Aw hell yeah! Christmas came early this year, in the form of a smart, dark thriller packed with whiplash twists, intriguing characters, and complex moral quandaries. This is one of my favorite genres when done well, and Liar Game served up arsenic-laced crack in twelve fast, furious episodes. Best of all, it made intellect sexy. The rules of the competitions may have been overly Byzantine, but it was a blast watching minds capable of calculating probabilities in milliseconds unravel them. The fact that those minds belonged to scarred, unpredictable antiheroes was the big, fool’s gold bow on top of the package. However, for a drama premised on betrayal, it was surprisingly uncynical. I wish Da Jung had been less saintly and a bit faster on the uptake (or that the gender roles had been reversed – does the sweet, naïve character always have to be female?), but I appreciated how her worldview was handled in the greater context of the story. The fall from grace is an easy tale to tell, but the show suggests that if we all hold on, even the deserving don't have to tumble into the dark.