Korean Live-Action Show: W · 12:09pm Sep 19th, 2017
Korean Live-Action Show: W
For those of you who are not aware, I am a big fan of live-action shows and movies from various parts of Asia (such as India, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, The Philippines, and other places).
I decided to start a blog series were I talk about the different shows from Asia that I enjoy watching in order to spread awareness for them.
This time I will be talking about a Korean show called W.
Here is the trailer for W, for those who want a quick overview.
I am just going to get things out of the way and mention before I go into this review that I have very mixed feelings about W. On the one hand, it has a really awesome premise; a person gets sucked into a web comic and helps the main character to solve a series of mysteries.
On the other hand, it has a romance subplot. And I am really not a big fan of romance. So that's already a strike against it, in my book.
But to be fair, I feel that the romance was handled rather well. I still hated watching it (I'm an ice Queen when it comes to this stuff, so meh) but at least it was tolerable because the writing was good.
So now I will talk about the story.
The main character of the story is a second year doctor-in-training named Yeon-joo. Yeon-joo's father (Oh Sung-moo) is a famous web comic cartoonist. He is most famous for creating a web comic series called W (what the show is named for), which features a male lead named Kang Chul who is trying to find the mysterious person who murdered his family after he won a shooting competition at the Olympics. However, before Kang Chul can get any leads, he gets accused of the crime himself and thrown into prison until he can be brought to trial. Initially the court rules that he should get the death penalty, but after there is no evidence that connects him to the crime, he is let out of prison.
Even though Kang Chul is released from prison, the public at large still thinks he is responsible and he is given very bad treatment by everyone he runs into. This causes him to want to commit suicide. He goes to a bridge and intends to jump off of it, but he decides at the last moment that he wants to live and spend the rest of his life trying to find the person who murdered his family so he can finally be at peace. He works hard and is able to form his own company. From there, he makes a program called W which he creates to help find the culprit who murdered his family but that also solves other crimes in the city as well.
Remember that Kang Chul is the main character in W, a web comic drawn by Yeon-joo's father, Oh Sung-moo. You need to keep things straight early or you are going to get really confused. Trust me.
So now that all of that is out of the way, let's talk about the web comic's creator, Oh Sung-moo. Oh Sung-moo is a starving artist type (initially). The fact that he is in and out of work and also kind of an alcoholic leads to him getting a divorce from Yeon-joo's mother (Gil Soo-sun). Shortly after the divorce, he creates the web comic W and this skyrockets him into an instant celebrity status. However, as he is drawing W he starts to realize (through a series of events) that the comic will often times illustrate itself. This seems to be driven by the determination of the main character of who I mentioned earlier, Kang Chul.
This terrifies Oh Sung-moo to the point where he attempts to kill off Kang Chul's character more than once, but Kang Chul is so determined to find the person who murdered his family that he seems to be able to always escape death; even at his own creator's hand.
The real story begins when one of Oh Sung-moo's assistant illustrators (as well as his right-hand man) for W named Park Soo-bong calls his daughter, Yeon-joo, at the hospital where she is training to be a doctor, and informs her that her father has gone missing. Park Soo-bong and Yeon-joo search everywhere for Oh Sung-moo, with little success. Yeon-joo thinks about calling the police but then she stumbles upon some notes her father made about creating a monster. She looks at his drawing tablet and sees an image of the main character of W, Kang Chul, covered in blood. He is laying on a rooftop and appears to be unconsciousness. As Yeon-joo turns away from the screen, Kang Chul pulls her into the web comic. Yeon-joo is disorientated for a few moments but then she sees a man bleeding in front of her so she uses her skills as a doctor to save him.
Shortly after, the paramedics are called and they take him to the hospital. The local police thank her for saving a life and as she looks around trying to understand where she is, she realizes that she has been somehow pulled into the wold of the web comic. Shortly after her epiphany, she returns to the real world and she learns that her father has been found.
She spends some time trying to convince the right-hand man of Oh Sung-moo (who is also the head illustrator of the web comic W's illustration team), Park Soo-bong, that she was pulled into the comic. She finally manages to do so after Park Soo-bong sees that Yeon-joo has appeared as a main character in the web comic when he never drew any of those panels himself. Yeon-joo starts to suspect that her father, Oh Sung-moo, might know what is going on but he keeps avoiding the subject whenever she brings it up.
As she is reading the web comic, she sees that her father is trying to kill off Kang Chul's character again. She does not want this to happen as she is now aware that everyone in the web comic world is somehow alive, and she goes into the comic to save Kang Chul from a lethal injection from a hospital worker.
Kang Chul is curious to who Yeon-joo is but she tells him that she has to keep her identity a secret. Meanwhile, the police of Kang Chul's world are after her because she is the only witness of the stabbing (as far as they know) and they want to take her to the station for questioning. Kang Chul sends his right-hand man and bodyguard Seo Do-yoon to help Yeon-joo escape and she does, successfully.
Yeon-joo eventually learns that her father knows that the world and characters he created are somehow alive and that is why he has been trying to kill off the main character, Kang Chul, so the story will end. Yeon-joo does not want her father to interfere because in her mind it is nothing short of murder seeing as the characters he has created are actually alive. So Yeon-joo continues to help Kang Chul so he can continue to live and reach some resolution about his family's murder.
In the process, Yeon-joo and Kang Chul end up developing feeling for one another. And the story basically shifts to focusing on their relationship as Kang Chul tries to discover her identity and any ties she could (potentially) have with the person who murdered his family.
I know that was kind of a long summary, but as you can see there is a LOT of stuff going on in the story. At its core, W is a very good show. It has everything you could want in a television program; action, adventure, mystery, intrigue, and dark undertones.
The one thing that kind of (personally) irritates me about this show is the romance subplot between Yeon-joo and Kang Chul. Like I mentioned before, the romance of this show is handled rather well. But it DOES drag on a bit in some scenes; and during this time I legitimately want to die a slow painful death. But you know. That is just me. Remember that I am a frigid bitch who hates all things romance. So you shouldn't really take my words about this as gospel.
At the end of the day, I really think that W is a show that is worth checking out, despite the romance. It has a very unique narrative with all sorts of twists and turns (especially concerning Yeon-joo's father, which is revealed towards the end).
If you can stomach some cheesy romance scenes every once in a while, then this is the show for you.
If you are like me and hate romance, it might be hard to watch. But it is still worth getting through to see the ultimate resolution in the end. Because trust me; it is a doozy!
If you want to check out the show for yourself, you can watch the entire show for free on Viki which hosts television shows and movies from all parts of Asia legally (they are licensed to Viki) here: https://www.viki.com/tv/30854c-w
Wow, that's an unique premise. I would like to see an anime adaptation of that series. Not a big fan of Asian live-action series, though I have seen a few live-action movies from Asia.
4673019 I am personally a big fan of both live action Asian shows and anime. :) But to each their own.
4673019 I am going to spend some time writing reviews for the ones I have watched. Hopefully they will catch on more because they are actually pretty awesome.