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AudienceofOne
In the last few years, Korea has basically saved the genre. First it produced Train to Busan, which reclaimed the genre for a critique of hyper-capitalism. Now it comes back with Kingdom, not only a fast-paced, action-packed piece about fighting zombie hordes but a critique of three of the modern world's greatest challenges: the ineffectiveness of the nation state in the face of multiple challenges, the rise of groups that see their own wealth and power as more important than the wellbeing of society overall; and the tension between truth and fake news when trying to deal with a crisis.
Kingdom continues to be absolutely scathing of late-stage capitalism while simultaneously maintaining its Confucian roots. And the fact it appears while many of our governments are failing to deal with a serious pandemic makes the whole thing even more powerful and even prescient. It's a simple fact that elevates Kingdom to a new level.
More importantly even than that, it's a ripping good yarn with fantastic production values, great acting, deft writing and the ability to surprise just when you think it's about to tread a well-worn storytelling path.
I just hope our real life Kingdom problems don't stop the fictional Kingdom S3 from being made this year.
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Trashy guilty pleasure with a side of good smut
Kinn is the second son of a mafia boss who meets the barfly, Porsche. With no parents and a younger brother to care for, Porsche is willing to do just about anything for money. Following an excellent first episode, he gets recruited to be a bodyguard for Kinn's gangster family. As the two fall in love, they find themselves mired in generic gangster shootouts and a complex family scandal that involves the mystery of Porsche's dead parents.Which is to say, that on paper KinnPorsche sounds like fun. In reality, it's A-grade, rolled-gold trash full of Makjang twists, inconsistent characterisation and a whole lot of sexy boys doing sexy things - most of it non-consensual or involving incest.
KinnPorsche is essentially a fetish drama, with the various fetishes interspersed with something that resembles a plot only in passing: it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, doesn't make much sense and isn't important anyway, frankly.
The show is also a tonal mess, with different direction and production styles clashing (the first episode is surprisingly good, the next two are confusing and contradictory, and the tones clash regularly from there).
But once you get past the idea that this show should be taken in any way seriously - and if you're in the right mood - it could be your latest guilty pleasure watch as it quickly descends into a morass of hot guys boning; sometimes drugged, sometimes drunk, sometimes underage, and sometimes as a result of chained-up basement torture. And nearly always when they're related in some way.
There's a lot of gratuitous sex and mindless violence and the odd, weird, fluffy date episode, which doesn't fit at all. But, I guess, for some people fluffy dating is their fetish so that's here for you as well.
The acting is actually pretty good, especially for a Thai BL, and the sex scenes are genuinely steamy as long as you handwave the rape, incest, torture, murder and creepy borderline paedophilia.
Kinn rapes Porsche, gaslights him, abuses him, manipulates him and yet the relationship somehow seems the most healthy when compared to the other ones in the show. Especially Vegas/Pete ["Nobody can hurt you but me!"] and the super creepy Kim/Porschay ["You're my underage cousin but I'm going to manipulate you into kissing me anyway"].
Anyway, put your brain on hold and enjoy the abuse trainwreck. Otherwise, steer clear.
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Now that it's finished I'm rewriting this review so what you read now will be a little different than what you read before. This is because TharnType has flaws, man, serious flaws. And every attempt the writer made to overcome its flaws was hamstrung by either the source text or the dictates of Thai BL generally.At its core, the latest addition to Thai BL had a surprisingly intelligent script with nuanced characterisation. Tharn is ostensibly a confident and comfortably gay man while Type is traumatised by sexual abuse when he was young. They find themselves sharing a room where Tharn's overt sexuality clashes with Type's apparent homophobia.
Unfortunately, the script was given the full Thai BL treatment, especially in its first few episodes. Type tries to bully Tharn out of their shared dormitory, Tharn responds by aggressively sexually harassing and even assaulting the younger man. It's impossible to see either of these things as desirable or romantic behaviour, yet the producers seem determined for us to be titillated by the sexual violence and amused by the bullying. I had neither response and nearly dropped it, since the normalisation of sexual violence is a problem I have with Thai BL generally and Type is at all times a rude and bigoted asshole - a fact that Tharn himself acknowledges at one point.
it seemed weird at the time and even weirder in retrospect that Tharn would respond to a roommate who openly sees him as a sexual threat by sexual assaulting him. I cannot reconcile this behaviour either with the character as we come to know him or with simple logic. Both Type and Tharn's behaviour is wrong and unfortunately the time constraints of the series meant we leapt through necessary relationship progression and decisions to get to where we ended up. Show should have devoted this entire season to the two navigating their way into a relationship. Maybe then viewers wouldn't have needed to do all the cognitive work in explaining it.
