5th Gen Idols Take Over Amazing Saturday — Here's Who Stole the Show

Korean variety television has a long tradition of using the idol spotlight as both a talent showcase and a personality test. On this week's episode of tvN's Amazing Saturday, the show handed the microphone to four of the most talked-about names from the fifth generation of K-pop — and the results were exactly as entertaining as fans expected, and somehow even better.

The second installment of the show's "Jewel Box" special, which aired Saturday, April 25 at 7:30 p.m. KST, brought together TooS member Dohun, NCT Wish's Sion, Kickflip's Gyehun, and KIKI's Kyia for an afternoon of games, surprises, and personality reveals that kept the studio in near-constant laughter. The regular cast — hosts Shin Dongyeop and Taeyeon leading their competing teams — had their work cut out for them.

The Four Guests and Why Each One Matters

TooS, the six-member boy group that industry insiders flagged as one of the most promising debuts of 2024, sent Dohun — the member described by his own groupmates as the unofficial group caretaker. He arrived on set noticeably shy, which the show played against his warmth: within minutes, he was sharing stories about the group's fandom name (Doreumi), listing the activities he most wants to do alongside fans, and radiating the kind of genuine affection that makes variety television work. The soft exterior contains a deep well of feeling for the people around him.

NCT Wish, SM Entertainment's newest NCT sub-unit, was represented by Sion — and Sion's introduction became one of the episode's first memorable moments. The contrast is immediate: visuals that belong in a fashion campaign, a presence that fills a room, and then a speaking voice and manner that reads as genuinely, warmly folksy. It is the kind of gap that Korean fans call "gap moe" — the appeal of something being the opposite of what you expect — and the studio responded to it immediately.

Kickflip's Gyehun is from JYP Entertainment, which means he arrived carrying a specific kind of industry context. Kickflip, the seven-member group that debuted in January 2025 after Gyehun spent a decade as a JYP trainee, has built a reputation for technical performance and strong group chemistry. What nobody fully anticipated was Gyehun's variety television instincts. His self-introduction — describing himself as a "living-wage flirt" who flirts "just to survive, not because I want to" — landed hard and set the tone for his afternoon.

KIKI's Kyia, the youngest guest on set, is fifteen years old and conducted herself as if that fact were irrelevant. Described by the show's producers as a "Nollato kid" — a reference to viewers who have grown up watching Amazing Saturday — Kyia delivered sharp intuition during the game segments and a performance confidence that older guests were still building at twice her age.

Gyehun's Afternoon Under Supervision

The thread that ran through the episode's most comedic sequences was Gyehun's tendency to toggle between genuine confidence, obvious bravado, and something that looked suspiciously like genuine variety talent. He pushed, provoked, acted certain about answers before immediately second-guessing them, and generally gave the impression that he had arrived specifically to make everyone around him react.

What he did not fully account for was that his JYP senior Young K — the songwriter and vocalist from DAY6 who contributed lyrics to Kickflip's track "Warriors" — was watching from outside the studio. When Gyehun's behavior reached a threshold that apparently required intervention, Young K appeared to provide what the show described as "special management." The details of that interaction are being held for the broadcast, but the phrase "special management" in this context is doing a lot of work.

The backstory adds weight to the moment: Gyehun's connection to Young K is not incidental. The DAY6 vocalist's creative involvement in Kickflip's debut album was both a practical contribution and a vote of confidence from an established JYP artist toward the group's first generation of performers. Finding himself on the receiving end of Young K's supervision, on national television, is the kind of scene that earns a clip its own social media life.

The Games: Where Personalities Got Tested

The episode's game segments divided the guests and regular cast across two competing teams — Taeyeon's group and Shin Dongyeop's group — for a series of games that included word-association challenges and the show's signature dictation round, in which contestants must accurately transcribe the lyrics of a played song.

The dictation segment featured first-generation idol songs from the 1990s, chosen at a difficulty level that reportedly flustered even Moon Seyoon, a regular cast member with strong credentials in that era's music. The fifth-generation guests, approaching the material as cultural archaeology rather than memory, attacked the challenge with variable accuracy and remarkable enthusiasm. Sion and Kyia each caught critical words at decisive moments; Dohun and Gyehun contributed energy and vocal opinions throughout.

An additional closing segment — an initial-consonant quiz built around K-pop song titles — gave each guest a moment to show off range that extended beyond their usual performance context. Kyia's instinctive responses, Sion's unexpected live moment, and Gyehun's commitment to whatever register the scene required all became material that the show's producers will be clipping for the next week.

What the Episode Says About the Fifth Generation's Variety Potential

The conversation about fifth-generation idols in Korean entertainment usually centers on performance metrics: chart positions, concert ticket sales, streaming numbers, overseas fan engagement. What episodes like this one do is fill in the parts of the picture that performance data cannot capture — whether these artists can be genuinely funny, genuinely warm, and genuinely present when the situation does not call for a choreographed response.

The four guests who appeared on Amazing Saturday this week answered that question in different ways, but all of them answered it affirmatively. TooS's Dohun made the studio feel looked after. NCT Wish's Sion made it laugh. Kickflip's Gyehun made it nervous in the best possible way. And KIKI's Kyia, the youngest person in the building, made it feel like the next generation arrived ahead of schedule.

Amazing Saturday airs every Saturday at 7:30 p.m. KST on tvN.