Having been running for the last 15 years, TV Asahi’s Zenryokuzaka is one of Japan’s most longstanding television shows, which is a bit strange considering its simple premise.

Every night at 1:20 a.m., Monday to Thursday, thousands of people tune in to TV Asahi to watch the latest episode of Zenryokuzaka, a bizarre show featuring women running up steep streets. Each episode lasts no more than six minute, including the opening and closing credits, and focuses solely on following the protagonist as she runs up the street. It’s an extremely simplistic concept, even for late-night TV, but one that has somehow remained popular in Japan for the last 15 years.

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Plastic surgery has always fascinated people, so it’s no surprise that shows like Botched or Extreme Makeover are so popular, but nowhere in the world is going under the knife more mainstream than in South Korea, so it makes sense that the Asian country’s own plastic surgery reality show is bigger than any Western shows can ever hope to get.

Let Me In is a hit reality TV show about transforming poor and socially excluded women through plastic surgery in order to give them better lives. But we’re not talking about a simple nose job, some lip fillers and lots of makeup here, most of the candidates chosen to go under the knife come out looking unrecognizable, with some displaying different bone structure and completely changed general features, like the shape of their eyes and mouth. Let Me In has been running for a decade now, and it continues to be a massive television success, although it has also attracted its share of criticism for glorifying plastic surgery.

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In a controversial case that has been the talk of a whole country these last few days, a 13-year-old girl went on TV to tell the world that she is pregnant with her 10-year-old boyfriend.

The two children, Darya and Ivan, recently appeared on Russian television show “On Air Live” to tell their story, get tested and be confronted by experts about their controversial pregnancy. Reports of Ivan having impregnated his 13-year-old girlfriend had been going around Russian social media all last week, but the couple’s parents gave their permission for them to finally show their faces to the world. The 13-year-old girl claimed that she had not been intimate with other boys than Ivan, and her version was believed by a psychologist, but then other experts produced evidence that Ivan was too young to leave anyone pregnant.

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A Kuwaiti female news anchor was recently suspended by the Ministry of Information for jokingly calling a male correspondent ‘handsome’ during a live TV broadcast.

Basima al-Shammar a news anchor for Kuwait TV, was covering Kuwait’s municipal election last weekend, when she made the mistake of jokingly complementing a male correspondent live on air. In a video that has since went viral, Al-Shammar can be heard telling her male colleague, who didn’t know he was already on live TV and was still adjusting his traditional headgear, that he didn’t need to fix his looks because he was already handsome. In the Western world, this would have passed as a simple compliment, but in Kuwait, it was perceived as flirtation on the female anchor’s side.

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54-year-old Konstantin Scherbinin, a Russian multi-millionaire who made his fortune in the oil business, is letting his children pick out his next wife on a controversial reality show called ‘Millionaire for Marriage’.

Scherbinin has allegedly vowed to respect the on-screen decision of his three daughters and one son, and propose to the lucky woman they select out of the 2,000 hopeful candidates. To show his commitment to the reality show, the oil mogul has designated his oldest son to run his businesses while he and the rest of the family focus on finding a new bride. The producers of Millionaire for Marriage have been criticized by Russian viewers for turning a show that is supposed to be about love into a battle for a sugar daddy who can provide a comfortable life fot the winner.

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