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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All the Feels

It seems so simple. Create nuanced characters that don’t slot neatly into standard role types. Give them time to build relationships. Make their choices hard. And yet, it’s rare to see shows do these things, and even rarer when one does them well. And, holy mother of demons and deities, does Love Between Fairy and Devil do them well. It understands that a show about emotions works best if it can make the audience feel every single one of them, and it uses carefully crafted storytelling and skilled directing to ensure just that. Whether it’s a moment of laugh-out-loud humor, sexy skinship, or heartrending grief, this team ensures that it lands, and lands hard. It’s a good old-fashioned melodrama in the best sense – one that recognizes that what we feel is the defining fact of who we are.

The show may be a fantasy, but when it comes to matters of the heart, it gives its characters no magic ways to fix things. Love is not instant, trauma lingers, and all loyalties cannot be honored equally. The cast’s skill levels vary, some of the visuals can be alarming, and the female lead makes a strong case for voice dubbing, but the show gets things right when it counts. While it may cop out ever so slightly in the final seconds, it argues that our real power comes not from what we cling to but from what we’re willing to sacrifice, and that while love may not conquer all, no conquest is worth a thing without it.

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An Anti-Romance in the Best Possible Way

The Red Sleeve does something I never thought I’d see in a K-drama - it dares to suggest that love may not conquer all. Most “romantic” sageuks start with the premise that every commoner or court lady dreams of being swept off her feet by a handsome prince, but few look closely at the power dynamics of such relationships, especially in the Joseon era where the patriarchy was so rigid that even the most powerful woman in the kingdom, the Queen Dowager, was essentially under house arrest. To its credit, The Red Sleeve centers this fundamental inequality, suggesting that consenting relationships are impossible if one person is the master and the other, functionally, a slave. It’s also smart enough to feature one of Joseon’s “best” kings as its male lead, emphasizing that the issue is systemic, not individual, and that no ruler, no matter how just, upright and swoony can be an ideal partner as long as they view their love interest as a possession. And when a woman must obey, the line between rape and mutual affection quickly blurs, even if the man is doing it “for her own good.” The discomfort the show induces is magnified by the fact that it includes no easy villains. Everyone has an agenda, but everyone is also trying to do their best in a world where protocol and order take precedence over human feeling. But when human feelings must be excised in the name of duty, the drama reminds us that it’s often women who take the fall. It asks us to reconsider whose lives matter, and argues that agency, even the agency to choose heartbreak, may be preferable to even the dreamiest of suitors.

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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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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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Chief Kim does something miraculous. It turns a show about accounting fraud into an absolute delight. Bookkeeping and balance sheets may not sound especially sexy, but if you’re in the mood for a quirky comedy underpinned by serious themes, you’ve come to the right show. Namgoong Min is stellar as a petty crook who decides that taking down the man is more fun than working for him, and he’s surrounded by an off-beat band of misfits whose superpowers range from strategic coffee delivery to aggressive janitorial espionage. I also highly appreciated Nam Sang Mi’s female lead, a sharp, capable career woman who was never relegated to token love interest.

While I don’t claim to have emerged from the show as an expert on cooking the books, the writer’s clearly done his research, displaying an impressive command of both the intricacies of financial fraud and the real world pain that such chicanery can cause. The drama argues that the devil is often very much in the details, showing how numbers on spreadsheets can destroy lives. While there’s tons of broad humor, the rage at the specific ways the system’s rigged is palpable, and the show knows how to land its serious moments as effectively as its silly ones. Best of all, it allows its characters to grow and change. Its sinners aren’t magically transformed into saints, but they learn how to come together to fight for a better future for themselves and others.

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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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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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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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Korean television rarely does science fiction, so Circle has novelty in its favor. Unfortunately it tries to cram the entire genre into a mere twelve episodes. It dashes from alien encounters to mad scientists to dystopian utopias to cyberpunk hackers to clones without ever stopping to flesh out a single theme or develop a unique voice and production style. It raises some interesting questions about the role memory plays in identity and whether trauma is an important part of our humanity or an impediment to happiness, but it never digs into its ideas in a meaty, revelatory way. Plot points are introduced to provide “twists” and then discarded when they’re no longer useful. Characters often behave in unbelievable ways, and perfunctory directing leads to visual inconsistencies and hackneyed acting choices. Yeo Jin Goo is talented enough to be riveting anyway, but the rest of the cast suffers. The final result is a show that feels more like a sketch than a finished product. It’s fast paced enough to hold viewers’ attention but it doesn’t give either of its worlds or timelines the care and attention they deserve.

