Light and Shadow

“An artist should recognize a metaphor” a character tells the show’s protagonist towards the end. And like Jin Soo Wan’s earlier shows, this one uses metaphor (in this case the trope of time travel) to explore how pain can become the garden in which art and joy grow, how parents can fail and save their children, and how it is not luck or fame or fortune but love that keeps us rooted in this broken world.

Most shows hesitate to mix comedy with serious themes, as if by merging the two, they’ll either destroy the lightness of the former or dilute the gravitas of the latter. Twinkling Watermelon explores child abuse, neglect, suicidal ideation, and discrimination against the deaf community, but it does so amidst a candy-colored swirl of music and unbridled teen exuberance. Its characters face real trauma, but they also laugh and flirt and rock out with their friends and wear their hearts on their sleeves for all to see. There are few dramas as unapologetic in their delight as this one, and even when plot points get messy or a random gang of thugs appears, the show’s warmth never falters. And in the end, it suggests that’s what truly matters both in art and life.

So to judge it by this criteria, does this show spark joy? Yes. So, so much. And its happy moments shine all the brighter for being set against the darkness.

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Much like screenwriter Ryu Yong Jae’s earlier Liar Game, Pied Piper boasts two intriguingly complex male leads and it’s well worth watching just to enjoy Shin Ha Kyun and Yoo Joon Sang’s fantastic performances. They put flower boys to shame as they prove how mesmerizing sheer unadulterated screen presence can be. Unfortunately, the female lead, despite being capably acted as well, gets marginalized as the story progresses, becoming a muse and motivator for the men rather than a dynamic plot driver in her own right. It’s a shame, since her relegation to token damsel in distress blunts the impact of her unique perspective on injustice and its remedies. As the show turned to increasingly dire (and increasingly less plausible) schemes revolving around the guys it started to lose me. There were some great acting moments, but I never felt that the show’s payoffs were as compelling as its set-ups. I kept wanting the one character truly dedicated to positive change to actually, you know, initiate positive change. Instead she shifted to the sidelines as the world crashed and burned around her. For a show predicated on giving voice to the victims of violence, it felt oddly ironic. Pied Piper deserves applause for venturing into unconventional drama territory, but it doesn't always have the courage of its own convictions.

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I often criticize shows for lacking dramatic structure, but Fermentation Family is the rare work that I actually wish had a less tightly constructed plot. There are gangsters, revenge schemes, birth secrets and nefarious corporations galore but underneath all the thriller trappings is a lovely, bittersweet meditation on family, food and loss. Most of the show unfolds in a traditional restaurant, and when it stays grounded in the routines and rituals of making a meal or creating a community, it’s wonderful. I could hang out with its motley band of lost souls forever as they chop vegetables, drink makgeolli and watch the seasons change. All of the complicated story machinations feel clunky next to the power of their simple human moments.

Speaking of human moments, a great deal of the show’s charm comes from its strong ensemble cast. As much as I love Song Il-Guk in serious sageuk mode, it’s a delight to watch him in a more comic role. He’s a marvelous physical actor, and his shy, awkward romance with Park Jin-Hee is one of my favorites in K-drama. A few of the secondary characters are overplayed, but most strike a nice balance between humor and heartfeltness.

If you can survive the awkward first episode, the occasional jarring tonal shifts and the general overabundance of narrative threads, you’ll be rewarded with quiet, gorgeously filmed scenes of flawed people learning to connect, forgive, and let go. The show doesn’t offer any easy answers to the world’s problems, but it provides a welcome retreat to shelter from the storms.

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A Man’s Story can’t decide what type of show it wants to be. It starts out as an angst-y revenge thriller, morphs into an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist caper, and then shifts into anti-corporate social justice mode with extra helpings of psychological case study. Some of these narrative threads are more compelling than others (I was particularly fond of the band of misfits caper plot), but the show’s inability to pick one gives it a disjointed feel. This is a shame, since the acting and directing are generally strong and self-assured. There is a cool, jazz-tinted vibe to the whole affair that nicely mirrors the icy charm of its antagonist, compellingly played by Kim Kang Woo. I also appreciated the quirky, well-drawn side characters, including a gruff female detective, a folksy mayor, and Park Ki Woong in a lovely performance as an autistic savant.

Unfortunately, the tonal and thematic shifts kept me from fully engaging with the show. As an indictment of corporate greed, it felt preachy and unfocused, especially since the primary representative of “The Man” was presented as a very singular individual with a diagnosed mental illness. Its attempts to address broader social issues never quite gelled with the personal grudges, warped family relationships, and cat-and-mouse brinksmanship that made up the bulk of its plot. When it was content to be entertaining it was a lot of fun. When it tried for “serious” and “relevant” it lost me. The personal may be political, but in this case, the politics felt like more weight than the specific human dramas of the show could carry.

