Pop Star Academy Katseye: Netflix’s global girl-group doc brings K-pop to the classic “Making the Band” reality show format.

When HYBE, a major South Korean entertainment corporation, and Geffen, a mainstream American record label, decided to combine forces to put together what they described as the world’s first “global girl group,” they gave themselves one year to create pop’s next big thing from the ground up. The show takes us through the strategy for scouting and condensing this process into a timeline of less than a year, leading to 20 girls being chosen to live together in Los Angeles for the “first-ever class of HYBE America training and development.” While in T&D, HYBExGeffen’s team evaluates the trainees every few months, openly ranking them on their performance skills as well as their attitude and improvement and sending the bottom-ranked members home before ushering in new girls to both keep the remaining trainees’ competitive spirit alive and bolster areas in which their trainees might be lacking. Because, beyond simply being good TV—for these young women, the stakes are the highest they’ve yet encountered—Pop Star Academy offers viewers a peek inside the pop machine. Only time will tell if Katseye really pulls off the runway like the execs hope, but at the very least, Pop Star Academy is proof that pop-industry reality TV is finally back.