lord_varvara

ha ha no, Lord Varvara is the best character on ho-hum Tribes of Europa. I enjoyed that show as guilty pleasure, and her character and actress are great, but I expected more from the creators of Dark.

BTW, if you like revenge dramas watch Netfix' Al-Rawabi School For Girls mini series. That was awesome. Didn't pull any punches and was very unpredictable. Also great acting by all the actresses playing schoolgirls

to me, a revenge drama would be good if: we cannot guess who the killer is (if the drama is determined to keep his ID a secret), main character isn't easily given all the tools to achieve her revenge (she easily won all fights with very little prior training/effort, she easily got an access to police, she easily got a boyfriend lol), main character is an actual character instead of po-faced plot-forwarded squarely focused on one thing, a drama didn't make a stupid turn towards romance midway through to pad up the running time since a thin story like this should have been a movie not a drama, main character has some redeeming quality to wish her to have a good life but this one was so unlikable one had to cheer when her boyfriend bit the dust and took happiness away.

P.S. a plank of wood emotes better than this actress. She has only 1 facial expression and then gets hysterical in "Look mommy I'm acting" way that gives Asian actors a bad name.

agreed. Ah yes, the painting thing is the silliest plot device ever. It seems that everyone but this drama characters can see how dumb the whole thing is. Also, after the first attempt fell flat on its face (just burn the painting and Ma Wang will be free lol), why do they bother again? It's not gonna work!

what's with LSG and reality shows? He's a big star and Hollywood big stars wouldn't be caught dead on reality shows. Perhaps it's an honor in Korea?

Superhero LSG sounds good to me.

I don't care how many months he spent learning ballet, I watched the show and I recognize a double when I see a double and I know all the editing tricks used to hide doubles. It was all the time. he didn't do even the most basic dancing which is why I say they should have hired an actor with ballet background (I've seen a number on that very show in background roles) or at least someone with dance background such as idols who are put in freakin sageuk lol.

He may be Netflix golden boy but outside of Sweet Home none of his dramas broke out. And SH wasn't a hit because of him but because monsters + appealing ensemble. Last time I checked, a lot of fans discovered LDH in that drama.

P.S, Popularity Awards have always been marketing awards. Everywhere. They don't mean best at acting.

ha ha cannot disagree! :)

apt comparison!

navillera was also ridiculous. The whole rpemise that old man wants to learn ballet was rather lulz but OK whatever. However, then they jumped the shark with letting him actually perform with the professionals lol. Who writes that crap? Your premise is out there to begin with but there were ways to keep it grounded. But noooo. They had to have Swan lake on the stage. I felt embarrassed for actors and myself for watching that trainwreck.

Nevertheless was a typical corporate trash. hey, how about we get that girl from World of the Married and that boy from Sweet Home and break viewership records by having them look mooney-eyed for X number of episodes? Plot? What plot? Who needs that when you have visuals from successful dramas of the past!

(not so) Shockingly, this drama had terrible domestic ratings. LOL.

yep, DP was good and unlike most drama it was very well paced. I wouldn't make it shorter or longer.

However, this great list in incomplete without Vincezo. lets be honest here. Everyone was disappointed after the drama moved from Italy to seoul in the very first episode. What a cruel bait and switch! And then the plot languidly moved through 20 episodes where 8, 10 tops would suffice.
Not to mention boring Gary Stu ML with the biggest plot armor ever and irritating FL who should have been tossed out of the window the second she appeared. Vincenzo and her father had much better chemistry.

Supporting cast saved this one.

Doom wasn't even popular. Korean ratings were blah. I bet it did well on Viki where only romance does well.

people are not contrarians. he isn't a very good actor but is put in everything these days so that allows more people to see his lack of range. he was effective in Sweet Home but the rest of dramas(Love Alarm, Nevertheless, Navillera) didn't cut it as far as his presence and acting goes.

Also, the less said about absolutely ridiculous attempts to hide that he didn't do ballet dancing (aka "headless" body double) the better. There are actors with ballet or dance background (your average idol, hello?) so why cast an actor who can't do even the most basic moves? It isn't like he's an audience draw.

Viki's fine. Thnaks. I have both accounts.

well said on both accounts. Mouse works as an unintetional comedy cause it's relaly laughable yet unaware of it. TB is indeed a surface-level Gangnam Beauty made by someone who didn't understand why that drama was actually good (spoiler: it wasn't CEW).

