When Live gives you Tangerines (Korean series): Excellent

I have a great love for Korean cinema and TV because it is just so different from the sometimes rather formulaic system that we have in western equivalents. Korea manages to pump out some really good series every now and then and they are able to somehow do it at a fraction of the cost of western productions. A lot of my suspicions about money laundering being a big part of western entertainment spawns from the fact that Asian series and films regularly produce things that look just as good as western counterparts for something crazy like 1/25th of the overall cost. How is that possible? I suppose that is a discussion / conspiracy theory for another time.

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I went into this series "blind" in that I knew nothing about it and this is a good thing. According to the wiki it is a Korean romance story and while I do enjoy Korean productions, they can sometimes go off the rails when it comes to romance. I likely wouldn't have watched it if I had read that. I did watch it though and it is evident right from the start that the show is about so much more than romance.

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The 1st episode starts out in a poor island portion of South Korea where a mother is struggling to survive with her daughter and their relationship seems a bit of a challenge at first. However, this all becomes very touching, very fast. I know that I got misty eyed as I sat on my sofa intently watching the words go by on the bottom of the screen because I, like most non Koreans, do not speak the language.

Whatever you do, do NOT turn on the overdub for this series as it is just painful in the same way that almost all overdubs are.

The child actors and actresses in this first episode are actually outstanding in their roles and this is a feature of many Korean productions that I don't think the west has truly nailed as of yet. I find child actors to be quite annoying in films that are in English, especially when the show has some sort of social-message that they are trying to convey. Take a look at my review of "Secrets of Red Rocks" for a few examples of exactly this.

The emotions that are shown in "Tangerines" are really profound, and while I cannot relate to growing up poor on the coast of a small and poor Korean island, I can relate to family bonds and how parents will do everything that they can for their children, and also how children often do not understand the struggles that their parents are going through as adults.

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I will say this though, by the time you get through the first episode you are going to be aware of the fact that the real directive of this show is an emotional one and unless you are some sort of sociopath you are probably going to be affected by this as it is quite powerful.

It has been a while, perhaps forever, that I can say that a series in my own language has invoked so many feelings in me in just one hour, but "Tangerines" really does an exceptional job of this. Trust me, you are going to want to call your Mom by the time episode 1 is complete.

I don't really know where the show is going at this point, but I do know that unlike a lot of other series that there isn't a lot of filler thrown in (none actually) in order to get the episodes to a certain length and this is a good thing because this annoys the hell out of me about many series that exist in the west. They appear to have a story to tell, and they tell it in as many episodes as it takes in order to make that happen. Far too often in western series it seems as though the writers are told after the fact how many episodes are required and they have to make it work somehow, even if the method of making it so means that it is going to be 3x as long as it actually needs to be.

There are 4 volumes in this series and all of them are 4 episodes long yet they were released over the course over a period of 4 weeks in March. As far as I know this sort of release schedule hasn't been something I have ever encountered.

Should I watch it?

There is one qualification you are going to need to have if you are going to take on this series. You need to be willing to read what is going on, on screen, while the show is going on. Or I suppose you would need to be completely fluent in Korean, which probably isn't going to be very many of you.

For me, sometimes watching a show with subs actually enforces that I pay much closer attention than I normally would because if it turn away or go to the bathroom in the middle of a scene, I can't possibly know what is going on without the subtitles.

If you can handle reading subtitles, I can almost guarantee that most people are going to enjoy this one and this is probably a big part of the reason why it has a rating of over 90% on all the review sites.

_{This series can be legally streamed on Netflix, which is a surprise since they so rarely seem to get anything that is actually good these days}