K-Drama

Since the very beginning, The Winning Try has been a superb show, but here in Episode 10, it reaches its zenith. Several developing subplots intertwine for a key cliffhanger, but that comes after several beautiful character moments.

The Winning Try's sudden pivot into more serious and compelling drama continues apace in Episode 9, a brilliant hour dense with interlocking subplots and heightening stakes.

Consent is never a simple subject, and it’s the rare show that can do it justice without dipping into uncomfortable territory.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, or so the saying goes, but the principle applies to K-Drama protagonists in a lot of ways. Beyond the Bar Episode 5 is built on it.

I’ve said this before, here and on various social media platforms, but it’s worth repeating — The Winning Try is much more than a sports drama. You...

It's only Episode 2, and yet The Winning Try is already delivering finale-quality drama, with all the big emotional swings and payoffs you'd expect after a full season of development.

The central idea of Trigger is that a lot of people are just waiting for the opportunity to shoot someone. Based on the shooting rates...

Everyone knew that The Potato Lab would have a happy ending. Really, it deserved one, and Episode 12 provides it with relish. It wasn’t always...

It was obvious that Episode 11 of The Potato Lab was going to play out like this. The signs were there. You can’t have a romantic enemies-to-lovers K-Drama without the dreaded breakup period, where crossed wires lead to an absence that makes the heart grow ever fonder.

As suspected, Episode 10 of The Potato Lab is indeed the obligatory one where problems between the leads threaten to upend their entire relationship.

How a show navigates its pesky middle episodes usually says a lot about it. You expect a captivating opening, and you expect an ending to provide all the payoff you’re looking for. But it’s rare that your average show has a really stand-out Episode 9.

When Life Gives You Tangerines has been a complete surprise and a riveting portrait of loss, grief, and family, especially in a brutal, heartbreaking Volume 2.

Fundamentally, The Potato Lab continues to work in Episodes 7 & 8 about as well as it has worked up to this point, and in largely the same way.

I’m assuming that I know what the end of The Potato Lab is going to be already because it’s an enemies-to-lovers rom-com and they all tend to work the same in a macro sense.

Oh, boy. That was a lot, right? I can’t even begin to imagine how many viewers were left heartbroken by Volume 2 of When Life Gives You Tangerines.

There’s an easy charm to The Potato Lab that feels like alchemy; narrative gold from leaden rom-com tropes.

I get it. I get why The Potato Lab works, and it’s a surprisingly obvious realization, highlighted really capably by Episode 3.

Ever proving that there’s more than one way to skin a cat – or, in this case, air a K-Drama – Netflix elected to release When Life Gives You Tangerines, the expensively-produced IU-starring drama doubling as a love letter to Jeju Island, in four four-part volumes.

Oddly, my concern with The Potato Lab is now that the weirdness of it might put people off. And that’s an interesting position to be in as early as Episode 2, since I’m still making a few assumptions about where it might all be heading.

What is it with K-Dramas these days? The concepts seem to be getting more and more bonkers. Now seems an odd time to suddenly decide that a good old rom-com isn’t enough anymore; there needs to be some kind of unique qualifying gimmick.