“I think DINO plays characters that people who only know him as a member of SEVENTEEN could never imagine he would play,” Yi Yunju, the head of the PLEDIS Marketing 1 team, said. “But he perfectly embodies these characters that would seem impossible to pull off.” DINO’s deft portrayals are no doubt a major reason why GOING SEVENTEEN became as popular as it did. According to the show’s producers, they only give the SEVENTEEN members “a basic idea of the tone” of the characters they’ll play “and keep direction to a minimum,” allowing “the members to be free to enjoy themselves and feel immersed without pressure.” “The producers do a lot of brainstorming and imagining but always turns out completely unexpectedly,” Yi said, revealing as well that Going Rangers Begins is “100% ad-libbed” and that the only direction the members were given was that it “has to be funny” and “never awkward.” The production team even said they “enjoy that there’s variables now because it’s often when something unexpected occurs that makes for the most interesting scenes.” The producers give SEVENTEEN a scenario like the village of Sevong-ri and its strange residents (“WONWOO’s Diary”), students running around outside at Sevong Middle School (“I Know & Don’t Know”) or a startup company where the employees are brainstorming together about memes (“Ad-lib: GOING COMPANY”), and the idols improvise their parts on the spot. The fact that they’re given a blank canvas to work with when creating their show lets them show off what makes their group special. When DINO plays Soon-eung in the show, he’s the other members’ teacher, but in real life, he’s the group’s youngest. In “Surprise Don’t Lie,” DINO accuses SEUNGKWAN during a game of Mafia after the latter says that “it feels like” no one’s playing the bad guy with a suspicious look on his face. DINO adds that he’s “shared a room with him for years,” so he can tell what SEUNGKWAN’s really thinking just by the look on his face. It’s the kind of situation that would only ever arise between people who have been living together for eight or more years like SEVENTEEN. The group will even do the exact opposite of what the producers ask them to do on GOING SEVENTEEN just to reflect their real personalities and relationships with one another or exploit their real friendships for laughs. 

The GOINGverse, the multiverse that exists within GOING SEVENTEEN, is more than just about having fun. Each episode has its own distinct flavor and amplifies different characteristics of the SEVENTEEN members themselves. Episodes like “WONWOO’s Diary” or “Ad-lib: SEVENTEEN’s Got Talent,” the latter of which sees the members improvising on the roles they were assigned just before an audition, give an unscripted look at SEVENTEEN’s teamwork and sense of humor, while “Let’s Go! SEVENTEEN,” an homage to the old KBS variety show Let’s Go! Dream Team, shows off their athletic abilities. Other episodes, like “TTT” and “Talk Get-Together,” are just like reality shows, showing the members of SEVENTEEN without any script or plot. The new season of GOING SEVENTEEN started up on March 1 and this time it takes all their recurring segments and centers them around “Don’t Lie” episodes, taking everything from the huge SEVENTEEN multiverse and working it all into the enormous show. This year, the series opens with the episode “GOING COMPANY Outing” and the final treasure hunt scene where JEONGHAN finds a note with the word “doctor” on it leads right into “Don’t Lie.” The “Don’t Lie” sub-series started off with episodes 66 and 67 and was expanded on in a mystery game episode (“Don’t Lie: CLUE”) and a tag episode (“Don’t Lie: The CHASER”). Within the larger framework of “Don’t Lie,” the versions of SEVENTEEN as office works, masked-and-suited murder mystery investigators and tag contestants join the version of the group that had been divided up between good guys and bad guys in the Mafia game episode, revealing just how deep the GOING SEVENTEEN multiverse goes. It’s already been three years since the first appearance of HOSHI’s character Kwon Scribe (“THE SECRET LIFE OF GOING SEVONG”). Since then, he’s reappeared in “Ad-lib: GOING COMPANY” and “Best Friends,” and was also mentioned in “GOING COMPANY Outing” and “Surprise Don’t Lie.” In that last episode, when JEONGHAN becomes a suspect and the words, “silver wings are on fire,” appear on-screen, it’s a callback to the phrase, “silent breaths and silver wings of a silent fairy,” that was written in his note in “Don’t Lie III.” By roping in characters like Fe Turin originally born outside the GOING SEVENTEEN canon, the producers of the show are giving a nod to all the other facets of the group that CARAT and CUBIC know so well. Not only are dedicated GOING SEVENTEEN viewers treated to new, fun situations every episode, they’re also able to spot recurring jokes and running gags that deepen their enjoyment of the series and the group. “Lots of people say there’s captions they didn’t think much about that can actually be interpreted in multiple ways when looked at again,” Yi said, adding, “Having an ever-increasing number of crossover episodes helps viewers to become fully immersed in the GOING SEVENTEEN universe.” Once viewers see there’s a connection between what happens in each episode and what SEVETEEN does in real life, CARAT and CUBIC alike are sucked into a limitless world of imagination. In the final scene of Going Rangers Begins, two teams—DINO, S.COUPS, DK, THE 8, JOSHUA and WONWOO as Hero 1, and SEUNGKWAN, VERNON, MINGYU, JUN, JEONGHAN and HOSHI as Hero 2—face off against each other, with Dr. Woo (WOOZI) in the middle, leading many fans to speculate whether the events of Going Rangers take place within the multiverse. “Both the group members and the producers find it really exciting when we can take an off-the-cuff remark from one of the members and spin it off into some actual content,” the GOING SEVENTEEN team said, noting they try to “get across the feeling of spontaneity and originality that results from unexpected developments and the fun of sticking to the grand narrative that we’ve been working on this whole time.” With an ever-increasing number of episodes revealing more and more about the boys comes a full-blown fictional universe that the producers can connect the dots in in such a way that it rewards longtime fans of GOING SEVENTEEN. “Every little thing mentioned in the episodes becomes a tool to help us shape the GOING SEVENTEEN universe,” Yi said. “One of the best things about the show is that it doesn’t leave any stone unturned. … Our goal is to create a massive universe—one unique to GOING SEVENTEEN.”