One thing TharnType definitely has going for it is its acting. Mew is an excellent actor who portrayed Tharn with a natural subtlety that gives his character a lot of layers. While Gulf (Type) isn't quite as good, he is elevated by working off the more experienced actor and as a consequence this has some of the best acting I've seen in a BL. The acting is possibly one of the reasons I kept watching it when I would otherwise have dropped it. That and how the show began to develop as it moved past its first few episodes.
Once the show begins to settle into itself, it tries to break free of the dictates of the genre the script has unfortunately been forced into. Tharn is a lonely man, disappointed by love and terrified of rejection following the manipulative abuse of an older man when he was young, and Type is a very confused, very damaged one who has a long road to walk in terms of coming to terms with his identity. I take issue with the idea it's Tharn's job to fix Type but thankfully the script moves away from that sharply, dealing as much with the complexity of Tharn's psychological trauma as with the obvious trauma of Type's. Or at least that's what it seemed to be doing.
It would be unreasonable to expect a Thai BL to adequately grapple with the intersection of identity, social gender constructs, trauma and bigotry. And I certainly didn't. But I wanted to give the show credit for at least trying. Some of the show's decisions around portraying trauma and assault seemed nuanced and interesting, others seemed trite and tone deaf. But even while TharnType did a better job than expected, it dropped all these themes entirely at the end and went straight for full-bore Lakorn nonsense.
I'll be blunt - I don't care about Lhong. I don't care about his character, I don't care why he became a total psycho and I also didn't need a Machiavellian villain mastermind to pop his head up at the last minute. This couple has real issues to deal with and instead we get some second-female-lead garbage ripped from a soap opera. The fact this is a gay male instead of a woman doesn't make this whole thing better, it makes it worse. For a show with an actual real openly gay character, this show's representation of the gay community got worse and worse.
I get it, I get it THE NOVEL but the novel is clearly stupid because this is ripped straight out of a bad Thai Lakorn. Worse than that, by shifting to an external issue to solve, the show refused to solve this couple's real problems - Type's trauma and refusal to accept his homosexuality and Tharn's inability to be honest due to a fear of rejection. None of these issues were dealt with (what about poor Kom, still convinced his childhood best friend hates him for being gay?). And it's not as though the finale didn't have time, devoting screentime to an endless showdown with Lhong that I personally couldn't give a fig about.
Because of this the happy ending feels shallow, a common problem with Thai BL. It reminds us that for all its pretensions, this is just another BL. A quick flash forward to a timeline after its sequel and companion piece, Love By Chance*, shows us they have no intention of ever dealing with these issues. We'll never see Type being brave enough to come out to his school friends or his parents, among many other important character moments we needed.
To say that I'm disappointed in TharnType is to imply that I expected more of it. I didn't. But I did have hope and that hope was obviously not fulfilled.
*This show is a prequel and companion piece to Love By Chance, both being based on source novels by the same author and set in the same universe. It's a universe with a great deal of sexual violence and, while the show is grappling with these issues in the main OTP, it doesn't have as much success with other plotlines across both shows. Having seen Love By Chance it is difficult to watch, for example, Techno being a loving and supportive friend throughout the show knowing that his brother's friend is going to rape him. In fact, Techno's brother being complicit in the rape is mirrored in Thorn (Tharn's brother) being fine with his brother's abuser still being in his life too. It's a dynamic that's hard to watch in both shows and, I guess, that won't be resolved unless there's a second season of Love By Chance. I can only hope that when all plotlines are resolved, the show can come down heavily against sexual violence in whatever form it takes.
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The show started off very strong. Although Derek Chang's An Quinhui is very young and very immature, he has lovely chemistry with Ruby Lin's Xiaofei. The acting is very good and, at least in the beginning, the show has a nice vibe of verisimilitude: these people feel real, their lives feel real and the story feels real too. This is a classic slice of slice drama - or at least it is until the episode 14 mark where it starts to go horribly wrong.
