I have a piece up at Hollywood in Toto, offering binge-worthy Korean television series as an alternative to Hollywood:
To misquote Mark Twain, “Everybody complains about Hollywood, but nobody does anything about it.” From the bloated, ossified franchises kept alive by Boomer and Gen-X nostalgia dollars (hello, Marvel/Star Wars) to woke studios that produce unwatchable tripe in service to progressive social engineering (hello, anything that’s won a televised award in the last ten years), Tinseltown, for many of us, is no longer a viable source of entertainment. And yet we, as Americans, have more leisure time than ever before, and we like to watch things on screens.
So what do we do about it? Where do we go?
Try South Korea.
Click to get the rundown on the best K-dramas available on Netflix!
Loqueesha’s low budget makes itself known early on: the lighting is drab, most of the scenes are shot close up, and the few bits of green screen are so terrible that they should have been left on the hard drive. (It’s the 21st century, so I can’t say “cutting room floor” anymore.) None of the actors looked happy to be there, and delivered their lines with an awkward kind of affect that accurately reflected the script’s leaden dialogue. Unnecessary, expository scenes involving radio execs took the viewer out of the story, and montages of average people listening to Loqueesha’s sage advice on the radio fell flat. Sometimes you have to decide that the baby is ugly early on so you can stop putting it in front of the camera. Nobody in production had the wit to do that.
Starring comedian Jim Gaffigan, 
I reviewed a documentary for 
“You’ve got five minutes to wow me,” Ms. Biedermeyer said, leaning forward with her elbows on the glass table and her fingers steepled in front of her mouth. “Shoot.”
Sometimes you find yourself a fan of somebody’s work without knowing it.
