These go to 11: ‘The Last Empress’, ‘Pandora’ & ‘Nice Guy’ — K-dramas with no shame whatsoever.
Makjang is a slang term that refers to a type of full-on melodrama where no plot twist is too ridiculous and no character too extreme as long as the emotional payoff is huge. ‘Potboiler’ is a reasonable approximation in translation. Korean drama can do nuanced, psychologically intricate stories without breaking sweat. A Piece of Your Mind, My Liberation Notes and Call it Love are excellent examples of the sublime end of the spectrum that I unreservedly recommend. However, this article is going to dive headfirst into the ludicrous, jaw dropping brilliance of the makjang instead. For a great explanation of the derivation of this word, try this legacy blog: it’s a shame they stopped posting a while ago.
I toyed with calling this examination of the absurd, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly because not all makjangs are equal. I’ll leave you to decide which is which. One of the highest rating dramas from 2018, The Last Empress is set in an alternative present where Korea still has a monarchy but one where ‘noblesse oblige’ has been traded in for a racketeering crime enterprise of epic proportions. Into this den of blue-blooded gangsters steps a common-as-muck naïve innocent in the shape of musical artiste Oh Sunny, played with dazzling sincerity by Jang Na-ra. The reasons why she ends up married to Emperor Lee Hyuk, played with as much degenerate cruelty as he could muster by Shin Sung-rok, are complicated but irrelevant. We’re much more interested in the ways Oh Sunny avoids at least five bizarre attempts on her life, including the sabotaging of a crane platform from which she has to make a spectacular appearance at her wedding — what, why?
Also mesmerising is a great set piece featuring Lee Elijah as duplicitous secretary Min Yoo-ra ambushed by Shin Eun-kyung as Empress Dowager Kang and punished by a murderous dousing in liquid cement. It’s a spectacular scene as Lee Elijah slips and slides under a torrent of grey sludge although it’s best not to dwell on how the hell the Empress Dowager managed to furtively pump a lorry load of Acme (TM) quick drying cement into a secret subterranean liar inside the Royal Palace. Min Yoo-ra survives and I sincerely hope the delightful Lee Elijah escaped entirely unscathed as well. Min Yoo-ra does more moral flips in The Last Empress than a gymnastics floor routine but her final comeuppance takes the form of a brick to the head giving her brain damage and leaving her in the tender care of her brutally spurned early years boyfriend — karma, eh?
The Last Empress is deliciously enjoyable at a certain level because it never fails to double down on its hysterical plot twists in a kind of outrageous arms race with itself. The writer, Kim Soon-ok, likes a makjang (she also penned Temptation of Wife and The Penthouse) but the wheels finally came off this buggy when she had to mangle her barely alive plot by adding two extra episodes to cash in on its stella ratings; but without the male lead, Choi Jin-hyuk. Tears sprang to my cheeks when his character, a brutish slob transformed into a fit Imperial bodyguard for purposes of revenge, simply disappeared at the apex of the drama forcing evil Emperor Lee Hyuk into a 180 degree character reversal. Although Jang Na-ra magnificently anchors the whole thing by playing the put upon heroine naturalistically straight, a show like The Last Empress requires a heavy dose of full-bodied over-the-top acting from the supporting cast, particularly the antagonists. There’s a Chinese phrase for this style of semiotically pumped performance, which literally translates as ‘pouring dog’s blood’ and Shin Eun-kyung is nothing if not a virtuoso.
I was reminded of both the dog’s blood and the cement as I watched 2023’s Pandora: Beneath the Paradise. In place of Lee Elijah, we have the equally beautiful Lee Ji-ah, over the top physical humiliations must be visited on desirable women in the makjang, and in place of the cement, we have a henchman yanking her prosthetic ear violently off to prove her secret identity. What is desperately missing from Pandora is someone of the calibre of Shin Eun-kyung to pour the dog’s blood because Shim So-young as Kim Seon-deok, the director of a The Witch: Part 1 The Subversion style mental hospital fronting an assassins’ school, just doesn’t have the ballast for a cackling super villain (TBF, she’s not bad in Taxi Driver and Alchemy of Souls).
