BTS Gayo Episodes
BTS Gayo (“pop music”) is a BTS reality show consisting of 15 “tracks” (episodes) broken into two season. Each track features BTS playing a music-related game and the episodes vary in length but are usually fairly short.
Season 1 of BTS Gayo is 9 episodes and aired starting in August 2015, about every 3-4 weeks.
Track 1 – Girl Group Dance Quiz – they have to replicate dances from various girl group songs and then guess the title, like charades. Adorable. JK is quite good. RM is terrible.
Track 2 – Identify the song through listening – listen to a strange clip from an obscure Korean pop song and then try to write down the lyrics you heard.
Track 3 – Recreate scenes from famous Korean kdramas – a must watch. JK has to cry using onions, J-Hope and V almost kiss AGAIN, Suga and RM have to fake kiss and jump rope. A classic.
Track 4 – Bangtan Karaoke – they have to take turns singing one line of a song (a cutesy girl group song from 1998), all the way down the line and back until they can sing the whole song as a group. They can get hints if they do a challenge which leads to most of them trying to eat gummy worms off of their face, and Jin again shows off that his toes are bizarrely agile. They get hit on the head with a hammer when they mess up and the whole thing is adorable. Penalty in the end: everyone gets a drink and 6 of them are tasty treats, and one is terrible.
Track 5 – Association Quiz – one team acts out a song and artist and the other team has to guess – funny. Suga cheats J-Hope into taking the penalty.
Track 6 – BTS Best Dancer – dance off to see who is the worst dancer, then they have to guess what fans voted on as their best dances. Suga challenges j-hope to a dance off and it is awesome. I Need U was voted best dance (it was also their biggest hit to this time).
Track 7 – Male Singer Quiz – act out a song and artist and the other team guesses, like charades. It’s the Red team versus the Black and White team. Jimin has to kiss V as a punishment.
Track 8 – Learn Trot Songs – trot is an old style of Korean pop involving funny repetitive lyrics, like a novelty song; V (in a shiny yellow jacket) plays a song and the two other teams of 3 have to guess. RM, Jin, and JK lose and have to “have their hair parted 2/8” (on the side).
Track 9 – Best BTS Songs – guess the fan-voted best 5 BTS songs, with Suga as the MC. This was quite confusing as we didn’t understand how the guessing worked. I Need U still considered the top song overall.
Season 2 of BTS Gayo started airing in January 2017 and aired approximately monthly for 6 episodes.
Track 10 – Guess 2016 BTS song rankings, as voted by fans. Kind of interesting to see what were the popular songs at this time – I Need U was the song that made them into BTS fans, 2!3! Voted as the most popular song overall.
Track 11 – Pictionary with K-Pop bands (featuring Team Lack of Will and Team Unprecedented Combination) – JK does all the guessing, but it’s older songs so he doesn’t get many right, and we don’t know them either! Jin, V, and Suga have to go outside without coats as penalty.
Track 12 – Learn children’s songs from variety shows. Not a super great episode as it involves a lot of songs we don’t know but does include the landmark moment that Suga says, “Uh huh. Listen boy…my first love story.”
Track 13 – K-Pop song quiz. We didn’t know most of these songs but it was pretty cute. Each boy gets his own “buzzer” that involves various challenges they have to do before answering, and Suga and Jimin are cheaters, as always. In one round they have to name the song and then also do the associated dance and it’s pretty funny. JK unexpectedly gets the penalty and has to do all the “buzzer” jobs in one relay.
Track 14 – Movie soundtrack inspired games. From Rocky – jump rope in partners (involves a lot of klutzy behaviour and hitting each other with the rope); from Scent of a Woman, identify your partner’s body part by feeling the parts of several members (Suga as the MC “tangos” with each contestant as well); from Love Actually, use a flip pad to draw words. For punishment, the others write a “script” for a scene where they each write one line, and Jin and Jimin have to perform a very silly scene about farts.
Track 15 – Produce their own MV (music video) for one of their songs that doesn’t have a video yet. This is for Spine Breaker and is pretty funny.