Not law – my little round up of things I’ve really enjoyed this year

So feel free to ignore if you’re just here for the law. This is a skippable one.

I often like to do a little December round-up of pieces of culture that I’ve really enjoyed in the year, whether that be music, books, films, podcasts or whatever.

I’m chiefly going to talk about K-Drama, that is tv that comes from South Korea, because I’ve got so into that this year and I want to share my passion and some recommendations.

What I like most about K-Drama is that it delivers such a powerful hit of good stuff in such concentrated form – if there’s a romance scene you’ll be desperate for the characters to get together and devastated when an intervening event gets in the way, if there’s humour you’ll genuinely be laughing not merely smiling and the action stuff is up there with the best Hollywood sequences. Also, they blend genres so effortlessly. The attention to detail on character and the tiny moments that illuminate character is another prominent feature. People may act in ways that surprise you, because the shows are hard to predict – but you will understand as things unfold why they acted in ways that made complete sense for them and who they are at their core.

When was the last time you really laughed during a western rom-com? If you’re watching a K-drama that’s a romance, it will be laced with really funny moments in every episode.

They will often have a bit of an elevator pitch that you just have to go ‘okay, that’s the particul. ar rule that they’ve given themselves for this programme, and let’s see what they can do with that rule’ – suspend your disbelief in the central premise for a bit and let it flow. Oh also, you just don’t tend to get underwritten supporting characters – if the female lead has a best friend then that best friend could easily have her own show, if the male detective has an older assistant then he’ll have his own set of quirks and dynamics – when you watch the show it is really easy to imagine these side-characters continuing to exist and going about their own lives and dramas when the main characters aren’t around – they don’t just feel like devices to advance the plot.

Here are some that I’ve really enjoyed

Miss Night and Day – this is a comedy and a romance, and a thriller murder mystery, and it works and delivers on each of those. Lee Mee-Jin is our female lead and she’s a young woman who lives with her parents and unsuccessfully tries to get into the civil service year after year. After an event, she is cursed/blessed with a situation where in the hours of daylight she is now a 50 year old woman and in the night she reverts back to herself. She gets a job as the old version of herself at a Prosecutors office and finds herself in both forms involved in a murder mystery. Both versions of Mee-Jin have excellent comedy chops and she has to keep getting herself out of situations where she either can’t be around certain people as she’s about to change forms or she knows something as one form that she really shouldn’t know as the other. Great theme song too. You can watch this on Netflix.

A Shop for Killers – this is an action / mystery show. Jeong-Ji is a college student at her family home, dealing with the aftermath of her uncle Jeong Jin-Man’s funeral, when ten contract killers turn up to assassinate her. She’s more capable than the audience, or she, imagines, due to her uncle having carefully and subtly teaching her life skills that she didn’t even realise were important. It’s got the best cold open – we just start with the killers marching towards her home and a sniper taking shots at her whilst two people we don’t know at all cower in her living room. The action all takes place in a single day with flashbacks to the past that let us gradually get to know Jeong-Ji and Jin-Man and start piecing together why all of this is happening to her. The action is top class. You can watch this one on Disney

Moving – this is a super-hero series, but one that’s trying to be grounded in reality. If you liked Heroes back in the day, this is a modern equivalent of that but with much more depth to the characters and action sequences and effects that beat anything Marvel is doing. We follow some students at a school and slowly learn that some of them have superhuman abilities. We also learn that someone is killing off adult superheroes and doing so efficiently and brutally. We then get to learn about the students parents and their gifts and life stories and how everything all ties together. Every single character is packed with interest and charm. There’s an episode which is all about Jang Ju-Wan’s character, who up until this point has been a cash-strapped dad rather ineptly pursuing his dream of owning a fried-chicken shop – we go back to his past as a gangster and learn that his superpower is that he can’t be permanently injured. The hour that follows is mind-blowing action, as he just engages in a vast number of fights, chases, more fights against overwhelming numbers and uses that superhuman gift (he can be injured, he can bleed, it hurts, he just recovers really quickly) in amazingly creative and brutal ways. It is properly up there with John Wick/The Raid action, but it is just a small part of the whole series. That episode is probably the best hour of television I’ve ever seen, because amongst the action you also get character, humour, vulnerability, a charming love story and a tragedy.

And I challenge anyone not to fall in love with Beong-seok, our male lead who is a teenage boy over-protected by his mother, and who has to eat double-portions of dinner and lug round weights in his school bag because if he loses concentration or gets emotional he will float into the air. I adored him. You can watch it on Disney.

