Letter #107: Apartment 404
Good morning, Erin.
My sister recommended a Star Trek podcast to me recen—well, no, not recently, I guess, but many months ago at this point—anyway, she recommended this podcast that is, essentially, an interview show conducted with various actors who featured in one branch of the franchise or another. Some of it is quite interesting; some of it is quite dull—after all, it’s predominantly lesser-known actors talking about themselves (and, worse, talking about themselves as actors), which doesn’t always translate into edge-of-your-seat excitement for the listening audience. (Particularly because many of the actors are, um, more advanced in years, and, as such, aren’t quite as…snappy, let’s say, in their recitations.)
One of the interesting takeaways (to me), though, was the frequency with which the actors—almost across the board—cited the same reason for igniting their passion for acting: they had to do some kind of performance for a class assignment, did something that made everyone laugh, and got addicted to the thrill of that laughter.
Now, all I’ve ever really wanted to do—in the broadest terms—was make people laugh. From my earliest days dabbling in comic strips to my Monty Python phase where I spent all my time writing sketches to my time doing comedy-driven stage plays to how much effort I put into some of my YouTube comments, you can follow that thread all the way back to my childhood. And I can absolutely confirm that there is nothing like getting an audience to laugh. It’s not what drove me to want to keep doing theatre, but it was certainly my favorite part of it. I love making people laugh.
…a statement which, however true, may well have left you scratching your head, given I don’t imagine you think I’m all that funny. I have tried, though, and would be thrilled if you have ever found me or my letters even mildly amusing (by which we can assume I mean entertaining), but…well, I never assume anyone has reason to think well of me, let alone find me amusing. But a boy can dream.
To wit: I was thinking about Extraordinary You, the other day, and was reminded of how gaga I’d gone over the very pretty Student #14, based solely on her picture in the attendance book/seating chart that we see when Dan-oh goes to see if Student #13 (Haru, of course) has a name. And, being an industrious fellow (...when it comes to pretty K-drama girls), I thought it was about time I figured out who this pretty young lady is and set out to do just that—via the following multi-step process:
look up an episode guide to try to gauge which episode has Dan-oh looking for his name
download the two best-guess episodes where Dan-oh looks for his name
scrub through the episodes until finding Student #14’s picture
copy down her name as written in Korean
bring up an online Hangul keyboard
take a moment to remember how spelling things in Hangul works
type out her name with the online keyboard
copy-and-paste the name into the google machine translator
match the name against the cast list
…which landed me at “Park Ae-ri” played by Song Ji-woo—that is, the actress who play Young Stewardess Bully in The Glory, the young singer with the crush on Good Boy in Welcome to Waikiki 2, the bratty young actress in Love to Hate You, the amorous kisaeng in Captivating the King, the hot high school girl in A Time Called You, and most recently #bestgirl Nurse Do in Doctor Slump. So, y’know, the young actress I’ve sort of been “Oh, it’s that pretty girl from the thing I just watched!”-ing in just about everything I’ve watched in the last year. Making this another case of “loving her before I knew her” (as I did with Kim Go-eun in Eungyo yeeeeeears before you had me watch Goblin).
“But Daryl, you inscrutable wag,” I hear you say, “why the preamble about making people laugh when your ‘to wit’ follow-up—though not uninteresting—isn’t, given the strictures of the context that precedes it, particularly funny?”
Well, that is because, dear Erin, we have not yet reached the punchline to this merry tale:
Because I knew I wanted to share this story with you, I went back to my Extraordinary You letter wondering if I’d included a screenshot of the Student #14 picture so I could poach it for use in this one, only to find that A) I had not included a screenshot in that letter, and B) I had already done similar legwork to find the actress’s name at the time I’d written that letter—TWO YEARS AGO.
Sigh…
Of course, it now occurs to me that you may have so often re-read my Extraordinary You letter that you would have memorized and therefore immediately recalled this detail, utterly cutting the legs out from under my story.
Though, of course, it is much more likely that you gave that letter a cursory glance back in 2022 and have since forgotten I even wrote it. In which case…maybe you did think it was a funny story!
Regardless—that was still a lot of work, so you can bet I'll find that screenshot to…aha!
See? There she is.
