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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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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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People will love it if they like that sort of thing, even if it's not even the best example of it. But if you're tired of everything about the setup and execution of romcoms then strictly avoid. The worst thing about this show is that it was made in 2017 but feels much older in how regressive it is.
Candy is here in all her incompetent, self-absorbed, whiny victimhood and she falls for Chaebol in all his asshole finery. Candy is a nutritionist, not like that matters either to her or anyone else. Especially not to the writer who seems to have only a vague notion of what nutritionists do for a living. It's just a new way to throw her in the path of Chaebol, with whom she shared a (naturally drunken) one night stand three years before. Can't have anyone thinking she's a slut by letting her choose to sleep with a guy when she's sober.
At the beginning of the show, there was quite a nice connection between these two characters. Both were incompetent losers even if one of them was a rich one. But when the show shifted forward three years, any goodwill from their initial interactions was quickly lost as he uses his position of authority to bully her and she acts like both a martyr and an idiot about it - not necessarily in that order. Episode after episode involved him ordering her to bring him food and then either abusing, insulting or harassing her when she did. She endured, as Candy does, and still liked him even after all of this. Dude must have been amazing in the sack. That's the only explanation.
There's a second female lead in this. I don't even need to tell you about her - you already know. Get a life, old-school second female leads. You're pathetic. There's a thing called feminism. It's well over 100 years old. You might have heard about it. It'll help.
There's also a second male lead. You've met him too. He's perfect and in love with the female lead but at least he never Nice Guys her so he has that going for him. He deserved to be in a better show.
While Asshole Chaebol at least retains a core of vulnerability that allows you to keep some sympathy for him as a character, Candy is endlessly self-absorbed and wedded to victimhood, especially around her mother and the dreaded S.E.X. on account of being a good girl and not one of those sluts.
One of the show's biggest fakeouts revolves around Candy's little brother whom she treats as a burden and refers to as "her dog" so people won't discover the scandalous fact that he exists. These are not her finest moments in a show filled with extremely poor behaviour on her part. One of my chief gripes about romcoms is that they only include sex if they want to do a pregnancy fakeout. I was willing to give the show credit for not going there except - oh no, it went there! Not only did it include it but it executed it in the most annoying, most sexist, and most horrible way possible.
Basically, this show is a quintessential old-school Korean romcom dripping with sexism and misogynism, double standards, nun/whore dichotomies and a female lead who is as annoying as she is useless. Her actions especially in the final episode are teeth grindingly annoying.
Some people who love this kind of thing will no doubt be annoyed by how much I hated this show. I just think it's a shame that shows like this are still being made.
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When it started, WhyRU had an air of meta brilliance. But whether due to bad writing, poor planning, or the Covid19 shutdown, it became instead an inconsistent tonal mess that isn't really about anything. I don't know what Why RU is or is trying to be. I don't think the writers and producers do either.
At the beginning, the story - about a University student, Zon, with a Fujoshi sister who believes himself cursed into a BL novel - danced on the edge of brilliance every episode but never quite made it. As a concept, the idea of him finding himself stuck living tropes and cliches from a BL novel had a lot of scope for humour. It meant the show could provide an old-school cliched BL love story while simultaneously parodying exactly that. And yet the show never quite nails it; being often slightly too serious about all its tropes for its own good. At its best, Why RU is like an over-the-top BL pastiche that will make you laugh out loud. At its worst, it degenerates into the genre it was supposed to be parodying.
And while the core relationships that underpin it are quite good - no harassment, stalking, assault or sexual violence and the two couples talk to each other and seem to genuinely like each other - the two clash tonally in a way that embodies the drama's tonal problem overall. Fight and Tutor's romance doesn't just seem to be happening in a different show - it's almost happening in a different Universe. One that really really wants us to visit Thailand's beaches.
Is Why RU a BL parody? An homage? Or just another standard show in a market that's close to saturation point?
It does help that the show is anchored by two strong young actors - Saint and Tommy - who can somewhat make up for the clunky and green performances of the other leads. Zon's increasingly funny freakouts as he tries to avoid being forced into BL scenarios with his designated love interest, Saifah, are by far the show's best aspect but these are jettisoned quickly in lieu of a standard Yaoi romance, albeit a super-cute one and a super-sexy one.
While a great deal of laughs can be had by e.g. a confused TharnType wandering through and monologuing randomly to the camera at one point or Zon exclaiming that Saint's character, Tutor, "isn't himself", the premise is never quite milked for the humour it could provide. The show never entirely commits to its premise and instead starts churning out a standard University BL instead.
