Flower Boy Ramyun Shop understands exactly what kind of show it is. Rather than aiming for “deeper meaning,” it’s happy to frolic in the world of sunny farce, parodying and rehashing drama clichés with gleeful abandon. The initial episodes are a bit cringe-inducing, but once the drama jettisons its questionable teacher-student dynamic, things improve tremendously. The plot meanders, but the cast is charming, and the writing actually gets better towards the end, with a final episode that is both roll-on-the-floor hilarious as well as a remarkably clever encapsulation of the show’s themes. That those themes include the world’s longest extended poop metaphor is, depending on your tolerance for such things, either a stroke of genius or a reason to run.

It’s also fun to see a heroine blast the Cinderella archetype to smithereens. There are no damsels in distress here, and the show dares to suggest that following your hormones instead of your head can be not only psychologically healthy, but, gasp, a whole lot of fun as well. Soulmates are nice, but sometimes good old fashioned lust works just fine too.

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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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Generational divides are a drama staple, but few versions of the trope are as high stakes as the one presented in The Princess’ Man. The aristocrats at the heart of the show vie for power knowing that they are risking not only their own lives but the lives of their entire families on the success of their schemes. Their plots are complicated further by the fact that the desires and allegiances of their children often diverge greatly from their own. The initial episodes take full advantage of the moral quandaries created by this zero sum game, as characters are forced to choose between friends and family, parents and lovers, ambition and affection. With the addition of sumptuous, jewel-toned cinematography and solid acting, things get off to a great start.

Alas, for all the lovely visuals and promising set-ups, the screenplay soon runs into issues. Few things frustrate me more than when characters act in ways that are convenient for the writer but fly in the face of common sense. Once the bloodshed begins, the characters appear to lose brain cells along with hemoglobin, making stupid choices that often seem directly at odds with their stated goals. If you’re looking for carefully crafted revenge schemes, you’ve come to the wrong show. Complex characters and decisions get dumbed down, and “Daddy doesn’t like my boyfriend” is treated as a crisis equivalent to “Dozens of innocent people may die today.” I personally found the secondary couple’s story arc much more compelling, if less swooningly romantic, than that of the leads, in large part because it seemed more grounded in the real world.

Finally, I wish the show had been willing to tackle the difficult questions raised by the historical events it draws on. This is a drama that has no place for the inconvenient truth that Suyang, for all his ruthlessness, turned out to be an excellent ruler, or for the idea that the welfare of a nation might matter more than the suffering of the elites. The period offers fertile ground for exploring if and when ends justify means, but the writer ultimately settles for easy heroes and villains. All in all, there’s a lot of flair, but far less substance than I hoped for.

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I really wanted to love this show. It has sexy, charismatic leads. It has fist-pumping sports action. It has power ballads! Oh, it has gender politics from the last century . . . heck, maybe the last millennium . . .

I was fine with the rehashing of sports drama clichés – hey, look, it’s the underdogs taking on the underhanded champions! – and the occasional random plot twists (fear the escalator), but the show’s inability to shake its nostalgia for a time when men were men and went out into the world doing manly things while women stayed home faithfully tending the hearth was, well, frustrating. Sure, these modern warriors are tough on the outside but vulnerable on the inside, and may need to stumble by for a shoulder to cry on every few years, but the whole Odysseus/Penelope trope felt so eight century BCE. And even Penelope never considered marrying one of her thuggish, abusive suitors.

The writer keeps stating that blind allegiance to absent men isn’t really the ideal, but in the end, that’s pretty much what the women choose. They wait, they nurture, and they take back the guys who for some baffling reason don’t seem to know how to operate a phone or send an e-mail. If you can turn off the critical part of your brain, the show has a fun summer popcorn flick vibe, but I was hoping for more than Top Gun on skates. I was also hoping that the women might eventually get fed up and whomp their errant men upside the head with a hockey stick. Just once. Maybe . . .

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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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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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Romantic comedies aren’t usually my cup of java, but Coffee Prince is everything a rom-com should be: sweet, funny, and sexy. If you can get past the silliness of the mistaken identity premise, you’ll be rewarded with a show full of carefully observed human moments, played out by an eclectic, engaging ensemble cast. The poor girl/rich guy love story may not be especially original, but it’s told with a great deal of heart and refreshingly little artifice. The characters come across as fleshed-out human beings instead of walking plot devices and the show understands how to create scenes of real emotional impact without heaping on the melodrama or resorting to cheap dramatic tricks. It’s also genuinely hilarious, with a central couple whose on-screen chemistry is off the charts.

Coffee Prince is hardly an undiscovered gem, but like the best coffee shops, it’s a warm, inviting place to pass the time. It gently reminds that life’s small pleasures should be noticed and savored, and that choosing love, for a person, a profession, or a place, is worth whatever heartache or stigma may tag along.

