Tag: TV

TV review: Gimbap and Onigiri

Gimbap and Onigiri poster

I’m a sucker for a romance based around food, and I love Korean and Japanese food, so Gimbap and Onigiri (TV Tokyo 2026) seemed like a good bet. A Korean woman studying in Tokyo strikes up a friendship – and then romance – with a Japanese man who cooks at a small diner. They bond over food, and the relationship helps them both move past stumbling blocks in their lives.

Rin (played by Kang Hye-won) is studying for a master’s in animation but at the start of her final year, she is falling behind her peers and struggling to find somewhere to live. Her mother is nagging her to move back to Korea and work as an art teacher but Rin dearly wants to stay in Japan. Though it’s unclear why as she seems lonely, with only one friend in Tokyo.

Taiga (Eiji Akaso) is clearly a good cook and is valued by his employer, though he’s had no formal training. His family are hard on him about what they see as an unskilled part-time job. But while working he’s happy and popular, if a little too shy to see how liked he is.

So they’re both insecure, and working unsociable hours that make it hard to have much of a life outside work/university. When Rin stumbles on the diner and they start talking, it seems like a perfect match.

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TV review: The Durrells

Still from TV show The Durrells

Soon after we moved to Bristol, I stumbled across three of the books from the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell in beautiful matching Faber editions. Tim bought me the missing fourth book and in 2012 I embarked on reading this complex tale of love, politics, friendship and betrayal in Egypt written in the 1950s. I loved them. I loved the language, the settings, the obfuscation of multiple layers of narration. Ever since, I have intended to read more by Durrell and learn more about him.

A couple of years ago I became aware there was a TV show called The Durrells (ITV, 2016–2019) and wondered if it could be about the same man. Well – yes and no. I’m three seasons in, so I’m enjoying it. But what have I really learned?

Lawrence Durrell was the eldest of four children (technically five, but one sister died very young) born in India to British parents. When their father died, Lawrence was already in the UK at boarding school. His mother Louisa decided to move to the UK with her three younger children. After an unhappy few years, all five of them moved to Corfu in 1935. (Right now, in a cold wet January, it is easy to sympathise with the idea to leave Britain for sunnier climes.)

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K-drama review: Tastefully Yours

Tastefully Yours screenshot

Sometimes I need my TV to be simple, warm and cosy. And what could be more cosy than the setting of a small-town restaurant with storylines about found family and sweet romance? That’s the vibe of Tastefully Yours (ENA 2025) – mostly. Unusually short for a K-drama (10 episodes of one hour each) the story gets to the point without repeating itself and ends satisfactorily.

Han Beom-woo (played by Kang Ha-neul from When the Camellia Blooms and Misaeng) is an executive at Hansang, “Korea’s top food conglomerate”, and is head of a one-star restaurant in Seoul called Motto. He’s a money guy, with no interest in the restaurants that he invests in, and therefore no qualms about destroying small businesses when they no longer serve his needs. His brother Han Seon-woo runs a two-star restaurant in Seoul also owned by Hansang.

Hansang’s founder and president is Beom-woo’s mother, who plays her two sons against each other, ruthlessly demanding the near-impossible and showing so little warmth it’s hard to believe these three people are meant to be related to each other. What is clear is the pressure both sons are under to get three stars by any means necessary.

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TV review: Back to 15

I have to give credit to Charlie Jane Anders for pointing me towards this TV gem. Her newsletter Happy Dancing always ends with recommendations for books, films, TV and/or music and the recs I’ve followed up I’ve always enjoyed. De Volta Aos 15 (Netflix 2022–2024) is a Brazilian comedy-drama coming-of-age series with LGBTQ characters and is a lot of fun. There’s also time travel!

Anita (played by Camila Queiroz) is 30 and her life is in a rut. When she goes back to her hometown Imperatriz for her sister Luiza’s wedding, she sees that it’s true of most people she knows: they’re all stuck in lives that don’t really make them happy. So when she sits down in her childhood bedroom and finds herself reliving her first day of high school when she was 15, it seems clear what she has to do. Anita (now played by Maisa) is going to fix everyone else’s life and then she’ll magically jump back to her real life, right?