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I don’t like serial killer dramas. I also don’t like shows that pair cold male geniuses with spunky heroines so he can give her a brain and she can give him a heart. Plus, prosecutors and cops up against institutional corruption? Been there, done that. And yet, despite its clichéd premise, Forest of Secrets works. It works because it has Jo Seung Woo and Bae Doo Na as the leads and they act their asses off, refusing to be reduced to stereotypes. It works because it’s as much about human relationships as it is about crime, exploring how the social networks we build can both sustain and corrupt us, about how easy it is to excuse the misdeeds of a friend, a colleague, or a family member. It also shows how an outsider can take those networks down, but it never lets you forget the gut-wrenching loneliness of such isolation. And finally, it works because the writer and the director pay attention to details. Without gushing tears, blaring pop songs, or graphic violence they present smart professionals methodically uncovering the truth.

The show does drag out the denouement, with more moralizing speeches than I’d prefer. It’s also not a ringing endorsement of the idea that people can change. It is however, a lovely example of how good writing, acting and directing can bring an old genre to vibrant, urgent life.

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Rebel, as its title suggests, seethes with righteous indignation at the Joseon era’s brutal caste system, and it does a better job than most dramas of showing the ways that people internalize and reinforce their own oppression. Caught up in the way things are, characters are often believably slow to grasp the way things could be and to fight back against the structures that constrain them. The show also features a strong ensemble cast, with exceptional performances by Kim Ji Suk as the unstable King Yeonsangun and Honey Lee as Jang Nok Su, and stirring recreations of traditional Korean music and dance. Viewed as a cultural celebration and social manifesto, it’s compelling.

The plot mechanics, on the other hand, are less effective. There are tons of intriguing set-ups that never pay off in meaningful ways, and the story takes an awfully long time to build to anything approaching actual rebellion. It also introduces a supernatural element that’s too literal to be read as symbolic but too underdeveloped to serve as a unifying mythology. It ends up feeling like a distraction from the very real issues that the characters confront – an easy way to get the characters out of trouble (hey look, super powers!) without serving any broader thematic purpose. In the end, the show is solid, but I wish its dramatic revelations were as engaging as its revolutionary ideas.

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Somewhere inside Goblin, buried under a mound of PPL and tears, is a good show trying to get out. The first two episodes suggest what might have been, deftly mixing intense action and off-beat humor in a dark world filled with ominous reapers, wounded goblins, ghost-seeing teenagers and cabbage-wielding grannies. The stage seems set for a life and death clash of epic proportions. Alas, it soon becomes apparent that the writer forgot to include an antagonist. The goblin-reaper face-off devolves into a chummy bromance, leaving “fate” to play the role of spoiler. Unfortunately, it’s hard to fight disembodied destiny. Whole episodes are spent weeping in pretty scenery and eating Subway sandwiches. The talented cast tries to up the urgency, but with nothing tangible to battle, the pacing slows to a crawl. The extended episode lengths and the director’s tendency to linger a little too long on every moment exacerbate the problem. Even the romance falters on the uncomfortable age gap between the protagonists.

Every so often. interesting ideas pop up about guilt, redemption, and the role of kindness in a cosmos more random than rewarding. Alas, the fickle gods that rule this universe stay above the fray. A drama that actually allowed its characters to take them on rather than simply lamenting their cruelty could have been powerful indeed.

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W can’t be accused of setting the bar low. It attempts to tell a compelling, tightly crafted story while simultaneously deconstructing the narrative tropes that drive such plots. At first, it pulls it off, pairing sly meta-commentary with unpredictable twists as characters defiantly refuse to follow their creator’s whims. However, as the story within the story goes off the rails, it becomes increasingly difficult for the “real” story to stay on track as well. By depriving itself of the traditional payoffs provided by standard dramatic structure, the show ironically defaults to the same hackneyed conventions it’s mocking (Deaths that aren’t actually deaths! Amnesia! It’s all a dream!).

What starts as an engaging meditation on how artistic works can take on a life of their own devolves into a jumble of incomprehensible rules and mangled timelines. The bigger thematic ideas get lost as you sense the actual writer struggling every bit as much as her cartoonist antihero to give her work an ending. And unfortunately, just like him, she can’t seal the deal. In a world where everyone can magically draw (or write) themselves out of difficulty, the act of creation gets reduced to expediency, not art. The fans within the show know something’s gone awry, but, alas, the fans in the “real”, real world are left hanging too. As a metaphor for how stories slip away from their authors, this one turns out to be a bit too apt.

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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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