Summary
Chicken Nugget gets off to a truly awful start, but persevere with it and you’ll find a surprisingly interesting and emotional show.
I do not recall ever hating a show as much as I hated the first few episodes of Chicken Nugget, only to then discover it’s a work of sneaky genius. The South Korean Netflix original – based on the popular webtoon – is daringly eccentric to an off-putting degree… until Season 1 morphs around the halfway point into a genuinely thought-provoking and sometimes quite moving examination of human connection, parenthood, friendship, love, and our ideas of home.
Look, I’m as surprised as you are.
I have to warn you, though. The first few episodes of Chicken Nugget are blisteringly awful, a hodgepodge of ideas too stupid to be taken seriously and comedy so broad and slapsticky that I felt embarrassed watching it instead of having a proper job. You’ll just have to trust me. There’s no way you’ll predict where this ends, but you’ll be thankful I told you to stick it out when you get there.
In the meantime, here’s the general idea. Choi Sun-man (Ryu Seung-ryong) operates a machine shop with his eccentric intern Go Baek-joong (Ahn Jae-hong), so isn’t especially concerned when a strange contraption turns up without warning. That is, however, until his daughter Min-ah (My Demon’s Kim Yoo-jung) steps inside it and gets turned into a chicken nugget.
Yes, I do mean that literally. But this isn’t even the off-putting bit. Min-ah being reduced to a chunk of chicken is just the catalyzing incident in an extremely silly odd-couple adventure that sees Sun-man and Baek-joong trying to figure out how the machine works and how to reverse its effects before Min-ah is accidentally eaten, lost, or any of several other fates that can be bestowed upon a morsel of fried food. And it’s awful.
Awful in multiple ways, too, from the overly arch performances to the screaming – God, the screaming – to the forced hysterics that replace a sitcom laugh track. I hated all of it and I couldn’t imagine it getting any better. Until it did.
I’m not going to spoil anything, since it’s the originality that benefits Chicken Nugget. I can confidently say that you’ve never seen a K-Drama or indeed any other show like this, and you might never again. But suffice it to say that once the true origins of the machine begin to be revealed, and those reveals weave in and out of various connected lives with intriguing and sometimes tragic backstories, the point, such as there is one, begins to reveal itself. The ending is a surprisingly thought-provoking and emotional examination of human lives and relationships that pays off what came before.
The format helps. Ten episodes is a lot, but they’re mercifully short for a K-Drama at just thirty minutes apiece, and the bite-size proportions are clearly intentional. The saturated colors make for a unique aesthetic and the absurdist humor can be quite entertaining when the screaming stops.
And the cast is game. Yoo-jung has little to do beyond looking like the kind of woman who someone would be head over heels in love with, and she does that without even trying, but Ryu and Ahn really rise to the challenge of the material. Certain sequences go on way too long, and the scattershot approach results in just as much stuff that doesn’t work as stuff that does, but the hit rate grows as the season develops.
Chicken Nugget Is Worth Persevering With
It’d be naïve of me to pretend that everyone is going to like this if they just watch it all the way through instead of reaching for the remote after an episode or two, but I can guarantee that plenty will have their minds changed as I did. Even in its totality, Chicken Nugget is too esoteric to be considered any kind of great show; too much of it simply doesn’t work. But it is the kind of show that will linger in the memory of the audience, and even if that isn’t exclusively for the right reasons, it’s better than passing by unnoticed.
Give it a chance, is all I’m saying. You might be surprised.
What did you think of Chicken Nugget Season 1 on Netflix? Comment below.
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