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On the surface, Nodame Cantabile is a typical romantic comedy of opposites attracting. Tamaki Hiroshi and Ueno Juri are pitch perfect as the mismatched pair, seamlessly veering from slapstick hijinks to emotionally grounded moments of discovery. However, the show’s real love affair is with music, and it’s a doozy, a delirious, swooning, unicorns-and-rainbows relationship that captures the raw joy of shared artistry, of that moment when an eclectic group of individuals joins together to become something greater than themselves.

The manga-esque staginess takes a bit of getting used to, with heavy-handed (literally) physical attacks and cartoonish mugging. The silliness alternates between endearing and alarming, but there is nothing frivolous about the show’s treatment of music. It notes how unforgiving the arts world can be, full of too many gifted students and too few opportunities, how competition, envy, harsh instructors and grueling practice regimens can drain the spark from performers. But, to its credit, the drama never glosses over the discipline needed to do great work. This is a show that celebrates both playfulness and rigor, suggesting that the best art comes not from one or the other but from a happy marriage of the two. It isn’t the misfits vs. the superstars, but an understanding that both are needed to bring a score to life. Moments of true harmony may be fleeting, but when they happen, in either love or music, it’s cause for celebration.

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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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Chuno is an odd show. It’s gorgeous to look at, if overly self-conscious, full of odd camera angles, exotic fight choreography, half-naked hunks and stylized slow-mo. However, all the pretty is in the service of a story that is essentially an extended chase scene. Jang Hyuk dazzles as Dae-Gil, owning the screen with sly humor and feral intensity. The role itself though is rather underwritten, and in the hands of a lesser actor could easily have become an inscrutable cipher. Speaking of ciphers, the principal antagonist looks fabulous massacring his way across Korea, but there is little sense of internal conflict or even compelling motivation as he instantly transforms from dutiful son to unstoppable killing machine. The female characters are also problematic. Lee Da Hae spends much of the show radiating pristine helplessness, more a walking stereotype of unattainable love than a human being, while Kim Ha Eun starts out spunky and clever, but devolves into obsessed and clingy.

Thematically, there are some interesting ideas thrown around about slavery, class, progress and authority but the writer seems unsure of exactly what he wants to say about them. The show is built around the awfulness of slavery, but it also depicts most of its slave characters as gullible fools, reinforcing the negative stereotypes stamped on them by the powerful. Folks respond to injustice with violence and/or flight, but neither tactic really seems to get anyone anywhere. There is a lot of stunning footage of running and fighting, but little clear sense of how the audience should feel about these choices. Are we supposed to applaud them? Reject them? Realize that the situation is a hopeless mess? And what is a viewer supposed to conclude from the fact that when change does happen, it results from factors almost totally removed from the actions of the central characters?

Good acting and striking visuals keep Chuno entertaining, but the narrative muddle weighs it down. There are some powerful moments, but the script never matches the dangerous, high-flying verve of its knife-wielding leading man.

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Capital Scandal was an unexpected delight. Part jazzy, Technicolor rom-com, part serious look at the physical and emotional toll of occupation, it gracefully balances humor and heartbreak. A romance, especially a funny one, set during the Japanese colonial era sounds like a recipe for disaster, but the show does a remarkable job of finding lighter moments without ever glossing over the atrocities of the age.

Visually and aurally, the show evokes vintage Hollywood, complete with swing tunes, flashing neon, and heightened acting that occasionally slips a bit too far towards the cartoonish. The Japanese characters are mostly broadly drawn, grating caricatures, more inane than sinister. The real conflicts in the show are between the Koreans, as they weigh the options of collaboration or resistance, betrayal or heroism, survival or sacrifice. To its credit, the show makes these struggles complicated, rarely drawing clear cut lines between “good” and “bad” as it examines the varied ways people endure a time of terror. While some plot elements require significant suspension of disbelief, particularly a final episode more grounded in wish fulfillment than reality, the show isn’t afraid to venture into darker territory, both psychologically and dramatically. It also features strong female characters who equal and often exceed the men in smarts, courage and conviction.

Most shows choose primary colors or shades of grey. Capital Scandal celebrates both, letting its surface flair complement rather than overwhelm its deeper themes. It thrives on contradiction, throwing its moments of joy into stark relief against a background of injustice, pain, and loss.

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Great roles for middle-aged actresses are rare. I loved that Secret Love Affair was anchored by a smart, sexy, morally complicated 40-something female protagonist, and it was obvious that the phenomenal Kim Hee Ae was having a blast playing the part. Yoo Ah In also does a fine job as a young piano prodigy, and when he’s onscreen with Kim, they make beautiful music together, both literally and figuratively. The love story generates plenty of heat, and, despite its salacious premise, feels genuine and ultimately quite moving. As long as the two leads are playing duets together or sharing bowls of noodles the show sings.

