaking? Not really — I could see the whole twist coming from a mile off (particularly cause they spent so much time setting it up), but it was still a delight to watch. And hey, if they can wring ten exciting minutes of television from four middle-aged people trying to play the recorder, then there’s hope for this show yet.
Grade: B+
MVP: all did very well, but after some thought I’ve decided that it’s HaHa
29 December
postponed due to the Jeju Airlines crash (and a faulty laptop); since today’s episode would have been a year-ender, I’ll review it next week as a roundup
Episode 734/5 January 2025
Guest: Kang Hoon (prodigal son)
And so we come to the final show of the year, except it’s not because this was supposed to be last week’s episode. In some respect it doesn’t really feel like much of a difference, since they just seem to acknowledge the return of Kang Hoon and move on. I do like how they’ve picked up as if nothing’s happened — if anything, Kang Hoon showed this episode why he and not all those other guests that’ve popped up this year (yes, even Kang Hanna) deserves to be called “RM family”. His deviousness, his charm, his ability to take the piss out of Kim Jung-kook — not everybody can do that, but he takes to it like a fish to water. I still prefer the core cast of seven (and it feels nice that they’ve finally acknowledged Yea-un as one of them) but he was a sparkling addition this year, and he really should come back more often.
In some ways, however, I feel that the coming of Kang Hoon and Ji Yea-un was pretty much a godsend for this show. Running Man has, I felt, been struggling for some time now — nothing to do with the production crew, who I feel genuinely are doing their best with the limited budget; nothing to do with the cast either, who still give it their all most weeks (even if the results may vary). But the arrival of two new members this year, with their own fully-rounded character settings to boot (one learning his place, one lovably silly) did help mask the roteness of most episodes; I am sure that the Gen-Z day out episode or the food episode just before the Olympics, which were both retreads of material they’d already done in the past couple of months, would have felt much more boring had they and their interplay with the cast not popped in to lighten things up.
And if you ask me, they did bring a shot in the arm to events. There wasn’t a huge uptick in quality — I don’t think we’re ever getting back to the glory days of 2012-14, so do pipe down if you’re still watching — but I think the members seemed to approach their Mondays with a great deal more vigour. The complaints of Jihyo not pulling her weight disappeared (though this might have something to do with the Somin stans finally leaving); HaHa and especially Seokjin absolutely felt like they were gunning hard for the SBS prizes this year. Even the production team seems to have gotten a second wind when it comes to games; after they came back from the Olympics, a frequent compliment of mine would be how they were no longer (just) relying on online trends for the games, which I feel is a shift for the better. That said, though, they really were constantly being throttled by what little funds they had to make the programme, and the threadbare nature of the show really was on display at times; I’m not sure that the decision to deliberately call attention to it at times was wise either, but this happened, and I guess it’s part of the show’s fabric now. In any case, it’s a second wind that I do hope continues, and in any case the fact that they are still on the run after FIFTEEN YEARS — a lifetime in television — is definitely something to rejoice about.
Grade: B
Year grade: B-
MVP: Kang Hoon (both episode and year)
And that, dear readers, is where I leave Running Man — this review is the last one I’ll write on the show. I’m not going to bring this over to the coming year, because even though this reviewing lark has been fun, I’m not sure I’ll have more things to say (truth be told, I was already struggling back in November). But I hope the fifty or so reviews above have shown you what a gem Running Man is (or more accurately, can still be); and I’ll certainly still stick around every Monday for new episodes. My thanks to everyone for reading, and to the cast and crew of the show for giving me something to think about this past year — I hope you all keep running, and never stop shouting “ANDWAEEEEEE!”
Inkpot Shuffles in the Twilight 
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