This not only goes predictably badly wrong in the past, but when Anita suddenly returns to her 30-year-old life it has changed significantly. She needs to get back to 2006 and do something differently. Which she does – over and over again for two seasons.

This show is gloriously fun. There’s the 2006 fashion and music. There’s high school drama, with love triangles ahoy. There’s hapless 30-year-old drama, in which Anita thinks she knows best and is repeatedly distracted by her love life. And there’s friendship – so much friendship.

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TV review: Call My Agent

Call My Agent poster

I loved this show. After our holiday in Paris at the end of January I wanted to keep the holiday magic alive. So I finally checked out French comedy Call My Agent/Dix Pour Cent (France Télévision/Netflix 2015–2020) several years after I heard the recommendation from TV critic Rhianna Dhillon. It’s so good I devoured all four seasons within a couple of months.

The show is set at a Paris talent agency, where established agents Andréa (Camille Cottin), Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert), Gabriel (Grégory Montel) and Arlette (Liliane Rovère) manage stars’ – mainly actors – careers, egos and dilemmas. We’re introduced to their world through Camille (Fanny Sidney), a young woman who has come to Paris to confront her estranged father and stumbles into a job as Andréa’s assistant.

This is a light, workplace comedy very much in the vein of W1A, the BBC comedy that satirises the BBC. Genuinely great actors with excellent comedy chops are placed in largely frothy and/or satirical storylines. The guest stars are actual, mostly French, celebrities playing themselves. (Which I admit I did not realise for the first few episodes as I did not recognise the names of the early guest stars. I guess huge celebrity in France does not necessarily mean huge international star.)

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K-drama review: Anna

Anna posterOur temporary holiday from Netflix means I have access to considerably fewer K-dramas at the moment, but there are still a few scattered between the other big streaming services. Anna (2022) started life as a web series and is currently on Amazon Prime Video in the UK. Unusually for a K-drama it’s only 8 episodes long. I didn’t even bother checking online reviews before giving it a try.

This series is most definitely at the more serious, high-quality drama end of the scale compared with a lot of other TV shows from Korea. But it didn’t drag or take itself too seriously, as I found with Misaeng.

Our main character is Lee Yu-mi (Bae Suzy – a huge Hallyu star I know mainly from Uncontrollably Fond), a young woman from a poor background who tells a lie that should have been small and insignificant but instead changes her life entirely. It also changes the tone of the show from straight drama to psychological thriller.

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K-drama review: Extraordinary Attorney Woo

Extraordinary Attorney Woo

I’ve been trying to complete my Netflix watchlist so that we can cancel it (at least for a few months), but they keep on releasing new seasons of shows I like or brand new series from around the world that draw me in. I am always a sucker for a shiny new K-drama. That said, when Extraordinary Attorney Woo (ENA/Netflix 2022) was advertised at me (because the algorithms know) I initially dismissed it based on the poster and the description.

This is the story of an autistic attorney, Woo Young-woo, in her first job after law school, in a country where there is still less support for and understanding of autism than here in the UK. That itself is of interest to me. But this is not one of those grittier, lower budget K-dramas, it has all the sheen of a typical big-budget production and that worried me – would it have any nuance? Or would it treat its lead character with the cliché-ridden and infantilising approach to the autistic brother in It’s Okay to Not Be Okay?

I recently attended a course on neurodiversity in the workplace, and the trainer (who herself is autistic) recommended this show, saying that it is sometimes clichéd but not inaccurate. I think that was the best way possible for my fears to be allayed.

I mean, it’s still high-budget K-drama – it’s glossy, cheesy, repetitive, often silly and sometimes surreal. But it never makes autism the joke. And it feels like it exists in a more “real” world than most K-dramas – albeit still a shiny version of reality where things always turn out for the best and most people wear designer clothes.

