Yoo Seung-ho was and remains one of my favourite Korean actors. I've long been surprised he only averages one drama a year and had great expectations for his 2020 outing, The Memorist. Based on a Webtoon and having a very comic book look and feel, the show is about a telepath who works openly for the police to solve crimes. Tortured by the things he sees in the memories of criminals, Seung-ho's Dong-baek is prone to violence and insubordination. His female equivalent is a brilliant profiler (played by Lee Se-young) whose genius almost presents as a superpower in and of itself.

One of the things Seung-ho is known for is choosing projects with sensitive, multi-layered male leads and strong, three-dimensional female leads with their own arcs. No female lead in a recent Yoo Seung-ho drama has been there merely to propel the male arc's lead or serve as an accessory. Strong female leads are almost a part of his brand.

The Memorist continues this trend by having a good mutual partnership between Seung-ho's telepath Dong-baek and the profiler, Han Sun-mi. Capable, intelligent, respected and extremely competent, Se-young's character has her own connection to the plot independent of Dong-baek and serves an equal role in the text to his own. This is extremely rare for this genre (and for kdrama generally). And, if it wasn't for the weaknesses of the plot, direction and editing, it would almost be enough for me to persist with the show.

These are two excellent actors doing their best with the material. It's just the material itself that's the problem.

Unfortunately, The Memorist just isn't that interesting. The show is dark - so dark sometimes that you can barely see what's happening - and badly edited, with things moving from action frame to action frame as though it's still a comic book and not a live action version. The characters remain undeveloped at episode 8, with little time given to them as people. To some extent, this is deliberate as Dong-baek's ambiguity is required for several plot points. But it doesn't add to the show's watchability if we can't connect or feel invested in these people as characters.

By episode 8, the show consists of our protagonists chasing a smirking psychopath around in the dark. And while I would usually persist just for Seung-ho and his badass female lead, I am unfortunately bored. Worse even than that, the show has a voyeuristic violence against women problem - a common issue with this genre. It's unfortunate for it that I am very tired of crime shows torturing women for their viewer's pleasure, or for them perpetuating the myth that it's strange psychopaths in the street we need to be concerned about. The real threat to women is men they know and it's about time dramas started acknowledging that.

Having a single strong female lead is not enough to overcome the victimisation of every other female character and by episode 8 this is becoming a real problem.

And so I am dropping the show and hoping Seung-ho's next endeavour is more to my taste.