Castaway Diva (2023)

A bemusing set of contrasts, Castaway Diva will stun you with its premiere episodes outlining a beautifully tragic backstory of crushed adolescent dreams and then launching into a headscratching modern day tale of.... I don't even know.
What was Castaway Diva ultimately about?
Seo Mok Ha (an always class act, Park Eun Bin), is an aspiring singer who longs to follow in the footsteps of Diva, Yoon Ran Joo (Kim Hyo Jin). Running away from an abusive father with the help of fellow classmate Kiho, she ends up stranded on a deserted island for 15 years. Improbable, maybe. But as a metaphor for having your early dreams slip away from you due to tragic, uncontrollable circumstance, it was pretty good. The show had shades of the delightful Thirty But Seventeen.

Fifteen years later, Mok Ha is rescued and tries to revive the career she aspired to while reconnecting with the loyal and generous Kiho.

Except that isn't what Castaway Diva is really about at all. Instead, the show veers off endlessly into the mid-career travails of the fading Ran Joo who isn't as successful as she'd hoped and is struggling with a disloyal agency and nodes. The idea this could somehow equate to 15 years on a deserted island alone after burying your abusive father is outright bonkers. The parallels between these two concepts - the literal and figurative isolation of obscurity for an idol - seems to be what this writer is trying to make and it's frankly gross. Ran Joo comes off as spoilt and entitled and narcissistic and Mok Ha gets dragged into outright fraud in trying to support her idol.

Kiho meanwhile is stranded on his own figurative island (or something) but the connections between these three 'castaway' plotlines is tenuous at best and, in the case of Ran Joo, borderline offensive.

The show is beautiful at several points and the casting is excellent. But the music, like most idol music dramas, is overproduced and often generic. PEB has several laughable moments with her guitar singing solo where the music is so overproduced that you can barely hear her real voice at all. The child actor in comparison had some real moments where you believed she was a raw talent. The rest of the music, apart from a few exceptions, is typically banal.

With an absolutely brilliant opening two episodes and a slow descent into the tedious, Castaway Diva truly is from the sublime to the ridiculous in one show.

Read More