At one point it became clear that Quinhui was far far too young and far too immature for Ruby Lin's character and the idea this relationship would progress to a romance was somewhat laughable. No mature professional woman her age would be genuinely interested in this child and yet the show pursued the relationship anyway. It's not surprising that it inevitably crashed and burned.
I am yet to see a Taiwanese drama that doesn't attempt to fill its long episode run with a touch of Makjang and unfortunately this was no exception. The last few episodes were a tough watch as An Quinhui responds to his feelings in the most immature way possible and the people around the main couple behave just as badly. In the end, what I had enjoyed about the show was slowly eroded until I was just left with frustration and second-hand embarrassment.
I only finished this show because I'd already devoted so much time to it. It's yet another Taiwanese drama that started off well but couldn't maintain it over so many episodes.
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Park Seo Joon and Kim Ji Won play average late-20s friends who have given up on pursuing their dreams because of the cost of living and the need for money. After a number of false starts and embarrassing failure, they finally find the strength to choose passion and happiness over drudgery. These two are fun and loveable leads whose strong friendship and love helps support each other through life. They're a delight to watch.
Kim Ji Won, in particular, gives Ae Ra a perfect mix of vulnerability and badass; combining hilarious aegyo and no-nonsense protectiveness to create one of the most compelling kdrama leads to date. Park Seo Joon is always a nuanced actor to watch and his brainless, hot-tempered but warm-hearted Dong Man will make you fall in love with him.
The second couple in this story are less interesting and, while their plotlines are no-less thematically important, I often lost interest when the attention switched to them. The plotting isn't perfect: there are number of disappearing characters, dropped plot lines and narrative digressions. And the show briefly falls flat when the couple first get together because of the dictates of the kdrama OTP tropes.
But none of this detracts from the enjoyment of the show. More importantly, this show ends well and doesn't suffer from the episode 14 kdrama slump. It maintains its pace to the end.
I could give this a lower rating for a number of reasons but it's such a satisfying watch that it deserves the 9/10.
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While some viewers may be thrilled to watch yet another clueless, awkward Candy bumbling her way to the love of a Chaebol, this is not one of those viewers. And while Korean writers are obsessed with the humour that comes from emotionally-stunted man-boys learning how to human, in this case the show is made even more tedious by the fact the male lead is an actual highschool-uniform-wearing boy. Albeit one who dresses like Gu Jun-pyo and has hair like Yoon Ji-hoo.
While the material in Biscuit Teacher and Star Candy was at least handled by exceptional actors, the acting in this is pretty sub-par - although I doubt anyone could have elevated the material these actors were given.
Regressive, reactionary and poorly-shot, with lacklustre direction and dated cinematography, this show is more of a televisual anthropology lesson than anything else.
As the first in the Oh! Boy Flower Boys series, I doubt it is necessary to watch it before moving to the more superior shows made later on.
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At the beginning this seemed like a standard BL: full of the same tropes but a bit quirky and funny. By the end, it was such an interesting and complex study of relationships.
This was far more nuanced and sensitive than I could have originally foreseen, especially around the progression of the main OTP. By initially embodying all the standard tropes, it was so much more effective when the show basically upended them halfway through. I'm not even sure if Pop and Oat are going to end up together or even what "together" means. What is love anyway? seems to be the question the show is asking and it asks it in a variety of ways.
As a consequence of this more-nuanced storytelling, some of the humour of the earlier episodes was lost at the end and the anticipated Season 2 meant several plotlines weren't resolved. In fact, after 20 episodes, I was a little bit disappointed that the show didn't have an ending. It meant the final two episodes felt meandering and anti-climactic.
But for being so unexpectedly enjoyable to watch, this is a strong 8/10
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It's not that it's *bad*. It's more that it's kind of nothing.
It started off quite well. Kang In Su and Yoon Sang Yi have a mutual love of music and a mutual attraction, though each is oblivious to the others' interest. When Sang Yi's record company scouts In Su, they end up cohabiting and... nothing.
While the first episode is interesting and well-paced, the show's pacing then slows to a crawl. The two don't even speak to each other till the end of episode 4 and then the shows veers unexpectedly into a cohabitation drama full of lens flare and little else.
