I am going to start a new #kdrama tier list on this account. Instead of trying to maintain a "Table of Contents" post that just grows and grows and gets messed up, I will just define the tiers here and reply to this toot with reviews behind spoilers that give the shows rank and title.
Tiers:
Special S-rank: See review to come
S-rank: Essentially perfect; high art
A-rank: Truly excellent
B-rank: Very good
C-rank: Fine
D-rank: Watchable but meh
E-rank: Not good enough to finish
F-rank: Trash
Pretty straightforward medical drama in a neurosurgery department. Bumped from C to B because the main romance was cute and it really nailed the ending, which I wasn't sure they would do.
It can't make up it's mind if it is a goofy, small-town romp or a tense chaebol-gangster thriller with horrible people and OOT cruelty and violence.
The minute to minute vibes are good sometimes, but it's just too dumb to hang together. The FL wonders how her mom knew where she was. How about those thugs who attacked you YESTERDAY? Maybe them? It makes the weird scenes of violence seem insane instead of tense or anything.
@dogfox dang, I had high hopes for that one
I did too for 5 or 6 episodes...
He is the leader of the Wooldachi at the end of the Goryeo period. She's a plastic surgeon in modern Seoul. He kidnaps her through time. Things work out.
It's fun! Kinda like a Korean wuxia. There's themed powers and some time travel stuff, but grounded (loosely) in real history. The villians are good; very hateable. And one of the big bads is kinda interesting: with an insatiable, undefined emptiness that makes him bad and crazed but unpredictable.
@dogfox a B? Really? I gave up partway through episode 2. Maybe I should give it a second chance?
It settles in around episode 4 when the king gets a real personality and his relationship with the queen develops. But if you don't like the cheesy quality it has, that doesn't really go away; you just get some characters behind it.
He's an emotionless plastic surgeon whose fiancé was killed. She's a cop with a no-good brother. There is a killer on the loose... whatever.
It is extremely standard-issue/paint-by-numbers mechanical output. It speaks well of the machine that it is so watchable.
The good guys are a Scooby Gang of con-men/freelance insurance investigators. The bad guys are airline and insurance company executives; as they should be.
I was very tempted to give this B-Rank for some very appealing individual characters and performances (esp. Ryu Hwa Young, Jo Jae Yoon, and Choi Won Young) but it is let down by misunderstood character dynamics and and a plot too damn complicated to be any fun.
1/
The plot is all about untangling some super complicated shenanigans at the top of huge chaebol corporations. It does the corruption of the one of the executives pretty well: nailing the "I am trying to be one of the criminals, but the other criminals keep hamstringing me by not telling me about their crimes!" thing that can happen. And I am sure if I really put the spreadsheet together, everyone motivations and maneuvers would make sense but, y'know, fuck that.
2/
She is a bad-ass, black-clad, stone-cold exorcist/real estate agent who can expel any ghost except her mother's. He is a con man who is pretending to expel ghosts. The bad guy is who they are in real life: a real estate developer.
FL does a great job at the closed-off, steely action chick and showing us the emotions which she is protecting with that exterior. The show is not quite as **fun** as I wanted, but instead packs an unexpected emotional punch.
The fate of nations and the personal destiny of of everyone in the show hinges on ceramics. Based on the life of the Baek Pa Sun, the first female porcelain maker in Joseon, it tells the story of her growth and revenge through pottery making.
It's shot with those cheap, soap-opera cameras, and the first episode packs a lot of crazy backstory into 40 minutes, but don't let that put you off. The clarity with which the show sees it's characters makes up for everything.
1/
You have the 3 crown princes, each one a partial reflection of their father, all the schemers in the palace fighting for status and bribes (of porcelain), the FL, her (adoptive) cousin and her friend/rival for her cousin's heart, and the villain ceramicist and his son.
There are a lot of schemes and counter-schemes, but they are all very expressive of the characters who make them. This makes it a real story instead of just a puzzle.
2/
