Friday Favorites: K-dramas

I’ll just stick to series here. I tend to like more of the action/adventure/mystery genre, though there are a couple of romance and “healing” genre entries on this list. I also have access only to the series on Netflix, so let me know in the comments if there are some great ones I’ve missed elsewhere!

• Black: This was the first K-drama I watched, and it’s still one of my favorites. Classic supernatural mystery K-drama about a woman who can see ghosts and a grim reaper sent to the world of the living to bring back an escaped soul. Go Ara is a great actress. The twists and turns are mostly genuinely surprising and heart-wrenching, and you really get invested in the characters. And I love its sense of humor. I love everything about Black except the ending, which everyone universally acknowledges is awful (I think there’s a procedural reason for it—like they found out they were canceled and had to shoot an ending for the story in a week or something). Just watch up through the next-to-last episode and then stop and make up your own ending. I guarantee you’ll be glad you did that.
• Memories of the Alhambra: I think this was the second K-drama I watched, and again, it was a lucky pick. A really interesting sci-fi action/romance about an augmented reality game that ends up not only blurring the distinctions between what’s real and what’s fantasy but actually mixing the worlds in consequential ways. Hyun bin is fantastic in it (and not at all terrible to look at).
• Itaewon Class: Still going roughly in temporal order of viewing here. There’s a whole sub-genre of K-dramas that are essentially about evening the score against chaebols (hereditary monopolistic corporations in South Korea). Chaebols are in everyone’s crosshairs in Korea these days due to the wage gap and constant corruption scandals. And so Itaewon Class is about a kid who embarrasses a chaebol family while trying to do the right thing and loses everything as a result—until he turns the tables on the chaebol through sheer determination and strength of character. It’s more interesting than I just made it sound, and the level of the acting really pulls it together (Park Seo-joon and Yoo Jae-myeong make convincing foils for each other). The diversity of the cast is also remarkable for a K-drama.
• My Mister: It took me a while to convince myself to start watching this one—it seemed depressing and not up my alley. But I was hooked the minute I started, largely because of I.U, who’s an incredible actress, and Lee Sun Gyun (better known to American audiences as Nathan, the chaebol jerk husband/father from Parasite). I remember reading some press for My Mister that said it was about “people who come into our lives exactly when we need help evolving,” and that’s a good description of the overall story. The plot follows an engineer whose honesty and loyalty tempt everyone around him to take advantage of him; an attempt to bribe him to look the other way on a substandard building project involves him with a young woman whose desperate poverty is drawing her into a blackmail gambit. Every episode feels like a high wire act, and the ending, while perhaps a bit sunny given what the characters have gone through, at least feels earned. The supporting cast—particularly the family and friends of the main character from the working-class neighborhood he grew up in—is so good it’s reason enough on its own to watch the series. The writing and acting are just really, really good. And, it’s often really funny, too, if I’ve made it sound too heavy. In fact, I think it integrates the light/dark duality that’s a hallmark of K-drama better than most series—better, for instance, than Vincenzo, which gave me whiplash with the way it veered back and forth between madcap humor and sadistic violence.
• Signal: This one does a nice job of combining sci-fi with police procedural. Like many of the K-drama police procedurals, Signal revolves around a particular problem in the Korean justice system—in this case, statutes of limitations on violent crimes. The story is about a young police profiler who lost his brother in a murky apparent suicide 20 years prior (the limit on prosecuting homicides at the time). He comes into possession of a police radio that lets him communicate somehow with a detective who died that same year in similarly mysterious circumstances while investigating a serial murder. The information the profiler gets over the radio helps him solve a current cold case but also gets him entangled with the detective’s former partner’s efforts to solve his disappearance, and that investigation leads them down into a rabbit warren of cover-ups and corruption in the police force. There are (perhaps obviously from that description) a lot of different plots to keep track of, not to mention the different time periods, but somehow the series manages to keep it all straight. And the acting, particularly by Cho Jin-woong as the vanished detective, is really solid. The way all the various plots come together at the end stretches credulity, but that problem is endemic to K-dramas in general.
• Stranger: Another good procedural that pivots around an emotionally empaired prosecutor and his friendship with an empathetic detective (the amazing Bae Doona). Policy problem, check (police cannot issue their own investigative warrants but must go through the prosecution, which introduces politics and delays; they actually spend entire scenes debating this issue, seriously). Serial murder, check. Chaebol villain, check (in this case, the gorgeous, scenery-chewing Yoon Se-ah). I’m making it sound formulaic, and I suppose it is, but it mixes these standard ingredients in interesting and suspenseful ways. There’s also a second season that’s good.
• The Good Detective: A young detective who’s turned his back on his chaebol family is paired up with an older working-class partner with family issues of his own. For personal reasons, the young detective starts poking around in a murder case from five years before and discovers his partner put the wrong man in prison for it. From then on, everyone has to wrestle with the conundrum of getting ahead versus doing the right thing: not only the two detectives but the upstart journalist (the luminous Lee Elijah) who helps reinvestigate the murder and uncovers a corruption scandal involving her own boss, the Chief Prosecutor and, you guessed it, a powerful chaebol—in this case, the one run by the young detective’s older, sadistic brother. Just watching Son Hyun-Joo (who also played the main character’s dad in Itaewon Class) struggle with his conscience is worth the price of admission. And Oh Jung-se makes a chilling villain, that’s for sure.
• It’s Okay to Not Be Okay: I wrote about this one before on my What to Watch on Netflix Before It’s Gone post. I’ll just add here that it’s incredible watching Oh Jung-se go from playing the villain in Good Detective to playing a man with an autism diagnosis in this series. Also, if anyone knows what the china pattern is that they use for breakfast at Ko Mun-yeong’s house, let me know in the comments; I’ve been hunting for it for six months with no success.