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Pigpen from the Peanuts comic strip has only one joke really
Charles Schulz created one of the most iconic comic strips of the 20th century with his warm and charming characters idly navigating school and youth baseball and adolescent crushes but layered with subversive and existential themes. Kids with absolutely no parental involvement. Bullying laughed off as kids being kids. A consistent message that practice and trying hard does not actually always garner rewards. Alienation, melancholy, anxiety, et al. It just so happens, however, that one of the oft-overlooked characters from "Peanuts" is the ideal metaphor for "Namib".
Pigpen is mostly a backdrop for the main characters and rarely gets a line. Namib has been garnering ratings of under 3 percent viewership.
Pigpen has the basic construction of other Peanuts characters. Big round head with close-set eyes, a few wisps of hair, trapezoid-shaped body and oversized shoes. Namib has the diva female lead, the angtsy male teen, the awkward girl with a crush, the cold and conniving CEO, the bad boy peer and the princess in distress.
Pigpen, in the comic strip, has a single gag which is that he [dramatic pause] cleans up [TA DA!!!! Jazz hands!] but as soon as he does, he almost instantly gets covered with dirt and dust again. It's not really a great gag but as mentioned above, deep literary analysis of Peanuts is about as light and fun as a semester studying Dostoyevsky and Lermontov at a little known liberal arts college in rural Indiana (if that sounds oddly personal and specific, well, yeah it is).
And that cycle is pretty much "Namib" in a nutshell. It's a mess. Throughout. Unrelenting. Except for a couple of really great scenes.
Gyo Hyun Jung is absolutely lost as Kang Su Hyeon. The character doesn't make sense, either in the backstory or her actions through the course of the show. She seems nice and smart and intuitive on the exterior but the primary plot requires her to do things that are unconscionably cruel and dumb and hurtful and the portrayal doesn't even show a lick of internal "I know I have to do this but I feel really awful about it". Instead, Gyo Hyun Jung sleepwalks through her scenes with about as much emotional heft as if she were ordering a diet soda through a drive-thru.
Lee Seung Joon is a terrible villain. The writing for the villain isn't great. It's irredeemably dumb that he has some sob story and a parade of misunderstandings about why he's such a jerk. Just make him a jerk. Less backstory. More present day jerkiness. And with a better actor. Lee Seung Joon is about as menacing as a one of the horses on an antique carousel that doesn't even bob up and down.
And the cliches. And the poor blocking. Some weird editing. One of the weakest supporting casts of any drama. Questionable wardrobing. Even the name makes so little sense that an awkward explainer scene has to be inserted so there's at least an attempt to make it make sense but in the larger context of the show, the explanation is profoundly nonsensical. It's an almost wall-to-wall mess.
But like our good pal Pigpen, it has a couple moments where somehow, someway, it has a terrific sequence. Every once in a while, Ryeoun (our angtsy teen heartthrob whose psychological issues need SERIOUS psychiatric counseling but instead gets haphazardly used as a plot device and then immediately glossed over) sings a ballad. And there are ballads in just about every drama. And they are almost always fillers for some montage so the production can eat up a few minutes without having to stretch some flimsy dialogue even more thinly across a sixty minute runtime. It's typically a perfect opportunity to use the 10 second skip ahead button until the schmaltz stops.
Not these. Man, this young man can sing. Act? Debatable. He had moments in "Twinkling Watermelon" but he's certainly not elevating a character beyond its weak writing here. But sing? [long dramatic pause] Sweet holy infant in a Middle Eastern manger. He could probably get the most machismo-fueled, fundamentalist Christian, straight-for-life Navy SEAL to think twice about his sexuality.
And then like Pigpen resuming his dirt & dust covered wallflower existence, Ryeoun stops singing and "Namib" goes back to its messy dialogue and trite characters and other assorted forgettable wreckage.
Not recommended.
Pigpen is mostly a backdrop for the main characters and rarely gets a line. Namib has been garnering ratings of under 3 percent viewership.
Pigpen has the basic construction of other Peanuts characters. Big round head with close-set eyes, a few wisps of hair, trapezoid-shaped body and oversized shoes. Namib has the diva female lead, the angtsy male teen, the awkward girl with a crush, the cold and conniving CEO, the bad boy peer and the princess in distress.
Pigpen, in the comic strip, has a single gag which is that he [dramatic pause] cleans up [TA DA!!!! Jazz hands!] but as soon as he does, he almost instantly gets covered with dirt and dust again. It's not really a great gag but as mentioned above, deep literary analysis of Peanuts is about as light and fun as a semester studying Dostoyevsky and Lermontov at a little known liberal arts college in rural Indiana (if that sounds oddly personal and specific, well, yeah it is).
And that cycle is pretty much "Namib" in a nutshell. It's a mess. Throughout. Unrelenting. Except for a couple of really great scenes.
Gyo Hyun Jung is absolutely lost as Kang Su Hyeon. The character doesn't make sense, either in the backstory or her actions through the course of the show. She seems nice and smart and intuitive on the exterior but the primary plot requires her to do things that are unconscionably cruel and dumb and hurtful and the portrayal doesn't even show a lick of internal "I know I have to do this but I feel really awful about it". Instead, Gyo Hyun Jung sleepwalks through her scenes with about as much emotional heft as if she were ordering a diet soda through a drive-thru.
Lee Seung Joon is a terrible villain. The writing for the villain isn't great. It's irredeemably dumb that he has some sob story and a parade of misunderstandings about why he's such a jerk. Just make him a jerk. Less backstory. More present day jerkiness. And with a better actor. Lee Seung Joon is about as menacing as a one of the horses on an antique carousel that doesn't even bob up and down.
And the cliches. And the poor blocking. Some weird editing. One of the weakest supporting casts of any drama. Questionable wardrobing. Even the name makes so little sense that an awkward explainer scene has to be inserted so there's at least an attempt to make it make sense but in the larger context of the show, the explanation is profoundly nonsensical. It's an almost wall-to-wall mess.
But like our good pal Pigpen, it has a couple moments where somehow, someway, it has a terrific sequence. Every once in a while, Ryeoun (our angtsy teen heartthrob whose psychological issues need SERIOUS psychiatric counseling but instead gets haphazardly used as a plot device and then immediately glossed over) sings a ballad. And there are ballads in just about every drama. And they are almost always fillers for some montage so the production can eat up a few minutes without having to stretch some flimsy dialogue even more thinly across a sixty minute runtime. It's typically a perfect opportunity to use the 10 second skip ahead button until the schmaltz stops.
Not these. Man, this young man can sing. Act? Debatable. He had moments in "Twinkling Watermelon" but he's certainly not elevating a character beyond its weak writing here. But sing? [long dramatic pause] Sweet holy infant in a Middle Eastern manger. He could probably get the most machismo-fueled, fundamentalist Christian, straight-for-life Navy SEAL to think twice about his sexuality.
And then like Pigpen resuming his dirt & dust covered wallflower existence, Ryeoun stops singing and "Namib" goes back to its messy dialogue and trite characters and other assorted forgettable wreckage.
Not recommended.
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