Whether because of Covid or because the writers didn't really know what they wanted this show to be, the back half is a yawn fest with the thinnest of plots that culminates in a final episode that will leave you scratching your head as to what the show's plot even was. Other than an excuse to have cute boys make out in exotic locales.
It's a shame because this could have been very funny, very self-aware and delightfully meta BL.
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I can't get more specific without ruining the plot - let's just say that the writers love their Noble Idiocy but can never quite nail the Noble part and end up only hitting the Idiocy.
It's a shame really because the premise is good, the acting is actually not bad (but the dubbing is atrocious) and the OTP have some nice moments of realistic cute. But the rest is just woeful and at a whopping 48 episodes it's a waste of time.
The biggest problem (apart from the endless Idiocy) is that the writers didn't actually know what to do with the dream-swapping and mostly used it for shallow diversions into lame romantic fantasies. There is a point in the plot where the ability of the leads to share dreams could have actually been used to enhance the plot. But in the end, it was just a conceit and not a well-utilised one.
By the end, this became one of the worst shows I've ever seen. Boring, bloated and pointless.
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And I generally like good trash.
Unfortunately, while Forest has several aspects of Good Trash and I got some joy in how bad the first few episodes were, it's just boring enough to be trash without any qualifiers.
The romance between a resident surgeon with a TRAUMA and a GENIUS tsundere CEO with a TRAUMA (no doubt due to a shared childhood experience they don't remember as yet) who both end up in a Forest of Secrets (I wish) is ludicrous in all the right ways but simultaneously a boring trope salad of romcom cliches, corporate shenanigans, and Candy-meets-Hot-Cold CEO scenarios (including forced cohabitation, a fake engagement, and a love triangle).
Park Hae Jin does his best with the material (and it's honestly just good to have him back on our screens again) but Jo Boa overacts, a somewhat disappointing performance from her after her kickass turn in My Strange Hero.
The show makes little sense, although that's not its biggest problem. It's just not fun enough to endure the bad writing, the bad cliches, or the inconsistent characterisation.
Also, considering how bad this year's fire season has been, turning fire fighting into a romcom for rich kids with other agendas leaves a bad taste in my mouth and that's something the show won't be able to overcome.
Dropped after six episodes.
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This review may contain spoilers
TharnType comes back to annoy us all for a very special episode of ignoring all its real issues. Our main couple declare their undying love for each other over and over again in what is nothing but embarrassing fan service while making sure to emphasise that Type is Definitely Not Gay (while everybody else around them is).
Type's big moments of coming out to his friends, family and Kom happen either offscreen, for laughs or in rushed broad strokes with all the emotions stripped from them. I should probably just be happy the writers dealt with those issues at all. They certainly didn't mention Type's trauma, apart from an impetus to his - apparently ongoing - hatred of Bad Gays.
Speaking of Bad Gays, Lhong wanders through to be forgiven by Tharn's brother in a truly disgusting scene that reminds us that Thorn is fine with San being in his brother's life too and therefore clearly doesn't actually care about him. He may as well hang a shingle on his door saying, "All Tharn's abusers are welcome here".
Essentially this "special" consists of random scenes with no real narrative thread or thematic underpinnings. It's basically "stuff fans might like to see" and I'm sure a lot of fans loved it. Even the weird cat/dog scene I'm scrubbing from my mind as we speak.
I guess if you sat through the first 12 episodes you may as well watch it. It changes nothing and adds nothing, except to my annoyance.
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A tight 13 episodes, intricately and perfectly plotted, the show has lovely performances by Alice Ke and Greg (Han) Hsu, a great soundtrack and a fascinating twisty-turny plotline. A love story between Huang Yu Xuan (Alice Ke) and Wang Quan Sheng (Greg Hsu) across space, time and reality, Someday or One Day might be a time travel drama or a parallel universe drama or a doppelganger drama (or possibly all three). For me to outline the plot would be for me to spoil the plot. And that says something about just how ambiguous and enigmatic the show is.
It’s rare for a show with a supernatural element to be so real, so emotional and so raw but Someday or One Day is as heartwrenching and bittersweet as it is intelligent and challenging. It will have you speculating wildly and attempting to puzzle out its mysteries, while agonising with its characters and feeling their every pang of love, pain, loss, grief, confusion and joy. Someday or One Day manages to be complex and intriguing while never compromising on the very real human emotions being experienced by the characters. Verisimilitude within the magical is almost impossible to adequately capture and yet these writers have done it.
In the midst of the unreal, these people feel real. And they feel real in a way that is truly raw and truly human.
While it's far too early to declare this the best show of 2020, I am anyway. It was almost perfect.
