No No Girls (2024)

Chanmina's Girl-Group Survival Show

Here's an idea: let's take all the budget for a girl-group survival show and allocate as much of that budget as we can on the finale and hold that finale in a packed 20,000-seat arena. We won't have a host or a narrator. All the earlier rounds will be filmed in various rooms around the agency, plus, maybe a small gym for one performance round to hold an audience we won't even bother to show on camera.

Honestly: it's great.

The popular rapper Chanmina and SKY-HI, the head of the agency, do all the work as hosts and judges, but even SKY-HI's role is primarily to echo the things Chanmina says and leave the production in her capable hands. There are a few choreographers and a solid vocal coach, but this series is primarily Chanmina's show.

Chanmina's idea for the group is to provide an opportunity for and develop the talent of women who have been rejected repeatedly by the industry. And she is wholly committed to the project. After the initial auditions and cuts take the candidate pool down to 30, she bleeds at every further cut, and so tries to do so as compassionately and transparently as she can. Unlike most other survival shows, there is no audience voting, and the cuts are decided wholly by Chanmina and SKY-HI.

The show is otherwise pretty standard: the women are divided into groups and given pieces to perform over a few rounds to display their skills in singing, rapping and dance. However, whereas every survival show I've seen stops at the final selection of the members of the new group and announcing its name this series gives us one more episode to reconnect with every single member of that initial 30. And while the editorial choices in that final episode are unusual - we step back in time before the arena show for 45 minutes of the 80 minute episode before getting snatches of the other woman's performances in front of the stadium audience - the climactic performance of Sad Song by the top 10 and Chanmina is one of the most moving moments I have seen on any survival show.

Most of this series was filmed in August of 2024, and in an another interesting production choice, the final 10 are given 5 months to prepare for the arena show. Of course, the real reason for that long preparation is that Chanmina was pregnant, and she had her baby in November. The only mention of that fact occurs in the last 10 minutes of the final episode when Chanmina says that she now has seven daughters ... and her daughter. But, in terms, of appropriately assessing talent, it is hard to imagine a more fair way than giving candidates that kind of stage including all the stagecraft, back-up dancers and musicians as well as that much preparation time to really show what they are capable of. I can't imagine we would ever see its like on any future survival show, and the results are pretty spectacular.

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