Okay, so—bringing it all together…I think we both know you need to be funny to do well on a variety show, and Apartment 404 is definitely one of those. But…was it funny? And, if so, was that enough to make it good? Only one way to find out: reading this lett—well, actually, I guess you could have watched the show yourself, so it’s really two ways to find ou—wait, you could also have spoken to someone who watched it or read a review online or seen a social media post about th—Y’KNOW WHAT NEVER MIND WHO CARES HERE ARE MY THOUGHTS:
1. Given my love of Busted, I was definitely up for another vaguely story-driven mystery-solving variety show, and that Yoo Jae-suk, “the Nation’s Host,” would be at the center of Apartment 404 as well certainly earned it even more good will—but, truth be told, I really only gave it a look because the always lovely Oh Na-ra (whom I loved as Maidservant Kim on Alchemy of Souls…which is a great show that you should absolutely watch) would be in it. And, though there was never enough of her for my liking, she was fun and funny and so very, very pretty. Which, for me, was enough to be worth the watch.
2. Of course, my personal biases aside, the real reason to give the show a watch is Jennie from BLACKPINK. (I’d happened to see her in a YouTube video the day before I started the show, so I actually recognized her, too!) She is hilarious, energetic, clever, charming, sly, and utterly adorable. The rest of the cast have their merits, but if you’re sticking around, it’s because of Jennie. (She’s kind of like this show’s version of Park Min-young and Kim Se-jeong on Busted.)
2A. But I also say this knowing nothing about Jennie outside of this show. Like, I “know” that she’s at the bottom of my totally amateur BLACKPINK ranking—based on only slightly less than nothing (literally: I’ve seen Jisoo clips that crack me up, and I think the other two girls are prettier)—but that’s it. I had no preconceived notions heading in, and so all I had was her performance on the show. And, from that, I can say that I quite like her. She’s always all-in, and she’s great fun.
2B. …which is not to say that she isn't also maybe a bit too competitive and, um…maybe sadistic is too strong a word, but there’s gleeful (though I’d say mostly playful) mean streak in her, too, that would sometimes come out as she would move to ensure she was at or near the top of the pack. Again, I mostly took this as playful—but there were times when I thought she went a bit too far…and maybe wondered what happened to the people who got on her bad side.
2C. That said, remembering that I even watched this show will probably be down to her being in it.
3. But does only remembering Jennie mean that the show wasn’t good? No, not at all. In fact, I found it to be a lot of fun and would watch more of it. BUT…the show’s a mess. It’s an interesting concept (taking real crimes committed in apartment buildings and trying to solve a slightly fictionalized version of it in an actual old apartment building), but the execution is all over the place. They split the cast into teams and ask them to compete to solve the mystery first…but also there’s always a saboteur (or two) among the cast who everyone else has to identify…but also the two teams basically don’t really compete against each other to solve the mystery…but also they play variety show games that aren’t integrated into the conceit of the show (whereas Busted always made the games a part of the plot)...but also none of it really matters because it always ends with a game of “unmask the saboteur!” in the last 45 minutes, with the cast often meta-gaming who it could be by eliminating people who already had a turn in previous weeks. As far as these things go, it mostly lacks cohesion.
4. …but that doesn’t mean that the show didn’t land a handful of absolute knockout plot twists with this formula. Genuinely brilliant setups from the production.
5. The episodes with the best (and most relevant to the “apartment mystery” concept) plots turned out to be the weaker episodes—structurally. As in, they were the messiest ones. But the ones with weaker plots functioned best within the formula of the show—but they also broke entirely with the “apartment mystery” concept and took place, y’know, not in the apartments. The formula still needs work, but the episodes outside the apartments were always much more interesting, so there’s definitely room to make this show—or its next iteration—much better. (Cough, Busted S4, cough cough.)
6. Jung-ha, the young actor in the cast, is the sweetest little squish of a boy—until he gets very serious about finally winning a game for once, and then he’s like a man hunting down the gangster who murdered his family. I know everyone’s probably putting on a bit of a front for the sake of the show rather than showing their truest personalities (which makes perfect sense), but…wow, like, his voice dropped an octave and his face changed completely. It was nuts. But, like, in a good way. Jung-ha was good times.
7. Oh, speaking of Jung-ha: he isn’t able to film one of the episodes, so the show brought in a replacement—one of the members of TXT! Which one? Um…Yeonjun? Is he a TXT? I think it was Yeonjun. (He’s actually in two different episodes.)