Unfortunately, I found the world surrounding the lovers to be less fleshed out and compelling. While I understand that the awfulness of most of the other major characters is meant to highlight just how terrible Hye Won’s life is despite its surface luxuries, I would have loved for there to have been more layers to the antagonists. Their universal loathsomeness did draw sympathy to the protagonists, but it also undermined the realism of the show and simplified its conflicts. It’s not hard to cheat on a husband with no redeeming characteristics, but that felt like an easy out for the screenwriter (and the audience) rather than an honest exploration of the challenges of marriage.

The directing of the show is carefully composed and the pacing slow. This allows for some lovely, unhurried emotional beats, but it can also feel a bit stifling. There were times I would have liked less precision and more abandon. The technique mirrors Hye Won’s fierce control, but when the fissures open in her life I wish the show had cracked open more deliriously as well. The main couple and the music are amazing. Everything else feels well worth losing for their stolen moments of joy.

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I doubt many writers wake up and say “Hey, let’s do a show about creating an alphabet! That will be exciting!” I suspect even fewer producers would greenlight such a project. Presumably, in the case of Tree with Deep Roots, the authors sold it as a conspiracy thriller, emphasizing the murders, mysteries and epic fight scenes. There is plenty of stylishly choreographed action and several hot guys with swords. However, as befits the show’s subject, the real battles are fought with words. And those battles are some of the most extraordinary I’ve ever seen on film.

“Tree” took a while to pull me in, but once the writers found their groove and the verbal fireworks began, it was riveting. Against the backdrop of a violent era, it asks if the brush can ever be mightier than the sword. If there is power in writing, and if so, who deserves to use it. If literacy is liberation or a different kind of slavery. Characters wield speech like blades in philosophical duels where systems of government and social orders hang in the balance. This is argument as blood sport – spectacular, visceral and deadly.

The cast tackles their paragraphs of text with gusto, and the director keeps the camera moving and the tension high. The final episodes falter a bit, veering away from ideas and more towards traditional action, with an ending that felt yanked from a summer blockbuster instead of developing organically from the drama's themes. Perhaps this was designed to appease nervous studio execs desperate to get to away from all the talking. It’s a small price to pay though for a show that is otherwise so smart, unconventional, and emotionally engaged as it teases out the limits and possibilities of language.

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I never expected to write that one of the best acting ensembles I’ve encountered in k-drama consisted almost entirely of twelve-to-fourteen-year-olds. Placing child actors in major roles is always a risk. Asking an entire class of them to carry most of the dramatic weight of a sixteen episode show is lunacy. And, yet, in The Queen’s Classroom, that’s exactly what they do. Obviously, Go Hyun Jung is on hand with her megawatt star power, but she’s not the protagonist. That honor belongs to the dogged Kim Hyung Gi and the three frighteningly talented young actors who play her comrades-in-arms in their struggle against their dreaded new teacher. These four tweens display emotional range and dramatic presence that would shame performers twice their age.

Their skills are needed, as the script tackles bullying, broken families, academic pressures, personal tragedies and class conflicts of both the educational and social varieties. The characters may be children, but the issues they face are alarmingly adult. The writing occasionally dips a bit too far towards sensationalism or sentimentality, but most of the time it stays grounded in a difficult but psychologically honest place. This is a show that understands the exquisite awfulness of middle school, and it lets its young cast shine as they struggle to survive its ravages.

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I started The Devil hoping for a smart, edgy revenge thriller and got one. The premise is intriguing and well executed, the writing is packed with allusions to art, literature and myth, and the show grapples unflinchingly with the real, lasting consequences of violence. Elegantly simple in its construction, it takes a bad man clawing his way towards redemption and sets him on a collision course with a good man tumbling into hell.

I expected the show to deliver twists and thrills. I did not expect it to break my heart. I did not expect a piece so steeped in vengeance to become a story of forgiveness. Not easy forgiveness or safe forgiveness or cheap forgiveness, but the kind you buy with flesh and bone and blood. There are supernatural elements built into the plot but there is nothing magical in the way the characters wrestle with their demons. Uhm Tae Woong is solid as a scruffy detective and Shin Min Ah is radiant despite a somewhat underwritten part. However, the show ultimately belongs to Ju Ji Hoon, whose ferociously controlled performance as Oh Seung Ha is simultaneously terrifying and deeply moving.

Shows that succeed within the conventions of their genre are rare. Shows that transcend those conventions are rarer still. The Devil does both. It holds a mirror up to evil, but finds sparks of grace reflected in the dark.

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