With Eyes East

Episodes 1-13, the finale

Original Broadcast: 3 October 2025
Written by Kim Eun-sook, Directed by Ahn Gil-ho
Starring Kim Woo-bin, Bae Suzy, Ahn Eun-jin, Noh Sang-hyun

I can’t believe how long Daniel Henney was in this

I’ll try to be brief, since I missed the window on this one, big-time. Genie, Make a Wish is part romance, part fantasy, part sadomasochist fantasy, part Dubai tourism ad, and all around, a great K-drama. Aww. Consider this post to be a follow-up to my report on 2022’s Anna, and another benchmark in the twin journeys of watching everything starring its two leads, Bae Suzy and the utterly enchanting Jung Eun-chae (Jeongnyeon: The Star is Born is next) taking me into 2026. This is my third Suzy drama, after her moody turns in Doona! and Anna, and now it appears she’s no longer trying to beat the “idols can’t act” rap by playing an emotionless psychopath. And look, I get it. An idol in film and television is an interloper, leveraging fame when an actor with lesser name recognition might’ve done a better job. Of course, Bae Suzy would’ve only been a famous idol for a few months before she debuted as an actress, and it was so early on in her career that she could arguably be considered a child actress. Alarmingly, she was only 15 when she joined Miss A, and starred alongside IU and Eunjung in Dream High roughly when I was graduating high school (Suzy is one year younger than me). I suppose the argument isn’t that Bae Suzy shouldn’t act because she’s an idol, but that she shouldn’t because she can’t.

Whether or not Bae Suzy added or subtracted from the show, she is the reason I watched it. And it doesn’t appear that she was a second or third choice for the production, leading me to conclude that the character was written with her in mind, as Lee Joo-young’s was, per her account on Hyeri’s YouTube show. And who’s making these casting decisions, sitting in front of Final Draft? See, Genie, Make a Wish is an RRR-level event in the K-drama world, with Suzy joined by fellow hallyu royalty Kim Woo-bin (Mr. Shin Min-ah), here reuniting after a 2016 drama called Uncontrollably Fond, and penned by superstar writer Kim Eun-sook. We’ve got a sprawling supporting cast spread out over multiple locations – and countries, even – and heaps upon heaps of shimmering CGI. While I’m less certain about the 300-Year War interludes, I’m only sure that the swirling sand effects are not AI-enhanced because they’re identical to the particle animation of the Studio Dragon logo. It’s got to be the same software plugin. On top of that, the celebrity cameos include Daniel Henney and Song Hye-kyo, and who knows if the latter case came from Kim Eun-sook, who helped turbo-charge her career twice, or Bae Suzy, her little buddy. The question is whether Genie, Make a Wish ultimately crumbles under all this weight, which does happen from time to time in a career as prolific as Writer Kim’s.

True enough, there’s a lot going on in Genie. It’s on the farthest end of the spectrum if something like Love Next Door or even Doona! is at the other, those simple shows with a small, manageable handful of subplots, if any. Those would tend to be my preference, although my favorite K-dramas fall somewhere in the middle. I avoid the supernatural-themed shows, but Genie has surely been a salve for my past experiences. Not even the starpower of IU could drag me through Hotel del Luna, and I’ve already covered The Judge from Hell in detail. For whatever their ups and downs, they’d only reinforced my prejudice about Korean science fiction – these titles didn’t even have the decency to be science fiction – that the world-building never stands up to scrutiny because we’re not meant to scrutinize it. As a result, there’s something almost blasé about the whole thing, not to mention woefully confusing. I may or may not have finished Genie with an incomplete understanding of the lore and all the rules, but that’s the perverse benefit: when super tight world-building doesn’t matter in the beginning, it doesn’t matter in the end. Not only that, the gaps in exposition feel more like narrative shortcuts, and the extant lore bits are usually affixed to characters, with information presented in the form of arguments or exchanges of dialogue, keeping things moving.

Genie, Make a Wish is compulsively watchable, even more so than better K-dramas I’ve seen, and I only figured out why when I tried once to pause midway through an episode. “I’ll stop at the next scene,” I said, aloud, because I do that sometimes, and the moment never came. There are few hard stops and resets; we’re introduced to the show’s unusual grammar from the very beginning. It moves in montages and glimpses, setting up payoffs with sequences broken up over multiple fragmentary scenes and jumping back and forth in time and space – literally. I also suspect that there’s enough building intrigue in each fragment that I was simply held fast. One moment, there’s a budding romance between the lesbian best friend and the magically de-aged grandma, and the next, there’s an envious bank clerk conspiring to steal money from the Bae Suzy psychopath. Ooh, she’s gonna hear from Mrs. Pipe Wrench. And that’s the main draw, of course, that Suzy’s character, Ki Ka-young, is called a “psychopath,” and she regularly tells Iblis, Kim Woo-bin’s genie character, “Iri wa,” or “Come here [so I can beat you].” There’s very little that sounds more threatening in the Korean language. You can also tell that Suzy was a dancer by trade, because each swing of the wrench or baseball bat is so rhythmic and graceful.