Being Korean, the production values are high and some shots are truly beautiful. The acting is however a little wooden and awkward; both boys seemingly uncomfortable around each other in an awkwardness that doesn't seem cute or deliberate but just due to both of them being green. For a drama about music, a lot of it was quite banal, although there were a few nice pieces here and there.
It seems as though the writers wanted to write a story about the love of music and keeping your artistic integrity but were forced to torture parts of it into a classic BL. One day someone will learn that a gay love story can be both of these things at the same time but today is not that day. Instead the drama is stuck somewhere in the middle being not much of anything.
That is to say, there is little wrong with Wish You and if Korea had made this first I'd have been praising them for doing BL at all. But after this year that ship has sailed. Still, I can say that the relationship between the two boys seems quite functional and is built on mutual interest and respect. So it has that going for it. In the end, I guess it's the story's potential to be much more than this that is the most disappointing.
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Bae Do Na and Jo Seung Woo are exceptional in their roles as a rare non-romantic buddy-cop partnership. While this show deals with familiar themes of corruption that kdrama viewers will find familiar, it is an interesting and gripping examination of the issue with a verisimilitude that borders at times on depressing.
Intelligent, fierce, uncompromising and stark, this is television at its finest.
10/10
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The thing that strikes me about Kill It was that the underlying story was compelling. Horrible? Sure. A little ridiculous? Definitely. But if it is the role of art to exaggerate to teach, then Kill It had a lot to say about the commodification of people.So it’s a damn shame that it didn’t say anything at all.
Kim Soo Hyun (played with the charisma of a dead tree log by the usually appealing Jang Ki Yong) is a veterinarian who is also a professional killer. Lee Young Eun (played with weirdly inappropriate sexual overtones by Nana) is a former ballerina turned cop who is chasing him. These two have a childhood connection around a shared trauma that brings them back together again and exposes a horrible conspiracy around experimentation on unwanted children.
Part of the problem is that I didn’t connect with any of the characters so didn’t really care what happened to them (with the possible exception of Kim Soo-hyun, whose arc was strangely under-developed considering he was the male lead). And the reason for that was entirely in the approach the writers took to tell the story.
Telling the story of these children from the ground up would have been a dark but fascinating story. But instead the show chose to tell the story from the other side.
Blank-faced assassins, helpless damsels, and rich men sitting around scheming just isn’t that interesting – unless the blank-faced assassin is dogmatic and determined and his motivation is entirely about revenge for the horrors visited upon him. A half-hearted blank-faced assassin who’d rather be playing with puppies might sound good on paper but this is supposed to be a Korean action/thriller, not a Guy Ritchie film.
They should have concentrated on the human aspect of the bioethics issue rather than throwing things together in some sort of plot soup of hit men, drug runners, organ smugglers, chaebols, corrupt politicians and human traffickers. That would have been a really tragic and compelling story.
I’ve come to realise that action thrillers are suffering from the same problem that romcoms are. They’re written from a template and the only thing that changes is the [insert childhood trauma caused by evil scheming chaebols] plot outline.
I also think the writers were trying to give a Healer vibe but Healer wasn’t a stone-cold killer for a reason and Healer had clear reasons for every decision he made. Which brings us to the way in which this show ultimately fell down: the core relationship between our male and female leads. At least, I think this was supposed to be our core relationship. The problem is it never made much sense.
I never knew if I was supposed to be shipping them, feeling aggrieved that she was being lied to, seeing this as some of doomed tragic love story, or what. I felt none of those things. Apart from the odd maelstrom of misplaced sexual longing, these two never connected: either as childhood friends or adults brought together by circumstance. Certainly not as potential lovers (although I live for the day a kdrama is brave enough to go there).
As a consequence, what this show lacked was an emotional core. It disassociated its characters from the emotional resonance of what had happened to them and so it failed to resonate with us, the viewer, as well.
The saddest thing about writing this is I can’t even mock the show in the end. It had all the ingredients of a much better drama. It’s not that bad, it’s just generic – even boring.
There’s no need to see it – you already have.
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Instead, this review will mostly concern itself with OMG IT'S A BABY!!!! Have you ever seen that xkcd cartoon where they graph human intelligence by inanity of statements against the presence of a kitty? Well, that's pretty well this show. There's a whole standard weekender plotline in here about found family and evil Chaebols and justice winning and everyone learning to just get along. But when up and coming actors Park Se Wan and Kwak Dong Yeon DO BABY none of that actually matters.
