In a surprisingly literal way, Undercover Miss Hong is like candy. Its 1990s Seoul is made up of brightly-lit night exteriors and pastel office sets which look positively set-like. I mean, utterly unconvincing, as if all the harshness or potential frictions of “reality” were duly sanded away. The entire cast is gorgeous – the computer nerd Lee Yong-gi has his hair frizzed up to obscure actor Jang Do-ha’s boyish good looks (shucks, apparently, he was in The Judge from Hell, but I don’t remember) – and every expository punchline is delivered loudly, underscored by upbeat, triumphant music or upbeat, suspenseful music. This is the manner of a cartoon. Facial expressions are big and made bigger by crash zooms, body language is gesticulation and flailing. Cliffhangers are earth-shattering until their immediate, pat resolution next episode, like an old Republic serial. There’s an ease to the viewing, and most certainly a comfort. None of this description should be taken as negative criticism. It’s candy, after all. I don’t believe that the fireworks nature of the show comes at the expense of anything, like complexity, for example. The financial technobabble is persuasive, even set against the unpersuasive backdrops (which I privately enjoy because I love sets, when environments feel fully designed), and the unraveling mystery is a weave of character and plot and social commentary, with aha moments only raising the stakes. … More K-Drama Report: Undercover Miss Hong, Part II

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)