[REVIEW] Variety show "Family Outing"

Published on 2010/02/08 | Source

Season 1 finale of variety show "Family Outing" [SBS]

"Family Outing" - Final episode, SBS TV (Sunday, 5:10 PM)

The family's last trip was no different from any other. The family members still played games, continued to play the game of love sticks in the hope they might avoid the dreaded early morning chores, huddled in a single room to go to sleep and made breakfast when they woke up. Except for the fact that they presented the production crew with red bean noodles, which would be their last breakfast together, it was the routine morning viewers had gotten used to seeing on the show.

Before the show's members started getting replaced and various issues of controversy emerged, "Family Outing" was a program with a distinct advantage. The members -- save for Yoo Jae-suk, Lee Hyori and Yoon Jong-shin -- who seemed to be a wrong fit for variety shows provided viewers with refreshing form of entertainment by taking on characters we had not seen them as before. As a co-ed reality-based variety show, the show also had a new power structure and intensity among the members' relationships.

But can only be a limit to the amount of fun the members with fixed personalities inside the show's fixed formula. As the members' characteristics started to overlap and their images exhausted, "Family Outing" -- which had become an outdoors version of "X-Men" segment in "Happy Sunday" -- ended up having to embark on its final trip after one year and eight months of airing. This is the quickest exit that a major reality-based variety program has made, and also a fairly quiet one since the show's departure had been expected for quite some time.

After the first season members hold the "Family Awards" as a special segment over the Lunar New Years' break, the second season of "Family Outing" will begin with a new batch of members. From what has been revealed about the new season so far, the show's setting and the formula appears to remain unchanged except for a change in the entire line-up of the cast. "Family Outing" has chosen to keep the show's fixed formula, which seemed to be its limitation, and make a small change within that formula. Can the family still be family without Korea's representative sibling duo Yoo Jae-suk and Lee Hyori?

Written by Yoonina (TV critic)