One of the things that frustrates us most when we watch dramas is when a show’s writers hold back information as a way of creating drama. We could call it You Know What You Did Syndrome, where it would just be easier to state what that person did instead of making the viewers guess. Delaying that payoff almost never is worth the annoyance that the viewer has if it’s held back. A new Korean crime drama on Hulu holds back a lot of information, to its detriment.
GANGNAM B-SIDE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “GANGNAM, SEOUL.” A group of law enforcement officers are in the parking garage of a building, with one trying to torch his way into a hidden area.
The Gist: Kang Dong-woo (Jo Woo-jin) is a top police detective in the Gangnam District, and he tends to initiate busts without his boss’ go-ahead. During this particular bust, he apprehends a well-known drug mule who implicates plenty of Dong-woo’s fellow police officers. Instead of letting it pass, he has those officers, including his boss, arrested. He then gets himself transferred to a rural district.
Three years later, back in Gangham, a club girl named Kim Jae-hee (Kim Hyeong-seo), wakes up high and realizes she’s in trouble. She goes to the bathroom and throws up to get the drugs out of her system. She then takes a hidden phone and calls a fellow club girl she knows has gone missing. She then runs out of the club, dodging traffic to avoid the bouncers and other thugs the bosses have chasing her.
Yoon Gil-ho (Ji Chang-wook), a “broker” of the club girls, is finding a number of them drugged like Jae-hee. He finds out that Jae-hee disappeared, but it seems that he knows where she is. When he finds her hideout, she asks him to find and save her friend, who is held captive.
Dong-woo is persuaded by the commissioner to come back to Gangnam and work on the case of a series of missing club girls in the district. He’s also called back to the center of the city by a call that says his daughter Ye-seo (Oh Ye-ju) is on a hold at a local psychiatric hospital. Her mental health has been fragile since being bullied and ripped off by a group of club girls, but she remains loyal to one: Jae-hee. And because she hasn’t responded to calls and texts, Ye-seo’s mental health is being affected.
He met Jae-hee a year prior, and the meeting didn’t go well; he’s also met Gil-ho thee years prior, when he was a driver for call girls. And while it seems that Gil-ho and Dong-woo are on opposite sides, they both want to make sure these girls are safe.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Gangnam B-Side is similar to other Korean crime dramas, like Vigilante.
Our Take: Gangnam B-Side, written by Joo Won-gyu and Park Noo-ri (Park also directs), tries to bite off a huge chunk of story in its first episode. We get introduced to Jae-hee, as well as Gil-ho and Dong-woo. There’s also Min Seo-jin (Ha Yoon-kyung), a young prosecutor that is also pursuing the case; we’re briefly introduced to her but don’t get much of a handle on who she is.
It took us two viewings of the first episode to really get a handle on the story. There are too many oblique references to what the girls may know or possess; there, the show commits the cardinal sin of holding back too much information, leaving the viewer grasping for information in order to make the characters distinctive.
It’s hard to figure out their motivations at the start of this story, aside from pursuing who is taking these girls. There’s also some purposeful confusion over just what Gil-ho’s role is. When Dong-woo sees a video of Gil-ho grabbing a drugged club girl and putting her in a car, Jae-hee is with them. He might think that Gil-ho is the one making these women disappear, but it feels like he’s trying to save these girls from what generally happens after they get drugged.
Still, the story is confusing, to the point where we weren’t even sure if Jae-hee was alive or dead, despite scenes where she’s hiding out; we thought that might be another club girl. There’s also the connection between Yae-seo and Jae-hee that seems to suffer from the same oblique connection that the main story does; we have no idea “what happened on that roof,” as Dong-woo said, to send Yae-seo into her emotional tailspin, and knowing that the information is being held back until a later episode is more frustrating than anything else.
Sex and Skin: There’s a scene in a club where people are watching a man and a woman having sex, but not that much skin is being shown.
Parting Shot: Gil-ho finds Jae-hee’s missing friend, but he’s too late.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Ha Yoon-kyung as Min Seo-jin, mainly because we barely see her in the first episode and we know she has a bigger role to play than that.
Most Pilot-y Line: Maybe it’s a translation issue, but we read the words “that bitch” far too many times in the subtitles. These thugs need more creative ways to describe the women who work for them.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Gangnam B-Side could end up being a good story once all the threads sort themselves out. But the first episode was so confusing and held back so much information we’re not that interested in waiting around until that happens.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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