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Alone in Love is one of the most depressing dramas I’ve watched, an unusual distinction for a show that doesn’t end with a pile of dead bodies, or even a pile of irrevocably broken hearts. It’s not so much an issue of dark plot twists, though there are real tragedies in the characters’ histories, as of overall world view. If you ever wondered what a romantic comedy would look like refracted through the lithium-laced sensibility of a suicide here’s your chance. When I later read that the author of the Japanese novel the show is based on killed himself, a lot of pieces fell into place.

If you can stomach the underlying bleakness (and incessant donut shilling), the drama does feature outstanding performances by Son Ye Jin and Kam Woo Sung as a divorced couple struggling to move on. Their scenes are funny and heartbreaking, if a bit repetitive, as they try to reconcile old wounds with lingering desires. The rest of the cast is strong as well, keeping the show engaging when the meandering plot becomes too slice-of-life for its own good. However, even when things are going swimmingly for all concerned, an omnipresent haze of alienation lingers like stale cigarette smoke over the proceedings. The script may tell you that better days lie ahead, but it’s more convincing in its pain than in its joy.

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If you told me that one of the most gloriously, unapologetically queer shows I’ve watched would come from Mainland China, I would have been . . . skeptical. But here we are, and The Untamed is a thing of beauty indeed. It’s a masterclass in how to tell the story you want to tell in the face of repressive censorship, and a breath of fresh air after years of watching Asian dramas where LGBTQ+ characters, if they exist at all, tend to be marginalized or pathologized. Better yet, the protagonist is presented as not only completely comfortable with his sexuality, but as explicitly rejecting the warrior codes that define manhood through ego, status, and how aggressively one waves one’s, uhm, sword around. Also, while there is a great deal of angst in the show, virtually none of it comes from the central relationship. Love in this drama is a source of strength, not shame – something to be embraced and defended, not cast aside as weakness. While the production team may not be able to show the physical progression of the romance, they lean into the emotional beats instead, understanding that “I love yous” shown through actions are more powerful than those expressed in words. The cast's acting levels vary, technical elements can be shaky at times, and, with one exception, the female characters are much less interesting in the guys, but these are minor issues. In a world of thousands of rules, the show suggests the only one that really matters is choosing people over power. It may not stop all loss and heartache, but you’ll have others there to catch you when you fall.

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Am I a shallow person that my main take away from A Million Stars Falling from the Sky is that KimuTaku is smoking hot? If you’re wondering where all the sex scenes in Asian drama went, they’re in this show, as the mysterious, potentially deadly Ryo beds half the women in Tokyo. Of course, all this carnality leads to VERY BAD THINGS, but that doesn’t mean the fireworks aren’t fun while they last. The show aims to push envelopes and buttons, and is certainly a gripping watch, with three leads who all give compelling performances.

However, unlike the puzzle which forms one of its recurring images, I didn’t find that the pieces completely fit together. Characters frequently acted (or failed to act) in ways that strained credibility and undermined the psychological realism of the piece. Also, the final string of disasters/reveals didn’t really work for me either as tragedy or karmic payback. The Greeks astutely noted that tragedy isn’t bad things happening to innocent people or bad things happening to guilty people, but bad things happening to exceptional but flawed people whose errors directly bring about their downfall. Here the victims felt either too blameless or too tainted for the events to have maximum impact. Despite all the sparks (and bullets) flying, I felt rather detached as the final dominos fell. Like its sociopathic antihero, the show is darkly beautiful, but it never felt entirely emotionally engaged.

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Most dramatic works focus on the actions of individuals. Characters make good or bad decisions, and their choices drive the plot. While this makes for compelling storytelling, it ignores the role of larger social structures in driving those choices. What makes Stranger 2 so remarkable is the way it foregrounds these structures, exploring how they can override and corrupt individual agency. It looks at what happens when the rot is not the result of a few bad apples but something baked into institutional cultures and explores how even the most upright people end up making moral compromises in order to function. While the show never excuses those who exploit these structures for personal gain, it argues that systemic problems can only be solved by building better systems. It’s smart enough though to acknowledge that organizations will always be as fallible as the humans who create them, and that “better” will never equal perfect.

From a storytelling perspective, the show starts slowly, spending the first several hours on seemingly trivial details. However, things pick up around episode 6 and the disparate narrative threads come together into a compelling whole. Its focus on the power struggles within Korean law enforcement recognizes that how a society pursues justice ultimately determines whether or not it will obtain it. Heroic cops and prosecutors like Yeo Jin and Shi Mok are great, but they are only as effective as the institutions they represent.

