What A View | Men on a Mission: the schoolboy antics of Korean celebrities are not to be missed
- Known as Knowing Bros in Korea, celebrities go back to school in a wacky variety talk show that involves a series of improvised challenges, embarrassing revelations and plenty of banter
- Jung Yong-hwa and Lee Joon are among the ‘students’ paraded on set
It’s back to college with Men on a Mission (Netflix), a variety talk show in which celebrity guests are mocked, set challenges and insulted by an unruly bunch of shouty, overgrown schoolboys in a classroom.
Called Knowing Bros in its native South Korea (the seven schoolboys are the “brothers”), Men on a Mission is the definition of “wacky” comedy: in troop the week’s guests, pretending to be new students, to talk about themselves and prepare to be laughed at by the brothers, who giggle through revelations of personal details and tales of embarrassing mishaps and career catastrophes.
Actor-musician “idols” Jung Yong-hwa and Lee Joon, two more glowing graduates of Korea’s national talent factory, were among the “students” paraded on set in a recent episode. Comprehensively guffawed at by their tormentors through loosely scripted but generally improvised tasks, they and their friends danced, tied themselves into knots in a version of Twister and played a type of charades – often while being lampooned with overlaid cartoon graphics.
The brothers, themselves drawn from the fields of music, comedy, acting and, in the case of ex-basketball star Seo Jang-hoon, sport, are all about banter (rather than bullying), such good-natured joshing being the glue that holds this riotous production together. And though sounding too chaotic to be any sort of hit, its awards roll suggests its mission – whatever that is – is entirely possible.
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