This article contains spoilers.
2.5/5 stars
Lead cast: Lee Do-hyun, Ra Mi-ran, Ahn Eun-jin
Latest Nielsen rating: 12.03 per cent
There’s a long-running discussion about the pros and cons of Korean dramas versus Western programming. The main point in favour of K-dramas that most seem to agree on is that they tend to be finite.
Although there are many exceptions today, particularly with streaming series, Korean dramas are still mostly designed as stories that neatly wrap up in one season. What people talk less about is whether, neatly wrapped up though they may be, those stories can be padded out enough to fill between 12 and 20 television episodes, each an hour or more long.
The Good Bad Mother midseason recap: diverting and emotional Netflix K-drama
Feel-good rural drama The Good Bad Mother, featuring Lee Do-hyun of The Glory, has just concluded a successful 14-episode run which saw it enter the ranks of the top 25 cable series of all time in South Korea with its closing rating.The basic framework of the story is clear: a pig-farming couple give birth to a boy whose mother pushes him to become a prosecutor after his father is killed by a gangster with the help of a prosecutor with political ambitions.
The boy does become a prosecutor, but is estranged from his overbearing mother along the way. However, when his mental capacities are impaired following an accident – actually an attempted murder – he returns to his mother to recuperate. Once he does, he resumes his plan and brings the villains to justice.
That’s the whole story in a nutshell and it’s one that we’re expected to understand as the series begins. The opening pair of set-up episodes include all the backstory we need to piece things together, and several more suggestions are dropped very early on, ensuring that there will be no major surprises.Since The Good Bad Mother was a ratings hit and viewers knew what was coming all along, what kept them watching? Unlike “bingeable” streaming series that shock spectators with their twists and turns, this fell in the category of family melodrama – series that seduce audiences with their display of heartfelt emotions and earthy charms.
The show delivers emotion and charm in spades, but as the emotions get sappier and the charm goofier as the story plods along, they can no longer mask the drawn-out and repetitive nature of the narrative.
While the story may not be the most important thing here, after a while it beings to feel like a nugget of butter being spread over a 14-slice loaf of bread. The main story could easily be told in the running time of a feature film, the equivalent of the two slices you need for your lunch sandwich.
What a film wouldn’t be able to achieve is to do justice to the show’s wealth of flamboyant supporting characters, but after spending the past few months with them some viewers may have begun to wonder if they would not have been better off without them.
The pantomiming villagers are a K-drama standard – dancing, singing and slapsticking their way through beloved dramas such as Crash Landing on You, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha and Our Blues – but the group that populates The Good Bad Mother is less memorable than its progenitors’ and occasionally downright silly.8 of the best new Korean drama series to look out for in June 2023
Take the wife of village head Son Yong-rak (Kim Won-hae), who is played by Park Bo-kyung of Little Women, though you wouldn’t recognise her as she appears in every scene with an elaborate new mask pack or other gaudy contraption to cover her face.Park’s visage is finally revealed in the coda, which indulges in a ludicrous backstory that positions her as the daughter-in-hiding of a Japanese yakuza boss. This may be an explanation of sorts for her silly get-ups, but it’s far from a satisfactory one.
Once it comes time for the show to end, Lee Do-hyun’s Choi Kang-ho appears before the villains as his old self again and returns to the court in his prosecutor robes. The comeuppance that has been teased for weeks is wrapped very quickly and a tad clumsily.
The rest of the final episode is devoted to the many other things we’ve been waiting to happen, including the tearful death of his mother, Jin Young-soon (Ra Mi-ran), from cancer and his permanent reunion with childhood sweetheart Lee Mi-joo (Ahn Eun-jin).
Yet the finale is so rushed that it doesn’t even take the time to show us some scenes that would have been unique to this story and probably quite a bit of fun to watch, such as Kang-ho revealing to Mi-joo’s two young children, who he was playmates with for much of the season, that he is actually their father. The climax skips over that entirely.
Before the pressure valve blew off the waterworks in the show’s final run, there were many genuinely tender moments in the show. Most of these concerned Kang-ho’s renewed relationship with his mother, who gets to take care of him as a child once again, after realising the error of her ways the first time around.
But in the end the creators had to have their cake and eat it too. Young-soon acknowledges her mistakes as a mother, recognising that she should have let Kang-ho grow up unfettered, but once he reclaims his memories and mental faculties he flexes his power as a prosecutor and avenges his father just in time for Young-soon to live to see it.
That’s some seriously mixed messaging. It doesn’t matter that Kang-ho subsequently discards his judicial robes to live a quiet life with Mi-joo and their children as a pig farmer – fulfilling his mother’s other desire for him.
The Good Bad Mother is streaming on Netflix.
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