The first part of the episode “Surprise Don’t Lie” was number one on YouTube’s trending videos the day after it was released. The “Don’t Lie” episodes combine several segments from the already popular GOING SEVENTEEN and as such serve as a kind of guidebook for travelers visiting the main series’ multiverse. Even someone who’s never watched GOING SEVENTEEN before won’t have any trouble enjoying the members of SEVENTEEN pointing fingers at each other in the games, mysteries and chase sequences that make up the “Don’t Lie” formula. Fans and CUBIC, meanwhile, will love watching how every corner of the SEVENTEEN multiverse comes together, showing the producers have managed to turn “Don’t Lie” into quality entertainment for existing viewers and newcomers alike. “We keep developing the material until we can confidently say it’s up to our standards for being fresh and funny, inserting new ideas into familiar ones or reconfiguring existing ideas,” the producers said. The things that make GOING SEVENTEEN unique were created in a deliberate process of trying new things from the planning stage—right down to the editing.”

GOING SEVENTEEN, which in some ways is similar to the MBC show Infinite Challenge, pays homage to this forerunner in the episode “Infinite GOING.” Just like Infinite Challenge before it, GOING SEVENTEEN introduces new characters to match the concept of different episodes, and when those characters start to cross over into other episodes, it makes the viewing experience that much richer for longtime viewers. Infinite Challenge extended a hand to new viewers by inviting different musical guests onto the show to sing with the cast members for their song festival episodes, and SEVENTEEN’s series does something similar with episodes like “Don’t Lie,” giving people who aren’t up to date on the group’s whole history a chance to catch up. Both shows have made efforts to consistently expand their universes but the approach taken by GOING SEVENTEEN differs from those in older TV variety shows like Infinite Challenge or Two Days and One Night (KBS). There’s a part in “Don’t Lie: The CHASER” where the SEVENTEEN members are running away from the villain with coins in hand and JEONGHAN says, “Be careful not to get hurt!” On those older shows, the cast would have risked injury for the sake of entertainment, but safety and overall well-being come first for SEVENTEEN. One of the major turning points where GOING SEVENTEEN really found its footing as a variety show was the first “TTT” episode, which went out at the end of 2018. It’s no exaggeration to call the retreat they go on in that episode the impetus for the current incarnation of the series as it puts the group members’ solidarity on full display—a friendship built on growing up together from the days of being trainees. Yi said the 2020 episode “TTT (Hyperrealism Ver.)” was so well received that everyone in the company could feel the positive response. “People of that age felt a sense of camaraderie with the episode, especially those who couldn’t do orientation or team-building due to the pandemic,” she said. “University first-years were able to enjoy those things vicariously through it. … I think that GOING SEVENTEEN has a lot of fun situations that make people feel like they want to be a part of the group and hang out with the SEVENTEEN members.” We live in a time of almost never-ending competition, but GOING SEVENTEEN gives twentysomethings a reprieve from the rat race where viewers can enjoy watching 13 people who are at once colleagues, friends and family who are fun, likable and considerate. In the episode “ONE MILLION WON,” for example, only one of them can win the prize money, and only if they betray everyone else, but they all put their heads together instead and devise a way to split it up among themselves anyway. In “Runner-Up Sports Day,” when the group finds out that the hidden objective is for JUN to win second place, everyone decides to work together to help JUN be the runner-up and all share the win. The fun doesn’t come from them competing against one another but from working together to push one person to victory and enjoy themselves along the way.

The cast of Two Days and One Night used to shout out, “As long as it’s not me!” almost like a motto. By contrast, the opening theme to GOING SEVENTEEN has the words, “Have you been well, everyone? / We missed you too.” The group members have been together ages—ever since they were trainees—and their fans have been watching them since long before the group even debuted. Together, they’re a team held tight with a strong bond, full of love and consideration for one another. GOING SEVENTEEN isn’t engaging despite being about idols, but rather, it’s engaging specifically because of the idols. Just like the lyrics to their song “CHEERS,” the group started in a “basement unit” and fought through hard times to reach dizzying heights in the K-pop universe. Despite all that, you can see on GOING SEVENTEEN that they’re happy as ever and sticking together. And they’re fun to watch. VERNON once recommended the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once in a Weverse Magazine interview, and his description of that movie applies just as well to his group’s delightfully youthful variety show: 

“If you watch this, your brain will burst into confetti. Each and every piece reflects back a universe of possibilities in my shortcomings. Let’s be kind. Let’s love each other. Right away.”