The producing director (PD) of “Produce 101 Season 2” recently sat down for an interview to commemorate the conclusion of his hit survival show.

PD Ahn Joon Young had nothing but praise for BoA, the MC of the show. He revealed, “It’s not easy even for the production staff to remember the names of all 101 contestants, but BoA was able to memorize them all. I think the trainees reminded BoA of her own trainee days. She consistently gave them a lot of advice.”

When asked about the show’s popularity, PD Ahn Joon Young shared a funny story, saying, “When Lai Guan Lin dropped [from No.2 to No. 20], my mom and dad called me asking if he was getting eliminated from the show. They normally don’t really contact me, but they called me that one time to ask about Lai Guan Lin. That’s when I knew my parents were enjoying the show, too.”

He was then asked about the whole controversy regarding screen time distribution, to which he responded, “We focused on screen time distribution a lot more than we had during the first season. The previous season’s episodes each lasted for about 100 minutes, but this season’s episodes were each extended to about 140 minutes. We did this because we wanted to show more of our trainees. We tried our best to have our trainees remain in people’s memories.”

When asked why they only let 20 contestants move on to the final live broadcast, PD Ahn Joon Young answered, “Last season, we had 22 trainees perform one song at the final broadcast, but we didn’t really like that. We wanted the second season to have two songs, so we decided to divide 20 contestants into two groups of 10. We chose not to have 11 trainees in each group because we didn’t want people to think that the winning group would end up as the top 11.”

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