I’m going to do something potentially dangerous here, which is to begin coverage of a K-drama after its first episode. Hold my hand as we embark – ew, clammy. My policy generally is to only write when I have something to say, because you only get one life and you can’t spend it writing hundreds or thousands of words on “meh.” The white-collar jury is still out on Undercover Miss Hong, so with this post, I wanted to talk about the first episode and how it functions as a first episode. In American television, we have “pilots,” a term that might’ve lately been broadened to simply mean “premiere,” but which used to be an internal document for a studio ahead of a full season order. The result, aside from hundreds or thousands of television shows never seeing the green light, was that TV shows from their second episode on might look and feel radically different. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a good example, because its pilot was initially made for Showtime before being picked up by The CW, so edits were made for adult content. Of course, you have legendary stories like Game of Thrones and all its tinkering, and the pilot might even be redone if it’s raggedy enough, like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. These days, I feel like quality control is more important (A-list actors probably don’t tolerate the dreaded “pilot season”). So, you wouldn’t have, like, a pilot for FX’s Shogun in quite the same way. That was meant to be a limited series regardless. Moral of the story: first episodes kind of suck. … More K-Drama Report: Undercover Miss Hong (2026)