Amen! Move to Heaven and Navillera were snoozeathons. They could have made decent 2 hrs top movies but a TV series even with limited number of episodes was waaaay stretching it.

Doom At Your Service - I'm not surprised it was crap with visuals like 90% of romantic dramas. I find it that most romance-based dramas are written only for shippers who generally only want to ship themselves with ML or SML sometimes (see True Beauty) and don't care whether a drama is pure nonsense without any substance. For them, having ML read a phonebook and FL swoon over him, whether he deserves or not, is enough. hence why such dramas have ridiculously inflated ratings on MLD. Shippers really grade ML's visuals rather than content of a drama. And in my humble opinion, visuals in many cases aren't even that great.

I'd add the following to the list:

Mouse - this drama was basicaly crime makjang. It got progressively ridiculous without being aware of its ridiculousness. I have no problem with makjang that knows it's makjang and is proud of it. But this thing fancied itself a serious drama lol.

Extracurricular - not at all as topical as it wanted to be (about half of the episodes were dedicated to ML trying to get his phone back) but a big snooze. Should have been a movie.

Lovers of the Red Sky - another Visuals = Higher Ratings Than Deserved crapola with tons of nonsense (fantasy world breaks its own rules every episode to accomodate the barely-there plot), long lulls in storytelling, bad acting (ML), ridiculous charactersiation (ML), ML-centrism (shippers asked for it duh!), FL sidelining (hey now, she swoons over ML, that's all characterisation and focus
that's needed)

River Where The Moon Rises - I honestly believe that new ML's PR astroturfed support for him cause he was a literal plank of wood. if they cast a plank for free, instead of paying this one, no one would have noticed the difference. This was terrible even by sageuk's low standards which is saying something.

My Name - Netflix' new K hope after Squid Game success is a textbook revenge cliche so predictable you'll guess the killer 15 min into the first episode. Which FL doesn't, lol, which is the only reason why this is a drama with about 8 episodes. On top of being dumber than an average drama fan, FL has about as much muscle as a kitten, but thanks to plot armor and revenge tropes, she beats up men twice her size who are also professional fighters that somehow forgot the most basic rule of martial arts - it's all about vital points, not strength. But even so, you could make a decent movie out of this, had it not been for romance! LOL, yes, halfway through, they inserted completely unnecessary romance to fill in the 8 episode time that would have been enough for a movie if they stuck with revenge only. Cue snooze. Cue inflated rating cause of visuals.

Squid Game - I love this drama like you wouldn't believe it. It's a great character study (I'm looking at you, Sang Woo!). I even inflated its rating cause, at the time I reviewed it, it was standing at paltry 8.1. But those Americans. Good Lord! Worst actors EVER!!!!! Like did they pick those guys up at a pub or something? They couldn't act their way out of a paperpag! And not only that but they were unnecessary. The twist from the last episode pretty much explained why the games existed. So why have these losers in the drama since they didn't move the needle and nobody liked them. Surely director could see they stunk up the joint?

True Beauty - a drama that sums up everything that's wrong with overinflated dramas: visuals over storytelling, paper thin plot that couldn't fill a movie running time let alone 16 freakin episodes, drivel, cringe, redundancy, moving in circles, filler, histrionics. or in Queen's immortal words: VISUALS! AAAAAAH THEY'LL SAVE EVERY ONE OF US AAAH AAAh AAaH

Netflix or Viki?

I dropped it after 1 episode and that ridiculous win against more trained fighters at the start of ep 2. LOL, as if they didn't know that attacking vital points >>> sheer strength. Why do we always have that terrible cliche to justify why a not-so-trained twink hero or skinny heroine somehow beat up well-trained men twice their size?

Your review confirmed every single prediction I made. They didn't even try with this drama. Just put bunch of cliches and rolled with it.

I get it now. Yes, psychological horror w/o supernatural. I haven't seen the drama but I know the genre now that you explained it.

I thought it was terrible. Boring. Ashin was no character but just a po-faced plot device. Her revenge was so over the top ridiculous that she came off as the worst moustache twirling villain. I suspect the idea was to make her sympathetic but nope, not even close. I'm not looking forward to see her in Season 3.