Pachinko is a new four part series on Apple+, premiering today, based on the sweeping 2017 historical novel by Min Jin Lee. It chronicles the painful history of Japan’s occupation of Korea, as told through a family’s experiences spanning 80 years. It’s in Korean, Japanese and English and features Korean superstars like Youn Yuh-jung (Minari) and Lee Min-ho (Boys Over Flowers). I first heard about it and saw the trailer on GoFugYourself. The trailer is so powerful it’s made me cry every time I’ve watched it. It turns out that the series is just as good. It currently has a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and critics are calling it a masterpiece. Here’s part of Caryn James’s review on BBC.com and so many other critics are raving about this show.
The family epic is a shop-worn genre, but the creators of Pachinko reinvent it in their dazzling, heartfelt series about four generations of a Korean family that moves to Japan. The story starts in a poor fishing village in 1915, when Korea was under Japanese occupation, and goes through to the polished world of high finance in Tokyo and New York in 1989. But that saga is delivered with such artistry and imagination – including the passionate yet restrained emotions of the actors, the elegance of the time-shifting narrative and the show’s astonishing visual beauty – that Pachinko is unsurpassed among recent series.
I will likely watch this next week. (I still have some Oscar movies I want to watch at least part of over the weekend.) I’m glad I renewed my Apple Plus subscription and am grateful that Korean dramas are becoming more popular with streaming services. Some of the best shows and movies I’ve seen lately have been from Korea and that seems to traverse genres. The more international and foreign language shows that come out, the more our entertainment evolves with compelling stories like this.
Photos credit: Avalon.red and Getty Images
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