Sure this means that there's only one plotline anybody who watched this show cared about but it's a good plotline. Kwak Dong Yeon gushing over a baby is almost worth 36 episodes of television (72 in the stupid numbering) and, actually, 36 episodes is not too bad for a weekender. I sat through 50 episodes of Good Thief, Bad Thief and that had no baby at all.
Seriously, Park Se Wan and Kwak Dong Yeon are great emerging actors and there is A BABY and the main romance at least is quite good (if a bit rushed, don't do any math). The fast forward button was invented for a reason so if you're not afraid to use it and don't mind that the average weekender inevitably feels both saccharine and flat overall, then I recommend, oh, at least 10%-15% of this show.
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Pharm and Dean are MEANT TO BE so end up together despite the fact that Pharm does little but cook, cry and look incredibly conflicted for someone who's supposedly in love. Ohm is a plank of wood as Dean and Earth's acting, as usual, makes me want to punch him.
I mostly enjoy the show's tone of anti-climax in terms of its conflict. The reincarnation is the only point of conflict and, honestly, that is somewhat refreshing. But there comes a point at which the whole thing is just spinning its wheels. They could have spent that time establishing Pharm and Dean's relationship in the present but instead it's just shallow INSTA!love that quickly wears thin.
As the show progresses, Pharm's response to his so-called epic destined love gets more and more weird, until the whole thing starts to come off as non-consensual. It's deeply uncomfortable and doesn't get better but worse over time.
With the extension, the show got even slower and had to jettison screentime for several characters who were no doubt contracted only for the original run. This served to make the whole thing even more boring and forced the writers to take the show in a direction that completely undercut what was left of its own themes.
With the pacing off and an OTP you struggle to ship, this is not the show it could have been and is overall a boring disappointment.
As usual, this comment comes with a disclaimer that I am not the audience shows like this are aimed at.
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Bryan Chang plays Zhao Xu Zhen, a devoted cop who begins to investigate cases involving a mysterious website. This review has been updated now that I've finished this season, although the last story in particular was a bit of a slog.
Futmalls is well produced and edited and the first case was quite interesting. The show's biggest weakness is its stereotypical and over the top male lead; the kind of genius cop who eats at crime scenes and mansplains forensic reports to crime scene investigators. He is a jarring and often annoying cliche and the investigative elements of the show are its weakest. When it veers more into the vaguely-menacing horror that is Futmalls' push advertising to people who are at their most vulnerable, it's definitely stronger.
This ends up being the show's biggest weakness since, after its first case, it essentially jettisons the horror element and becomes more process driven. The procedural police aspects are incredibly weak and the male lead is too much of a cliche. In its third case, the show drives its narrative with torture porn of female characters and a weirdly sympathetic portrayal of a skeevy man and his blow up doll. Yes, men wrote this. You can tell.
The show never answers any questions, never overlays any logic onto Futmalls, never seems to know if Futmalls is a menacing presence or just something that exists to drive its cases (one entire story never becomes a case at all) and then just... ends... clearly setting itself up for a season 2. It's deeply dissatisfying and wasn't good enough overall to tune in for another set of episodes. So I regretfully conclude it's not worth your time.
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So with a title of 'Amensalism' and an intriguing premise involving death dreams, I decided to overlook the terrible acting of Prince and tune in. It started off okay with a kind of dreamy and ambiguous tone. Prince was... actually even worse than usual, which I didn't think was possible... but it was interesting enough to get me through the first few episodes.
Unfortunately, overall, the show is a thematic mess and the plot is even worse. Having watched to the end, I honestly couldn't tell you what it was even about. A huge part of the plot was taken up with a conspiracy completely unrelated to the male lead's dreams or his near death experience. I squinted and cocked my head sideways but still couldn't see how 'Amensalism' factored into any of the relationships depicted.
Worse than that, the show undermined its own mythology more than once for head-scratching "twists" that the show could have done without. It also assassinated one character very badly and then expected both the other characters and the audience to forgive her the next episode. In the end, it came down squarely on the side of a standard predestined romance with a crime thriller complication.
Overall, Amensalism was an unfocused mess and I don't recommend it.
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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.
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