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K-drama review: It’s Okay to Not Be Okay

Poster of the four lead actors in It's Okay to Not Be Okay

Sometimes I need an engrossing, hyper-real, overwrought drama with plenty of romance and a little comedy, and only a K-drama will hit the spot. The previous few I watched hadn’t quite worked for me, but It’s Okay to Not Be Okay (tvN/Netflix, 2020) was just right. It’s far from a perfect show but it is very entertaining in its heightened mishmash of styles.

Our lead character is Moon Gang-tae (Kim Soo-hyun), who works as a caretaker in psychiatric wards/hospitals and lives with his brother Moon Sang-tae (Oh Jung-se, from When the Camellia Blooms) who has autism and works various low-paid jobs. They move homes and jobs frequently, which is related to Sang-tae having witnessed their mother’s murder when they were young.

Gang-tae is both sweet and very capable, but to cope with the difficulties of caring for his brother and their frequent moves, he can come across as cold and unemotional. This makes him an ideal sparring partner for Ko Moon-young (Seo Yea-ji), a popular children’s author who is brittle and quick to anger.

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April 2022 reading round-up

Easter weekend pleasures

Happy International Workers Day! April was super cold and then gorgeously warm and dry, so it feels appropriate that May has begun with grey drizzle.

Last month I finished four books but it felt like I read non-stop. I am more than halfway through three books at the moment, so I guess that’s related. And all our weekends have been busy, so I’ve had very few long stretches of reading time.

Anyway, the four books I read were all great but I especially loved The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe and co-authors. I love everything Monáe does, including the album Dirty Computer and its accompanying “emotion picture”, which is the origin of this book, so I am unsurprised but also relieved to have loved the book as well. I had pre-ordered a copy of this book for a friend’s birthday and was delighted to have two copies show up in the post because Tim had pre-ordered one for me as a surprise. What an excellent partner.

Last month we had friends and family come to visit; we went to the beach; and I went on a day trip to the Cotswolds for a friend’s birthday. This coming month we have our first holiday of the year, which we have barely started to plan, so let’s hope that comes together!

My top films watched last month would be Spider-Man: No Way Home, Wadja, Hello My Name is Doris and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. My top TV is a very close tie between season two of Russian Doll and season one of Heartstopper. The latter is based on the web comic by Alice Oseman, which I’ve discussed here before, adapted for TV by Oseman herself. It is a perfect adaptation – a mostly gentle and sweet (but sometimes dealing with serious issues) school drama about two boys falling in love (and their diverse group of friends). I know the web comic gets a little more serious over time, so I expect season two will be less light and fluffy. Assuming it’s renewed, but the ecstatic reception of season one hopefully means it will be.

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December 2020 reading round-up

December reads

It’s been a cold, wet, grey end to a difficult year. Which means we’ve spent most of the last week curled up indoors with blankets and hot drinks. I think even Beckett is feeling the cold, despite her double fur coat, as she’s been cosying up to us more than she had for a couple of months. It’s either the cold, or she’s just grateful to have more of our attention while we’re not working for a week and a half. Next week could be stressful for her.

This month I finished seven books, which is pretty high for 2020, though it should be said that includes two books I started last month and one that I started in October. I blame Christmas and my dead/dying laptop for my not having written a book review despite having had a week of holiday.

I think I badly needed to unwind this past week. And the quantity of TV that I’ve watched suggests I’ve not done too badly at that. I have watched and thoroughly enjoyed both seasons of Home For Christmas, a Norwegian romcom about a nurse who lies to her family on 1 December that she has a boyfriend who she will be bringing to her parents’ on Christmas Eve, and then spends the next three weeks trying to find a suitable man. It’s not cheesy or simplistic, the characters are all interesting and varied, but it’s still fun and very Christmassy.

I also watched the first season of Dash & Lily, another show set in the run-up to Christmas, this time set in New York and based on the books by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. As there are multiple books I’m guessing they hope to do another season, but they probably couldn’t shoot it this year so the teen characters might look rather older when next we see them! This one was also enjoyable but quite cheesy and fluffy, and I am starting to get a little annoyed by the trope of the bubbly, happy-go-lucky girl being paired with a sulky, constantly negative boy.

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