'My legs were shaking, I could barely breathe': Can hardship variety shows make a comeback?

"It felt like I'd been scammed into a job," said Do-un. Four men who had never given hiking a second thought find themselves climbing a mountain together.

"All I could think was that if I kept going up, I'd get to eat," said Tarzan. Sure enough, the kind of hardship they had never experienced in their lives was waiting for them.

"The stunning view from the summit felt like something truly special," said Lee Chae-min.

"I thought about tipping off the press or even filing a lawsuit," said Car, the Garden. Even now, looking back on the ordeal, the frustration has not fully faded.

Netflix drops its new variety show "Why on Earth Do People Hike?" on Tuesday. The show follows four people who have never cared for mountains — Car, the Garden; Do-un of the group Day6; actor Lee Chae-min; and Tarzan of Allday Project — as they attempt to conquer a snow-covered peak. It marks the third collaboration between the Na Young-seok production team and Netflix, following "Seo Jin's Africa" and "Lee Seo-jin's Dalla Dalla," and is directed by Park Hyeon-yong, known for "New Journey to the West" and "Ppyong Ppyong Earth Arcade."

Director Park Hyeon-yong said at a press showcase for the show — held Wednesday morning at Hotel Naru in Mapo-gu, Seoul — that the program grew out of a simple idea: "I thought that people who hate hiking might bond and grow close if they struggled up a mountain together." He added that he deliberately kept the hiking plan from the cast during recruitment. "They probably had a very hard time when they showed up and found themselves doing something they never wanted to do," he said.

The show pushes four reluctant participants onto a snow-covered winter mountain, signaling the return of a format largely absent from Korean variety television: the hardship show, where celebrities are thrown into real physical ordeals rather than studio sets. Whether four very different personalities sharing their rawest emotions in extreme conditions can chart a new course for the genre remains to be seen.

Few things are more entertaining than watching someone else suffer from the comfort of your own home. There is no official definition of the "hardship variety show," but the image it conjures is broadly consistent across the industry and among viewers: celebrities thrown not into a studio set but into real wilderness or remote environments, enduring genuine cold, hunger and exhaustion with their bodies on the line. Put simply, it is a format built around making its cast suffer — on camera, for laughs.

The genre's prototype is widely considered to be KBS's "2 Days & 1 Night," which first aired in 2007. The show earned broad appeal across age groups by dropping cast members in snowbound mountain villages with nothing but a tent, or stranding individuals alone in absurd locations — delivering a primal kind of comedy rooted in real discomfort. Under producers Lee Myeong-han and Na Young-seok, the show averaged ratings above 20 percent through the early 2010s, leading what many consider the golden age of hardship variety.

Around the same time, SBS launched "Law of the Jungle with Kim Byung-man" in 2011, sending its cast to overseas jungles, uninhabited islands and polar regions to survive using primitive methods. The show ran for a decade and set a record for the most overseas remote-location shoots in Korean variety history. Built on the distinctive concept of survival and self-sufficiency, it held the No. 1 Friday variety slot for an extended period and posted peak ratings in the 15 to 17 percent range.

In pushing its cast into extreme conditions, "Why on Earth Do People Hike?" follows the classic hardship variety playbook — and then raises the stakes further by sending four novices up a notoriously rugged mountain in the dead of winter.

"Winter is the season mountaineers love most, because the snowscapes are simply stunning," Park said. "I was hoping that when four young men face an extreme environment, you'd get real, unfiltered reactions — and the kind of raw chemistry that comes from suffering together."

While it is hard to pinpoint exactly when the hardship variety genre began its decline, its presence on Korean television today is minimal. The only show keeping the format alive is the ongoing "2 Days & 1 Night" series, whose fourth season is currently posting nationwide ratings in the 7 percent range — well below its peak.

In its place, observation shows following celebrities' daily lives, romance-driven dating programs, and survival brain-game formats — led by series such as "Devil's Plan" and "The Bloody Game" — have long established themselves as the dominant variety genres.

This year's variety landscape has followed much the same pattern. Established romance-show brands mounted a heavy push — Netflix's "Solo Hell," Channel A's "Heart Signal" and Tving's "Transit Love" among them — while mystery and brain-survival formats held their ground, with Disney+'s "Murder Club," Wavve's "The Bloody Game X" and KBS's debate-survival show "The Logic" all drawing audiences. Hardship variety, however, remained conspicuously absent.

One industry insider said the pandemic dealt a direct blow to formats built around groups of celebrities going somewhere and suffering together. "Location-based shows cost more to produce than people realize, and when the hardship becomes repetitive, viewers burn out," the person said. "There are a number of reasons the format faded."

Against that backdrop, "Why on Earth Do People Hike?" aims to revive the genre by pairing the classic hardship variety formula — physical suffering as a source of comedy — with a fresh cast. The production team says the show absorbs the trends of the current era rather than simply replicating what hardship variety looked like a decade ago.

"I really don't think I can do this show," Car, the Garden said in one clip. Producer Na Young-seok said he assembled the cast while "envisioning a next-generation variety group to carry the next decade." They make a point of dismantling the old hardship-show cliché — the tearful, emotionally cathartic summit moment that defined the genre 10 to 20 years ago.

"In the old days, if you climbed a mountain and watched the sunrise, you absolutely had to cry. The formula was to put the cast through hardship and extract both laughs and emotional payoff," Na said. "But in the summer of 2026, people with less variety experience will look at a sunrise after all that suffering and just say, 'I'm too worn out to even look at this.' I think that's the genuine reaction — and that's the sensibility of today."

"This show has an answer to the question of what 'hardship' means in variety television today," Na added. "We'll show you a hardship show that looks nothing like the ones from the past."

In that sense, "Why on Earth Do People Hike?" fills the one conspicuously empty slot in the current variety landscape — physical suffering — and does so with a deliberately off-kilter sensibility. The cast's own earnest plea for viewers not to watch, on the grounds that a hit show would mean another mountain climb, is itself a sign of just how far the format has drifted from convention.

Car, the Garden said he has been telling people around him not to watch the show. "If it gets popular, I might have to go hiking again," he said. "But if you all enjoy it, I suppose there's nothing I can do. I just hope you lie back comfortably in your room and laugh at someone else's misery."

Tarzan said watching four honest, straightforward men climb a snow-covered mountain is genuinely entertaining. "That said, next time I'll make sure to take responsibility and stop us from going hiking," he added.