Post by ajk on Feb 15, 2024 1:56:25 GMT -5
I was eager to watch this series. Had never seen a Sado story before, and was curious to see how this one portrayed his descent into madness. It started out okay, very good in some ways. But especially after the first ten episodes or so, it started to decline. And it never consistently found its footing again. Have to say, unfortunately, this is one of only a few historicals that I’ve watched that I wouldn’t be eager to watch again. Just can’t give it a thumbs-up in the end.
Two things about it that I liked. One was King Youngjo. How the character was written and presented, and the actor who portrayed him. All excellent and you can definitely believe that they captured the essence of the real Youngjo. Right up front the series said that this would be the Sado story told from Youngjo’s point of view and they made a good call on that. He was a highlight.
The other was that we got a good look into the pettiness and bickering and rivalries among the women in the palace, both the royals and their attendants. Most series don’t get into any of that, or only show a bit of it, but the first three of LH’s memoirs talk a lot about it and you can believe that there was some of that going on all the time in palaces in the past. It wasn’t fun to watch but I appreciated getting a taste of that side of palace life.
And maybe one more thing that deserves mention, the actress playing LH was good, and the scenes with her and Sado together were some of the best scenes in the series. Unfortunately the story started when LH and Sado were teenagers and it simply didn’t work having two people around 30 years old in those roles for that point in the story. But I don’t know how you get around this difficulty with telling Sado’s story, unless you switch actors, which presents other issues.
The negatives, well first and foremost this wasn’t a faithful telling of Sado’s story. Not at all. LH’s fourth memoir, completely different from the first three, lays out a textbook case study of how a person develops a debilitating anxiety disorder, and describes how it tormented Sado and all of the bad things that happened because of it. That’s what I expected we’d be getting, but it was nothing like that. We got very little of how Sado’s illness developed as a younger person; we saw very few of the bad things that he did—the things that helped push Youngjo to make his decision; and towards the end the writers even wrote Sado as making a rational decision to act crazy—as in, this is just an act. Besides ducking the real story, I thought that was extremely disrespectful to anyone who’s ever had to battle a psychological or mental illness.
Second, Mistress Moon. Yes she was a real person and yes she and her family were toxic. But the writers pushed her way too much into the story, and it was just the same thing over and over and over again. She’d pull some manipulative stunt, everybody else would be horrified (and completely surprised that she’d do such a thing), and she’d go back home and cackle that evil laugh of hers. So many times that I lost count. I saw this happen to a contemporary K-drama once, the scheming young woman hurting other people suddenly starts taking over the entire story. So apparently there’s an audience for this kind of thing. They even turned her brother from the active schemer that he apparently was in real history into a go-along stooge, I guess just to make her all the more the baddie. But it was way too much and got injected into far too much of the story. Oh and that plot to switch her baby with another baby, has to be one of the two or three dumbest storylines in any historical I’ve watched here.
And third, too many episodes were just plain boring. At first I really enjoyed the style of the series, it was lower-key and more patient, especially after watching the intense EWG. Life is like this; things happen more patiently and aren’t compressed together TV-style. But wow especially in the second half, everything started bogging down and some of the episodes were almost a chore to get through. Part of the problem was when the more political side of the story started to come into it. We didn’t get a lot of background on the officials, and they simply weren’t interesting people like the better-written officials in other historicals. But that was only part of it….
Maybe the larger problem is that it’s not even possible to stretch out the Sado story into an entire series like this one and keep it interesting. There isn’t a whole lot there beyond one person’s psychological story (and the story of those around him) and it doesn’t encompass a lot of wars or external events or other complicated situations that are relevant to it. You just don’t need 34 episodes to tell that story effectively. So you end up having to toss in extra Mistress Moon, or the nanny / ninja acrobat / fortuneteller-shaman (What the heck was that all about), and even then the story drags. I can’t imagine what we’d have gotten if the original plan for 50 episodes hadn’t changed. This may be the only series ever that was helped rather than harmed by the episode count being changed while the series was airing.