The short version is that Ki Ka-young stumbles upon the magic lamp while visiting Dubai, and out comes Iblis with the promise of three wishes. See, Iblis is also Satan, and a thousand years ago, an earlier version of Ka-young had inadvertently imprisoned him in the lamp against his failed bid to prove that humanity was corruptible following his fallen-angel war with Heaven and, for some reason, Death, and this is already becoming the long version. Presented piece by piece in the show, it is relatively easy to follow, though questions arise early and may not be satisfactorily answered. Part of the disconnect that allowed me to relax and enjoy but, then, not fully respect this part of the show was the matter of Ka-young having been reincarnated (kind of?), which made for a blend of at least three mythologies based on world religions. The important notes at the beginning are that the three wishes are a test to prove that humanity is corruptible, and that Ka-young was in Dubai to confront the mother who gave her away for being, well, a psychopath. Instead, she was raised by her grandmother, Oh Pan-geum, who taught her rules and routines which she could follow without necessarily grasping emotionally.

The show goes into detail on Ka-young’s history, and I appreciate that there’s effectively world-building for the non-fantasy character, too. In fact, the concept of a psychopath raised by a kindly village to not murder people is a perfectly compelling setup for a K-drama already. I might resent Genie for also being about a genie. I might resent it for juxtaposing a powerful, godlike being with Suzy’s theoretically vulnerable Ka-young, but as we’ve found, she spends an inordinate amount of runtime beating him up. This is my introduction to Kim Woo-bin, and I get the hype. He plays Iblis so perfectly pompous and smug, only to be undercut by a non-reaction from Ka-young or the threat of violence. He does a lot of fish-out-of-water comedy early on, which is something I confess to always finding funny. There’s jokes throughout, peaking with fourth-wall breaks – including cheeky references to Kim Eun-sook’s past works and that Song Hye-kyo cameo. The resolution of Daniel Henney’s dog who wished to be human and his dedicated, confused chauffeur played by Kim Ji-hoon was a big, wholesome laugh. And yet, the final arc of the show is dedicated to the broad good-versus-evil action, culminating in a brutally bittersweet ending.

Of all the Lego playsets the show spends time building up, its found family is the most precious, encroached upon by others. Ka-young uses her second wish to make her grandmother young again, and the renewed “Lee Mi-joo” has a series of cute run-ins with Ka-young’s friend Choi Min-ji. This is her only friend, whom she saved from bullies in elementary school by using her psychopath powers, and then inspired to succeed in life under pain of death. Their relationship is really sweet because Min-ji accepts so much of what’s difficult about Ka-young, and we see that it is truly difficult and not a lark. It’s with her character that the final notes of the show sting so much, but overall, I just preferred seeing these three women and Iblis and his Animorph henchman Sade over the unfolding mysteries of the little kid bad guy and Eljjael, the Angel of Death. I mean, I liked that Iblis and Eljjael could be grudging friends one moment, bitter rivals the next, and fighting to the death before resetting to one. But I also see how the magic of the unfolding mysteries is required for the “hijink” aspect of the found family. It’s all one ecosystem, even if I personally feel like some biomes got more attention than others.

That’s a personal thing, too, before I suggest there’s anything objectively wrong with Genie, Make a Wish, beyond the moral grey areas of remixing Arabic culture and promoting tourism to Dubai. While not as thrilling as Kim Eun-sook’s (and director Ahn Gil-ho’s) previous work, The Glory, it’s ambitious in a different way. It keeps a number of balls in the air, and if the wide-ranging tones ever feel jarring, they contribute to an overall feeling of mania, captured in micro by Kim Woo-bin’s wild eyes. And it all builds to a dramatically satisfying romance whose fate moved me more than that of its contemporary, Bon Appétit, Your Majesty. The male and female leads were engaging and active, and something exciting always sparked in their encounters. Kim Woo-bin is excellent, of course, but what Bae Suzy is doing here is offering more than her unbelievable good looks. As Ka-young, she walks the tightrope of being over-serious, of being funny without being funny, commenting on how pretty she is in reflections with a completely flat affect or cocking her head in just such a manner to express the confusion of a scientist studying an insect. She’s at times dryly humorous, almost pitifully sympathetic, and weirdly charming.

I will admit that her big emotional moments toward the end aren’t similarly convincing, and I think it’s because she’s speaking her emotions into the air as well as crying them. I’d rather ding Kim Eun-sook’s sledgehammer subtlety than Suzy’s acting on that one, where the latter is a natural fit in the more mature storytelling environment of Lee Zoo-young with Anna. So, my question going forward with Suzy will be how she handles the higher register so synonymous with K-dramas. Maybe that’s where the anti-hype comes from. Looking over her filmography, I see a lot of lead roles, to be expected. As I’d observed with Yoona’s acting career from a distance, these characters are usually not as interesting as, say, the villain or the quirky best friend, and they tend to be alike anyway, not to mention well-liked in the world of the show. She’s never gonna have that underdog advantage. Still, I think Suzy’s been as exploratory as her status on the forefront of Korean pop culture will allow. I’d love to see her bear her fangs in a villainous role, or put some technique behind the violence (alas, while frequent on Genie, it was only a taste). I look forward to seeing where she goes from here. (I only discovered she’ll be playing a vampire in her next show after writing all that).

“That was your last chance.”

PS. A fair number of close calls with familiar faces on Genie. For one, I’d confused Noh Sang-hyun for Lee Je-hoon, who I’d seen as a surprise cyborg in the airport show Where Stars Land, and even more so, I was convinced that it was Kim Hieora playing the evil henchwoman, but it was, in fact, an actress named Bae Geu-rin. So, my apologies to Ms. Bae, but I’m newly disappointed that Kim Hieora hasn’t gotten a role since her bullying allegations back in 2023. After all this confusion, I had to double-check that I was, for sure, seeing Kim Ah-young, who I liked so much in The Judge from Hell. Even when she’s playing a non-evil character, she just looks so evil.

The Park Yeon-jin grin