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I started Beyond Evil expecting a dark, twisty crime drama. I got something even better. Because while the show delivers a solid thriller plot, at its heart it’s a love story. Not a romance, but a close character study of deeply traumatized people fighting like hell for justice, absolution, and each other. The entire cast is excellent, but the real fireworks happen whenever Shin Ha Kyun and Yeo Jin Goo are on screen together. Their frenemy partnership is one of the most explosive actor pairings I’ve seen in years, a raw, bruising encounter of open emotional wounds as two people from very different worlds discover just how similar they are.

Most murder mysteries focus on solving the crime, but this one explores the damage left behind – the way friendships and communities fray, the guilt of survivors, the difficulty of finding closure, the fact that neither vengeance nor arrests are ever really “enough.” The show also recognizes that atonement is an action taken, not a gift bestowed. It never lets its characters escape responsibility for their choices, but it also grants the option of redemption. There is a lot of darkness in this world, but it suggests that even at our most broken, we are worthy of love and capable of grace.

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Aw hell yeah! Christmas came early this year, in the form of a smart, dark thriller packed with whiplash twists, intriguing characters, and complex moral quandaries. This is one of my favorite genres when done well, and Liar Game served up arsenic-laced crack in twelve fast, furious episodes. Best of all, it made intellect sexy. The rules of the competitions may have been overly Byzantine, but it was a blast watching minds capable of calculating probabilities in milliseconds unravel them. The fact that those minds belonged to scarred, unpredictable antiheroes was the big, fool’s gold bow on top of the package.

However, for a drama premised on betrayal, it was surprisingly uncynical. I wish Da Jung had been less saintly and a bit faster on the uptake (or that the gender roles had been reversed – does the sweet, naïve character always have to be female?), but I appreciated how her worldview was handled in the greater context of the story. The fall from grace is an easy tale to tell, but the show suggests that if we all hold on, even the deserving don't have to tumble into the dark.

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Like its teenage characters, School 2013 is awkward, earnest, and testing its limits. Although it’s told from the perspective of Jang Na Ra and Daniel Choi’s rather hapless teachers, the relationships and struggles of the students form the heart of the show, and it does a particularly good job exploring the lives of young men on the margins and the ways that society and traditional schooling fail them. To its credit, it avoids the feel-good fallacy that a savior teacher is all it takes to overcome these issues, suggesting that while supportive adults can certainly help, larger structural changes are needed to keep at-risk kids from slipping through the cracks. It was also nice to see a show ditch the standard heteronormative love square and pair up its two main male students and two main female students instead. While romance isn't the central focus, the recognition that queer kids face their own range of issues (and can find awesome partners) was appreciated. The plotting can be clunky at times and it’s not an especially realistic look at the art of teaching, but the show’s obvious love for its characters as they fumble towards adulthood and its refusal to endorse magical solutions to their problems elevate it above most high school shows. Its lessons may be messy, but they ring all the more true because of it.

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Chicago Typewriter pairs art and armed revolt in its double entendre title and interwoven timelines. The pen and sword, the typewriter and the tommy gun, are put through their paces as agents of change and righters of wrongs in a gorgeously directed show filled with striking visual storytelling. The three leads have lovely chemistry, especially in the all-too-brief glimpses of their past lives in occupied Korea as they try, and often fail, to honor both their love for country and each other. The present world may have less idealistic fervor, messier character dynamics and more random animal encounters, but it provides needed space to interrogate how trauma echoes down through generations. Like Jin Soo Won’s other dramas, this one mixes off-kilter humor, magical realism and deeply serious themes, a combination that may not work for everyone. However, if you’re willing to suspend a whole lot of disbelief, you’ll find a show that looks unflinchingly at the horrors of the past, while also showing how art can honor, remember, and forgive.

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Oh, dear lord, Bad Guy. On the one hand, the script is a disaster, its ineptitude obvious long before the crash and burn finale. On the other hand, three of the four leads have both talent and screen presence, making them great fun to watch when they’re not tripping over loopy narrative threads. Part of the problem is that the director and writers appear to be telling two completely different stories. In interviews, the director mentioned wanting to create a modern version of Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black”, focused on ambitious outsiders seducing their way to the top. This element of the story is actually interesting, and, had it been fully developed, could have been twisted, sexy fun. The writers apparently never got the memo though, as they crank out a paint-by-numbers revenge drama, complete with ham-fisted moralizing, dead puppies, and incoherent plot twists.

If you can tune out the big picture and focus on the pretty, there are lots of entertaining scenes full of atmospheric camera work, great music and sizzling chemistry. Just don’t expect it to all add up to anything by the time you get to the end.

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