Whenever the producers and director of the show like it or not, they influence the end result a lot, and it makes the shows less entertaining to watch. With limited screen time, they have to decide who to show and for how long. Trainees who get more screen time at first get more popular. Because they are popular, the director and editing team adds even more scenes with them, which makes them even more popular - at the end of the day, they are the ones who will debut.

⇢ Cast aka the contestants and mentors
I started the show for Lian Huaiwei. He was my favorite in season 3, so I wanted to check his “humble beginnings”. Surprisingly, the one that was the most entertaining was Lay. He was so unintentionally hilarious, it was hard not to like him. All the mentors did well. I could see they truly tried to help the trainees as much as it was possible.
For the contestants themselves… Only a few caught my attention, and it’s mostly because only a few got a fair amount of screen time. Watching the finale, I still did not remember the names of over a half of the trainees… I guess it says a lot.

⇢ Music aka the the performances
There were few performances I liked quite a lot, but for me, the buildup is quite important. I want to see them practicing the songs more, see the progress from the day one of forming a group, to the day they actually perform. Sadly, I did not get much of it.

⇢ Story aka the production
Let’s get real… they did not care that much about the international audience. They did not bother to translate into English the result boards, hence the only way I could find out who won in specific groups was based on the reactions of the trainees. Which is sad, because the competition is the core of the show… but I could not even follow the competition to the fullest because of the lack of translations.

Another thing that bothered me a lot were the volunteering and charity work bits. Don’t get me wrong, the idea was amazing, but it was wasted by adding it to the episodes themselves. It would be far better to make it a separate series like “Charity with Youth” or something like that, with full length episodes just showing the trainees work. By adding the bits to the episodes, the precious time that should be used on showing the teens working to achieve their dreams was wasted. With that, during the elimination, we weren’t even able to hear the thoughts of all the trainees that got to the next round.

What I liked though, was the addition of the Special mentors, who were able to promote the trainees to the next round, even if they did not get enough screen time. It’s fair to leave some space for the professional to “interfere”, since the production is not completely fair to all the trainees to gather the votes from the public.

Overall, I kind of had fun? I laughed quite a few times, even managed to cry here and there. I feel like I was just spoiled by season 3. Not only were there twice as many episodes, but also all the episodes were longer than the ones in season 1 - with that, I was able to get to know and get invested in the trainees and their journey far more.