Money Heist – the Korean version. Money Heist was already great, and I had some doubts that an adaptation was necessary or could pull it off – is there another actor in the world who could pull off Berlin’s character, for a start? Well, it is well worth a watch – a lot of the beats are the same but there are enough swerves and wrinkles to make it unpredictable even if you’ve seen the original. There are a lot of smart choices to smooth out some of the slight missteps of the Spanish version – we don’t have the ugly side of Berlin’s womanising here and the Professor’s situation with the lead cop is more plausible and insidious. If you’ve never seen either, I’d still watch the Spanish version – a group of robbers all named after cities do a daring raid on the national vault, but they aren’t only after taking what is there and the brains behind the operation thinks very differently to any planner you’ve seen before. I actually think the Korean version makes the manager of the bank even more infuriating and loathsome than the Spanish version, which I would not have thought possible. (He’s a great actor, and has a smallish part in my next recommendation too, and he’s great in that)

Crash Landing on You – this is really the magnum opus of k-dramas. Cannot recommend highly enough

The central conceit is remarkably silly. It is romance/comedy/drama/thriller – and as I’ve said earlier, nothing else successfully blends genres like a k-drama. If you read a description of a show on British TV as a ‘comedy drama’ then it won’t really be funny or dramatic, but it will be a tiny bit both – it might make you smile, it certainly won’t make you belly laugh. That’s not what you get in Kdrama. When I watched this show, there were quite a few times I had to pause it because I mysteriously got grit in my eyes and couldn’t see the screen any more.

Yoon Se-ri is a fashion tycoon from South Korea – she’s about to be appointed as the successor to her father’s multi-million business (yes, the first episode of this show sets up a Succession style drama where Se-ri, her two venal brothers and their wives (one ditzy and scheming, one pure Lady MacBeth) all jostle for power and position – and the show STILL does that, but it immediately goes ‘we can just have this element of the show as the D-plot with everything else we’ve got going on’ )

For a publicity stunt to launch her new line of sports-wear, Se-Ri goes paragliding but a freak storm knocks her off course and she crashes into a tree. When she wakes up, she sees a solider from the North Korean army – the stoic and serious Ri Jeong-Hyuk and she realises that she’s accidentally been blown into North Korea. What we then get is a fish out of water comedy as the spoiled rich kid adjusts to life in a small military village in North Korea, a romance that blossoms, a french farce of concealing her and lies getting out of control, as well as a taut political thriller with Jeong-Hyuk being drawn into power-plays at the highest level of power and being a pawn in that WHILST also trying to find out who murdered his brother and get revenge. And then everything gets flipped on its head in the second half of the season, which is frankly even better than the mind-boggling good first half.

The supporting cast in this are incredible – there was no reason for the military wives in the village and the meddling female jobsworth inspector to be so well-rounded and drawn and you to fall in love with each and every one of them, there’s no need for each of Jeong-Hyuk’s little squad of soldiers to all be fully-realised characters that you never want to leave – no need for Se-Ri’s downtrodden personal assistant to have his own character arc. But it gives you all of that, and keeps you guessing throughout. Right until the final episode I didn’t know how the show was going to end.

It is just so good. The chemistry between the two leads is so remarkable that they actually got married after the show finished – you can really see them falling in love in real-time. Both of them change and grow so much – the actress who plays Se-ri does a remarkable job of getting you to care about and adore a character who initially starts as being pampered and entitled and you get to see other facets of her that transform everything you think of her, but even at her haughtiest she is still charming and funny even as she’s being ghastly and demanding scented candles from people who don’t even have functioning electricity.

There’s a little throwaway gag reveal really late on involving online computer games which made me laugh so hard that I thought I’d injured myself, and it showed so much about three characters – it didn’t need to be there at all, it was a throwaway moment but it was done with such care and touch. It was a joy throughout. Be prepared to cry though.

You can watch it on Netflix – and you should absolutely do that. Go and watch it now. I want to talk to people about it endlessly.

My god, they’re both so incredible.

These guys – I wanted a whole series just about them. “I think we should fall upon this fried chicken as though they were the enemies of our fathers…”

Watch Crash Landing on You – and if you’ve already watched it, watch it again.

Honourable mentions also to Gyeongseong Creature – which is a wartime monster thriller drama romance, set in occupied Korea during WWII where the male lead floats through life in a sort of Casablanca/Great Gatsby vibe – he’s making a great living running a pawn shop and he is the man who knows everything and can get everything, but doesn’t care about anything. That sadly gets him drawn into finding the missing mistress of the head of military police, and into awful Japanese human weapon experiments on developing the ultimate killing machine. You can watch that on Netflix.

Taxi-Driver – where the conceit is that a taxi-company and a victim support charity are really just fronts for an Equaliser-style vigilante organisation who get revenge on criminals who the law isn’t touching, and then put them in their own personal prison (run on their behalf by an incredibly alluring female mobster). The male lead in that is a former actor and former marine who goes undercover to properly target his victims and get revenge and he’s charming and smooth and funny. Also, he’s a dab hand with a hammer and a nail gun. You can watch season one of that on Netflix.