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The beginning is pure cracky, trashy fun. It's silly as hell but I laughed out loud anyway. The premise - of rival baseball teams as some kind of warring kingdoms - was milked for a lot of laughs and the female lead kind of sold me on the character despite overacting. Lee Dong Wook is a class act and his charisma drove a lot of what made the first half so appealing.
By midway through, I was kind of stunned at the uptick in quality. Show got more serious, more philosophical and even became quite good there for a while. While I missed the laughs, I wasn't complaining - show was way better than I was expecting.
But here I am writing a review about the whole drama. And unfortunately that includes the final sombre, meandering, turgid, boring final episodes of seriousness and filler and serious filler. There was so much comedy yet to milk around the original premise that could have filled a full hour of fun but instead it kept up the dour tone and filler plotlines until I just couldn't care anymore.
Show got trashy, show got good, then show got dumb. It's a shame but there it is.
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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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It's possible there's a super cute drama in here desperately struggling to get out but who the hell would know. This was nothing but a disjointed, incoherent mess from beginning to end. Nothing makes sense, everything is super rushed and the whole thing is ridiculous. Oh and there's clearly a season 2! Which... if they knew that why not spend these six episodes having them fall for each other and then the next six on the separation, noble idiocy, family opposition, public scandal, arranged marriage, kidnappings and Rise of the Big Bad - rather than trying to do all those things in TWO EPISODES.
Oh yeah, there's a plot here somewhere. An Idol gets a bodyguard (Eugenie Liu) who is a huge fan of another Idol (Jasper Liu) that Idol 1 is pretending to be dating. The bodyguard is the daughter of a Triad boss. The daughter of the Triad boss has no concept of professionalism or boundaries but she does attempt to murder several people - attempted murder is supposed to be funny I guess.
Ignoring the bad writing and terrible pacing, the female lead's fangirling is super super annoying and I see nothing in this that says she fell for Adorable Jasper rather than Adorable Jasper's public image and that is a big big problem when I'm supposed to believe they're SO MUCH IN LOVE after they met a week ago and slept with each other once.
This is transparently aimed at 14 year olds who fantasise that if they met their Idol (who conveniently is exactly like his public image) then said Idol would fall madly and instantly in love with them and only something as crazy as a mob boss, mad fans and the paparazzi could keep them apart!
Jasper Liu is adorable I guess but his character is paper thin; practically a chalk outline. The female lead's entire character is a problem from beginning to end. Which is, thankfully, not that long. Since this is only 6 episodes. And subsequently a giant mess.
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Honestly, I should have listened to my initial instincts.
Any sense of outward progressiveness on the part of this show is a total sham. It's the same misogynistic drivel that Thai Lakorns have been feeding to women forever. Even above the endless grinding sexism of the show's messages - nun/whore dichotomies, women being pitted against women, men being let off the hook for their cheating and lying while women end up taking the blame - the show deals with every point of conflict by somebody realising the conflict never existed in the first place. That's just bad writing.
What started off as a show with a strong, independent female lead trying to make it in a male field while navigating double standards around sex and sexuality became yet another morality tale in Thailand's virginity cult. As usual, my life is worse for having watched a Thai Lakorn. I won't make the same mistake again.
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While Singto has already established himself as a young actor through the very popular Sotus series, Ohm shows he has definitely moved on from the dumpster fire that was Make It Right. Both actors put in fine performances aided by a script that's subtle and - considering it deals with ghosts - surprisingly realistic and sincere.
He's Coming To Me is characterised by consistent, sensitive plotting and its refusal to discount any characters. It is extremely well-written and even has a few twists and turns that are both surprising but also sufficiently telegraphed (this is no mean feat). It has not one but two well-developed and extremely real female characters, both of which are treated by the writer with respect. And it almost completely avoid the bad BL tropes that have plagued the genre since Love Sick. Despite the premise of the show and an ending that disappoints, this show is not about a ghost that falls in love with a boy but is instead about how we grapple with love, loss and identity through adolescence.
The Ending
When a drama is as coherent and well-written as this one is, if someone messes with the ending it becomes obvious. The show unfolded beautifully until about 5-10 minutes before the end where the whole thing becomes a mini trainwreck. You can almost see the tear marks where someone hacked off the original ending and stapled in a new, nonsensical version. This show could give kdramas a lesson in how to ruin a perfectly good drama by missing the landing. I'm sure a lot of people were fine with it (HAPPY ENDING!) but, quite frankly, it was dumb and almost ruined the rest of the show.
I'm not going to downgrade my rating because of the ending because almost everything else was executed perfectly. But it is jarring. Most if all it's stupid. I'll just pretend the drama ended as the writer clearly intended before this nonsense was pasted in.
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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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This review may contain spoilers
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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