Chicken Nugget is a very strange offering. It follows the story of a woman that has been transformed into a bite-sized snack, and the attempts to return her to her normal form. To say that the show is experimental is perhaps an understatement, so I decided to dig up everything I could about the Netflix show to give audiences a sense of what it’s really about.
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K-Drama Chicken Nugget Has a Strange Premise – Here’s What We Know
It is hard not to distill the premise of the show down to a single driving narrative, which is a woman who is accidentally transformed into a chicken nugget. However, there is much more at play here than you might first think, and you cannot deny that K-drama has been making some serious moves with its genre output, looking at horror and sci-fi to tell some more off-the-wall stories.
Even by those standards, Chicken Nugget is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’s presented with a garish comic book colour palette that reminds you of the excesses of the 1960s Batman TV show, mixed with modern-day nods to Rick and Morty’s Pickle Rick episode. There are also some more obvious parodies woven into the plot, including one of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and several nods to the director’s other work, and when you see them you will recognize them.
The story sees a mysterious device being delivered to a small business, and the owner’s daughter Min-ah visiting her dad’s work mistakenly entering the device thinking it’s a sleeping pod. The machine transforms the hapless girl into a piece of chicken, much to the horror of her crush Baek-joong and, of course, her father. The quest to find out what the machine is and how to reverse the process is now on.
What is Chicken Nugget based on?
Chicken Nugget is based on the Naver webtoon of the same name. The South Korean Naver Corporation hosted the webtoon on its platform, and its popularity and strange premise have led to this adaptation on Netflix.
Chicken Nugget Director and Cast
The surreal comedy mystery series was directed by Lee Byeong-heon, a South Korean film director and screenwriter. He is probably best known for his 2015 film Twenty, and 2019’s Extreme Job, notable for being the highest-grossing South Korean film of all time.
Cast-wise, the leads are played by Ryu Seung-ryong and Ahn Jae-hong. You might remember Ryu Seung-ryong from Miracle in Cell No. 7, The Admiral: Roaring Currents, and Extreme Job. Ahn Jae-hong is also well known for his performances in The King of Jokgu and Fabricated City, and the TV series Reply 1988, Fight for My Way and Melodramatic.
Min-ah is played by My Demon’s Kim Yoo-jung.
What is Chicken Nugget really about?
While it’s hard to explain without delving into spoiler-territory — you should read our in-depth Ending Explained and our Season 1 recap for that — it becomes clear as the show goes on that it is about very broad and very human themes like family, parenthood, ambition, relationships, love, and the idea of home.
Chicken Nugget explores these ideas in various ways and to mixed effect, but the big questions it ultimately asks, which include how much we’d be willing to lose for love, are poignant and easily identifiable.
Either, way, it’s not just a zany story about a woman who turns into a chicken nugget. Although it is that too.
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