The other shows we’ve watched here that haven’t been as good as others, almost always I end up talking about missed opportunities—how much better the series could have been if they had made different choices on this or that. But this one, it didn’t feel like opportunities were missed; it was much more that not enough was there to begin with. Livelier writing would have helped a lot but probably not enough.
Two things about it that I liked. One was King Youngjo. How the character was written and presented, and the actor who portrayed him. All excellent and you can definitely believe that they captured the essence of the real Youngjo. Right up front the series said that this would be the Sado story told from Youngjo’s point of view and they made a good call on that. He was a highlight.
The other was that we got a good look into the pettiness and bickering and rivalries among the women in the palace, both the royals and their attendants. Most series don’t get into any of that, or only show a bit of it, but the first three of LH’s memoirs talk a lot about it and you can believe that there was some of that going on all the time in palaces in the past. It wasn’t fun to watch but I appreciated getting a taste of that side of palace life.
And maybe one more thing that deserves mention, the actress playing LH was good, and the scenes with her and Sado together were some of the best scenes in the series. Unfortunately the story started when LH and Sado were teenagers and it simply didn’t work having two people around 30 years old in those roles for that point in the story. But I don’t know how you get around this difficulty with telling Sado’s story, unless you switch actors, which presents other issues.
The negatives, well first and foremost this wasn’t a faithful telling of Sado’s story. Not at all. LH’s fourth memoir, completely different from the first three, lays out a textbook case study of how a person develops a debilitating anxiety disorder, and describes how it tormented Sado and all of the bad things that happened because of it. That’s what I expected we’d be getting, but it was nothing like that. We got very little of how Sado’s illness developed as a younger person; we saw very few of the bad things that he did—the things that helped push Youngjo to make his decision; and towards the end the writers even wrote Sado as making a rational decision to act crazy—as in, this is just an act. Besides ducking the real story, I thought that was extremely disrespectful to anyone who’s ever had to battle a psychological or mental illness.
Second, Mistress Moon. Yes she was a real person and yes she and her family were toxic. But the writers pushed her way too much into the story, and it was just the same thing over and over and over again. She’d pull some manipulative stunt, everybody else would be horrified (and completely surprised that she’d do such a thing), and she’d go back home and cackle that evil laugh of hers. So many times that I lost count. I saw this happen to a contemporary K-drama once, the scheming young woman hurting other people suddenly starts taking over the entire story. So apparently there’s an audience for this kind of thing. They even turned her brother from the active schemer that he apparently was in real history into a go-along stooge, I guess just to make her all the more the baddie. But it was way too much and got injected into far too much of the story. Oh and that plot to switch her baby with another baby, has to be one of the two or three dumbest storylines in any historical I’ve watched here.
And third, too many episodes were just plain boring. At first I really enjoyed the style of the series, it was lower-key and more patient, especially after watching the intense EWG. Life is like this; things happen more patiently and aren’t compressed together TV-style. But wow especially in the second half, everything started bogging down and some of the episodes were almost a chore to get through. Part of the problem was when the more political side of the story started to come into it. We didn’t get a lot of background on the officials, and they simply weren’t interesting people like the better-written officials in other historicals. But that was only part of it….
Maybe the larger problem is that it’s not even possible to stretch out the Sado story into an entire series like this one and keep it interesting. There isn’t a whole lot there beyond one person’s psychological story (and the story of those around him) and it doesn’t encompass a lot of wars or external events or other complicated situations that are relevant to it. You just don’t need 34 episodes to tell that story effectively. So you end up having to toss in extra Mistress Moon, or the nanny / ninja acrobat / fortuneteller-shaman (What the heck was that all about), and even then the story drags. I can’t imagine what we’d have gotten if the original plan for 50 episodes hadn’t changed. This may be the only series ever that was helped rather than harmed by the episode count being changed while the series was airing.
The other shows we’ve watched here that haven’t been as good as others, almost always I end up talking about missed opportunities—how much better the series could have been if they had made different choices on this or that. But this one, it didn’t feel like opportunities were missed; it was much more that not enough was there to begin with. Livelier writing would have helped a lot but probably not enough.