For more than five years, the Korean reality dating show Single’s Inferno has held viewers in thrall. Each season, the show, which debuted on Netflix in December 2021, leaves a dozen or so attractive single Koreans stranded on a deserted island with few resources. Their only way out is by making love connections that will grant them a momentary reprieve in the form of an overnight date at a luxurious hotel called “Paradise.”
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Single’s Inferno Season 5, the most recent installment, has been heralded as a return to form of sorts for a show that has maintained its popularity but has sometimes struggled to create as many romantic connections as producers and viewers would hope for. Some previous tweaks to the general format, including allowing contestants to go on back-to-back “Paradise” dates with the same person, have allowed deeper connections to grow. However, other tweaks, such as the introduction of two “Inferno” camps rather than just one in Season 3, hindered romantic progress.
Heading into Season 5, after a Season 4 in which the romantic life of contestant Lee Si-an took up much of the narrative space, producer Kim Jae-won was looking to find “a really nice balance” between novelty and a proven format that would allow for a diversity of connection and character moments. “For Season 5, we didn’t want to go for drastic changes in format,” says Kim. “[We wanted to] make sure it feels natural, and then we can show more of the charms of the characters.”
Single’s Inferno Season 5 has racked up more than 45 million hours watched in its third week on Netflix’s Top Ten Non-English Shows. With the finale airing on Feb. 10., let’s break down where things stand with this season’s contestants and their love connections.
Choi Mina Sue becomes the season’s breakout character
Season 5 launched with a bang in January, immediately sending the most popular female contestant and the most popular male contestant to “Paradise” with dates of their choosing. Meanwhile, back on “Inferno,” the producers brought in new contestants. While the show typically adds cast members, known as “game changers,” midway through each season, this time, they added some new people to the mix early on to encourage additional connections. “The reason why we did that is because some of the fans missed how, in Seasons 1 and 2, on the first day, [the contestants] cook dinner together, they eat, and then they write letters to each other,” says Kim. “They love those small moments. So we wanted to still keep that, but pace it up a little bit.”
Kim was pleased with the results, as connections formed between various contestants from the jump. Many of them were between University of Illinois student Choi Mina Sue and various male contestants, including fashion marketer Song Seung-il; model and former baseball pitcher Lee Su-been; and quant trader Lee Sung-hun (aka Samuel Lee). As the season progressed, Mina Sue became a much-discussed figure for her indecision around who to choose.
“I think she was being 100% transparent with herself, and that’s something that’s really hard to do when you know that there’s cameras and you’re on camera,” says Kim of Mina Sue’s character arc in Single’s Inferno Season 5. “But she knows how to show her vulnerability. She knows that she sometimes can be, you know, contradicting herself, but she doesn’t care. She would just let it on the camera. And I think that was very courageous of her to do that.”
The roller coaster ride of Mina Sue’s Single’s Inferno arc, which prompted “pick me girl” criticism and viral villain edits from some viewers, was a surprise to producers, who don’t monitor every conversation in real time while filming. “It was really fun for us as well, when we were editing, seeing all those different things that were happening inside her head,” says Kim. “I’m very thankful that she has been very transparent with herself. I think it’s always fun to have three dimensional characters, whether it be movies or series or reality shows.”
Casting Single’s Inferno’s biggest season yet
For Kim, character is at the heart of Single’s Inferno, which is what makes the casting process so important. “From season one, the most important quality that we looked for in the participants was charm and attractiveness, but as we were doing four seasons, what we felt was that the power of communication is really important,” he says. “[They need to be] able to really communicate with the other cast and to talk with each other from the bottom of their hearts.” This specific skill of reality series communication can be especially difficult to cast for. ”Sometimes, when we were doing interviews beforehand with the participants, it felt like they were really good at communicating,” says Kim. “But, then, once they’re on the island, they’re sort of awkward, or they’re not showing as much charm as we thought they would.”
