Intro for March 27, 2026

Dear Gossips,

Baseball is back, baby! Here in Toronto a new Blue Jays season begins tonight – I’ll be there to see the new banners, to welcome home our beloved crew of ragtag silly misfits who went from worst to first (in the American League) last season and charmed fans of the sport beyond Canada by becoming living memes. Advancing to the World Series while sleeping in their cars or couch surfing, their cute little dances, wearing each other’s faces on their t-shirts… actually, it was a whole season of team hijinks and killer chemistry, chemistry that powered them all the way to the Fall Classic.

And I made the comparison already back in November, the convergence for me personally, as a lifelong fan of the Toronto Blue Jays, and also a devoted member of BTS’s ARMY, that there is overlap here – because like the Jays, what ARMY loves so much about BTS, even though they are now global superstars, is that at the heart of it, they are still seven goofy kids from Korea who can at once give the most spectacular performances but also two minutes later be absolute clowns. Their secret sauce is how close they are, how much they love and respect each other, not unlike the Blue Jays of 2025 and, hopefully, 2026.

Those qualities are fully on display in BTS: The Return, the new documentary about their comeback that premiered today on Netflix. I got up at 4am to watch it, because I’ll be at the game tonight, so I wanted to start my day with Bangtan and end with Blue Jays. It was the right life decision, kicking off this Friday, a spring day, the first day of baseball in my city, with seven artists who let us into their creative process.

One of the strengths of the doc, in my opinion, as ARMY, is that it was made for ARMY. There’s no introduction, they’re not trying to appeal to every Netflix subscriber here with a BTS 101 – we get dropped in immediately without preamble as they work on the album in LA. And nothing is manufactured here; that is to say that there’s no embellishment in the documentation of their work. Sometimes the work isn’t “good TV”, because work can be a grind. RM, Jin, Suga, j-hope, Jimin, V, and Jung Kook were grinding in LA, at times they were struggling as they put the album together, unsure about the lyrics, about the arrangements, wondering whether or not they were forcing it with a few of the tracks.

It’s honest, it’s authentic, in the way they’ve always been. Especially the parts where they debate among each other whether or not ARIRANG works – as a sample in the song “Body to Body” which kicks off the album but even as the album title to kick off their second chapter. We see them disagreeing, respectfully, we see them split in two camps between those who are into it and those who have their doubts. We see their management team offering their opinions about the choices they should make in the music; we see RM talking about fear, the pressure…

But we also see them playing, eating together, slipping into the shorthand that they’ve established after so many years together. And, most powerfully, we see them WANTING to be together, CHOOSING to be together. We should all know, by now, how rare that would be, for a group to go off and pursue solo activities before serving a year and a half in the military, to basically run back to each other, and actually mean it.

As difficult as it might have been to make the album, the decision to reunite was never the challenge – and that brings me back to what I was saying earlier about their love for each other. No one is happier about BTS being back together than BTS, truly. They’re wealthy and successful now, individually. They’re in their 30s and they’ve just spent nine months putting together the album and will be on the road with each other non-stop for at least another year. Nothing is obligatory here, at this point it’s about willingness and desire.

Near the end of the film, during a photoshoot at Gyeongbokgung Palace, while all seven of them are standing in a line, Jung Kook can be heard saying, “We did it guys, we’re back together again”. He could also have been saying, “We’re finally home”.

Yours in gossip,

Lainey