How far is an Everyman willing to go to have a building under his name? How far is he willing to go to feed his bank account hefty sums of money every month? What is he willing to sacrifice? The protagonist of tvN’s black comedy Mad Concrete Dreams discovers that he can very well sell…
Reviews
Still Shining: The Illusory Spark of Nostalgia
Once the credits played at the end of JTBC’s Still Shining, I found myself sighing. I wasn’t sure I’d fully understood the writer’s intentions and goals, and I felt I needed time to process this fairly short 10-episode melancholic journey of romance and grief. Then, the following day, as I read bell hooks’ All About…
Undercover Miss Hong: Nothing Less Than a Magnificent Triumph
When deciding whether to set a story in the present or a few decades ago, there’s much that a screenwriter should take into consideration beyond mere nostalgia. Surely, if they decide to set their tale in the past, the most important factor is what the decade in question can convey or illustrate that is still…
Boyfriend on Demand: What’s So Wrong With the Unexpected?
With the rise of “hybrid romances” in South Korean television, it’s been hard to find a good ol’ rom-com. That sort of light and fun story that isn’t scared of placing romance at its narrative core and letting its characters change and grow through their romantic entanglements. Recently, these kinds of straightforward series have been…
The Art of Sarah: All That Glitters Is Not Gold
South Korea, 2006. The year of SBS’s Alone in Love, MBC’s Princess Hours, and KBS2’s The Snow Queen. Outside the small screen, the country was fascinated by Vincent & Co., a legendary Swiss watch company whose exclusive, luxurious timepieces had been beloved by European royals for over a century. Behind fancy launch parties, celebrity endorsements,…
Pro Bono: A Masterfully Crafted Manifesto for a Fairer World
As we live in such a dark and unfair world, we sometimes forget how powerful a good story can be. A good story can not only offer us solace and hope, but also serve as a protest, a frustrated scream against a system that protects the powerful and stifles the powerless. That’s the kind of…
Can This Love Be Translated?: A Dazzling, Chaotic Case of False Expectations
Marketing a film or series is a tricky, complex art. You may have an extraordinary piece of cinematic art in your hands, but without the right promotion strategy, very few people might get to experience it. The production team needs to define their target audience and have a clear vision of their story’s tone and…
Cashero: The Superpower of Plot Contrivance
If I were to think of a superpower that could best describe Netflix’s Cashero, it wouldn’t be super strength or telekinesis (i.e. the ability to move objects at a distance). No, the most important superpower in Cashero certainly is the writers’ ability to design an entire series purely based on convenience. An incredibly loose adaptation…
The Dream Life of Mr Kim: An Extraordinarily Humane Character Study
What’s your dream life? Maybe it’s a solid career, lots of money, a happy marriage, or travelling around the world? We all have different ideas when it comes to the ideal existence on this big planet Earth, but some goals are more common than others. For instance, in JTBC’s The Dream Life of Mr Kim,…
Typhoon Family: An Adorable(ish) Blend of Murphy’s Law & Groundhog Day
“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” That’s what Murphy’s law dictates. But maybe we could change it to Typhoon’s law, after tvN’s charmingly histrionic Typhoon Family, which took over Saturday and Sunday evenings from October to November 2025. Directed by Lee Na-jung and penned by rookie writer Jang Hyeon-suk, Typhoon Family feels like…