When casting for Season 5, the Single’s Inferno producers introduced an additional step to the interview process. “We created this kind of a mock interview that really resembles what the talk and communication will be like on the island,” says Kim. “So then we can really see how this person will act and talk when they’re on the Inferno.”
This season also saw an increase in the number of contestants. In Season 1, Single’s Inferno featured six women and six men. In Season 4, seven women and six women came to the island. In Season 5, the cast grew to seven women and eight men, increasing the possibility for connections to form. “The thing that I learned for sure throughout the seasons is that there are no good people and bad people, but there’s good chemistry and bad chemistry,” says Kim. “In order to see all the different types of chemistries, you need a lot of different people, and you need diversity too.”
Single’s Inferno Season 5 finale love matches
The shift in perspective seemed to work for Season 5, with more of the contestants finding some degree of love connection. While freelance announcer Ham Ye-jin and model Lee Ha-eun left the island without having experienced any notable romance, the rest of the cast took their shots in the finale.
Following Choi Mina Sue’s mid-season flip-flopping, model Kim Go-eun emerged as the most popular of the female contestants. Heading into the finale, optician Woo Sung-min, handball coach Shin Hyeon-woo, and The Trunk actor Jo I-geon were all vying for Kim Go-eun’s heart. In the end, Go-eun chose Sung-min, whose easy-going yet steadfast commitment fell somewhere between Hyeon-woo’s full-throated flirting and I-geon’s rakish energy.
Mina Sue’s fickle mid-season behavior also led to suitors Su-been and Seung-il losing interest. However, Sung-hun, who connected with Mina Sue in part due to their shared comfort expressing themselves in English, never wavered in his interest. The two chose one another in the final episode, walking away from Inferno hand and hand despite never going on a date in Paradise.
After his connection with Mina Sue faltered, Su-been grew closer to Carnegie Mellon student Park Hee-sun. Though Hee-sun had her reservations following the revelation that Su-been had shared a bed with track and field athlete Kim Min-gee while in Paradise, she decided to give Su-been another shot. The two were recorded watching the Single’s Inferno finale together, implying that they have stayed in touch after the production’s conclusion.
While Min-gee may have shared a bed with Su-been in Paradise, she never shook her feelings for Seung-il. The two clarified their connection prior to the finale ceremony, spending much of the final episode in carefree bliss.
The same could be said for contemporary dancer Kim Jae-jin and ceramic artist Lee Joo-young. While IT office worker Youn Hyun-jae also asked Joo-young to leave Inferno with him, she had already told both Hyun-jae and Jae-jin that her heart lies with the latter. From a viewer’s point of view, Joo-young and Jae-jin seem like they have the best shot at translating their connection on Single’s Inferno into a real-world relationship.
Single’s Inferno Season 6 and beyond
While the Single’s Inferno contestants keep the status of their relationships famously vague, with no couple confirmed to still be together from the first four seasons, we will find out more about the fate of the Season 5 romances in the Single’s Inferno Season 5 reunion, set to air on Feb. 14.
On a broader note, Kim says the production team plans on trying to maintain the scope of contestants seen in Season 5 in future seasons. “Going forward, I think we are going to keep with having more participants in the show in order to have that diversity and the number of interesting people and different perspectives,” he says. “That’s going to be our goal and our challenge.”
One element of Season 5 that probably won’t continue in future seasons? The option to forgo going to Paradise when given the opportunity. In Season 5, Hyeon-woo opted out of going on a Paradise date he won, after Go-eun was chosen by I-geon and therefore unavailable as a partner. “Hyeon-woo came to the crew and asked if he is allowed not to go to Paradise,” says Kim of how the series-shifting moment went down. “We had a discussion, and then we told him that he can choose not to go. I think, at the time being, that was the right choice for Hyeon-woo. So that’s why we told him he could.”
However, Kim says future Single’s Inferno contestants most likely won’t get the same option and will have to go to Paradise when they get the opportunity. “If we let this happen all the time, maybe there could be some side effects,” says Kim. “Maybe more people would think of not going to Paradise?”
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