Lee Ji-ah has a delicate gentle performance persona. She looks tender and kind and her voice is soft and sincere. All of which she put to devastating effect in My Mister as Lee Sun-kyung’s cheating but repentant lawyer wife. She’s not scared off by the trashy as three seasons of SKY Castle clone The Penthouse: War in Life proves; Dog blood again poured by Shin Eun-kyung. I was fascinated to see what she would make of the amnesiac mom / female assassin trope — Hello, Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight. Lee Ji-ah oscillates pretty effectively between a muscle memory kick-ass and a nice but confused chaebol wife but it’s still weird seeing her lose a prosthetic ear, poke a guy’s eye out with a stick and do endless one versus many martial arts scenes. It’s a bit like watching an Andrex puppy bite the head off a rottweiler: there’s a certain level of cognitive dissonance but you can’t take your eyes off it. I guess Lee Ji-ah has form subverting her soft persona with the ‘still waters run deep’ menace of The Ghost Detective; it no doubt helped that she looked spectacular in red.
Kim Soon-ok has got her fingerprints on Pandora as creator but got someone else (Hyun Ji-min) to write it. However that dynamic worked, the script is somewhat dubious, even for a makjang. Take victim of multiple injustices, Go Hae-soo (Jang Hee-jin): having discovered that the best friend who saved her life is actually the assassin who murdered her father, she shows her displeasure by mowing the shit out of said friend’s flower beds before chucking a stone through her window. When challenged, she glowers but sarcastically claims the stone was an accident. Mmmm, that might work in a Dynasty kinda way if your nemesis had flirted with your husband or upstaged you at the PTA but she shot your father at his presidential inauguration with a high powered rifle from a thousand yards. A dodgy script can really expose you as an actor and Jang Hee-jin is bearing the brunt in Pandora, which is a shame because she was marvellous in My Shy Boss.
There’s a pattern developing here, is there not: all the actors in Pandora seem to be better in something else, and that definitely includes the male lead, Lee Sang Yoon, who’s a shadow of his VIP level. Part of the fun of the ‘housewife / family woman is an assassin’ genre is its fish out of water reveal but in Pandora, pretty much everyone in amnesiac killer Hong Tae-ra’s (Lee Ji-ah) new life is a turd, so the fish is not really out of the water. Also, the script can’t hold onto its secrets so there’s no tension: e.g., the good looking bodyguard, who’s not only a double agent but also the assassin’s long lost brother, is outed within 30 mins of first sight. There’s some bad monkey acting from a man in a furry suit, a preposterous tech/sci-fi additional plot that skews the focus and the whole thing gives clichés and tropes a bad name. Pandora is utter rubbish but weirdly watchable up to a certain point then it starts to eat its own tail.
Juicy is the word I’d deploy for Nice Guy, a full-on melodramatic pot boiler from 2012 staring Song Joong-ki, Moon Chae-won and Park Si-yeon in a devastating chaebol corrupted love triangle. The tango-esque theme music with its jaunty piano accordion is neatly evocative for a drama that’s got everything: car crashes, a perennially sick sister, a medical emergency on a plane, memory loss, a despotic chaebol father with a heart condition, treacherous underlings, obsessive love, murder, manslaughter, manipulations of all sorts from blackmail to seduction, kidnapping, domestic violence, gruesome beatings, bitch-fests, all or nothing power plays and more emotional set piece face offs per episode than anyone has a right to expect.
As a treatise on the past being always with us and the unpredictable and bizarre nature of love, Nice Guy is hard to beat. The plot may be preposterous but as a means of ripping the characters to their basest most vulnerable shreds, it’s gruesomely effective. Moon Chae-won is spot on as the hate driven chaebol heir, sporting a cynical bob and a glassy stare, just perfectly ripe to be hopelessly stabbed to the heart by Song Joong-ki’s tortured nice guy made bad by an epic love betrayal. Park Si-yeon rips into her typecasting turning her simmering femme fatale into a nuanced and magnificently agonised soul torn apart by a no-win internal conflict between overwhelming sexual love, maternal instinct and cold hard self-interest. Yikes! A must watch if you’re curious what the dramatic equivalent of throwing a can of petrol onto a bonfire looks like.
The lesson for would-be makjangs is clear. By all means turn your amps up to 11, but make sure you’re playing a good tune in the first place. It works best if crazy things happen to characters that we care about.
Available to stream in the UK: The Last Empress (Netflix, Viki); Pandora: Beneath the Paradise (Disney +); Nice Guy (Netflix, Viki — The Innocent Man); A Piece of Your Mind (Viki); My Liberation Notes (Netflix); Call it Love (Disney +); The Penthouse: War in Life (Netflix, Viki) ; The Ghost Detective (Kocowa+); The Witch: Part 1 The Subversion (Amazon Prime — Shudder); Taxi Driver (Netflix, Viki Pass); Alchemy of Souls (Netflix); VIP (Netflix, Viki). Subscription required: Netflix, Disney +, Amazon Prime, Shudder, Kocowa+, Viki Pass.