7A. Speaking of TXT, though…
I could not reach for my phone to take this picture fast enough. Could not believe it. (According to the back of the box, this is Taehyun. And there’s a little standee of him you can cut out from the back of the box. Which I’d have absolutely done for you, if you were still working at the office.)
8. One of the big things this show definitely has in its favor is that there are a couple of segments of Subway product placement! Woo-hoo!
9. Episode 2 had some totally rad choices for background music: “Tank,” the Cowboy Bebop theme song; and the badass guitar riff song from Vincenzo (“Aspettate,” if I’m not mistaken).
10. Jennie being genuinely excited to see Jae-suk every week always made me smile.
11. Oh, a point I didn’t make when speaking about the show lacking cohesion: past a certain point, they don’t even show you the variety show games that are played, anymore. Like, maybe you get a round of charades for one team, but the rest is shipped off to YouTube or something for optional viewing.
11A. Also, in an attempt to make the use of actual cases seem a little less garish than it immediately feels, several of the episodes try to insert a kind of moral or social message at the end. (I mean, that’s how it felt to me. Maybe they were being much more sincere than I felt they were.)
12. I forgot to mention that each episode becomes its own little period piece based on the time at which the case they were using happened, which means the actors would be dressed in styles of the time and all the props (from home decor to cars) would be from the year of the investigation—which would often make for amusing situations where the younger cast members would seem totally lost about how to, for example, turn on the TV or operate a rice cooker. Less amusing was how old it made me feel when I wasn’t lost about needing to pull on the volume knob on the turn dial TV to turn it on.
13. If the start of Episode 1 is anything to go by, I don’t think the cast had any idea what kind of show they were filming until they got to the location for the shoot. (Though, given their clothes, the kinds of cars they were told to drive, and what was playing on the car radio, they were able to guess that they were doing something period piece-related.)
14. In one episode, the cast sneaks past the police tape on the door to the apartment’s creepy murder basement to search for clues—but they get caught and sent back upstairs. And all I could think was that, if this was Busted, Min-young would have already taken 900 pictures of the crime scene on her phone so that getting kicked out wouldn’t have mattered. But, hey, not everyone can be Min-young.
15. At one point, Na-ra tries to walk one of the men through the intricacies of driving a car with a stick shift from the backseat (like, as he’s driving the car with the stick shift), but won’t take over driving even after he offers. Later, she takes the car for a spin to sort of refresh her muscle memory so that she can do the driving for their team—but she freaks herself out over trying to back into a spot and gives up. Which was a weird little subplot for the episode, but…we got our setup and payoff. Can’t ask for much more than that.
16. One of the games we see them play requires the cast to take turns naming countries, and Puerto Rico is one of the acceptable answers. Which made me raise an eyebrow.
17. Episode 3 is set in 1999 and deals with the fear of Y2K, and this will never stop being hilarious to me. It was always such a scam.
18. Credit where it’s due: the show correctly uses the term mammonism—like, literally, in English and everything. I was very impressed.
19. In the middle of a scene where a woman has come to the cast in a panic wondering if any of them has seen her boyfriend, Na-ra is so impressed with the woman’s acting (“She’s really crying!” she says) that she asks her if she’d like to join her talent agency. The rest of the cast tells her not to interrupt the poor woman who’s just doing her job—and, to her credit, the woman never once breaks character. But, even after she leaves the scene, Na-ra keeps talking about how good the woman was. Which, if nothing else, is a heck of a compliment.
20. Speaking of the support actors, this is straight out of my notes for the final episode: “Who is the babe playing Si-eun???” (Answer: Kim Si-eun. Totally my type.)
20A. Yes, yes—I’m shameless. But you know I fill the absence of interpersonal relationships with fawning over pretty Korean actresses. This should surprise no one.
21. To my great surprise, Jennie seems to have absolutely no stamina. Or, at the very least, if she has to jog for more than a block, she is absolutely tanked and has to walk.
22. There’s some wonderful “close but no cigar” English in a classroom they visit later in the season: “Back to the basic!” a sign declares, to light chuckles from me.
23. In Episode 7, Jennie has foregone her contacts in favor of her glasses because she says she’s “too puffy” to wear them. (I haven’t a clue what this puffiness is that literally everyone on these shows is always worried about, but I thought she looked fine.) I mention this only because she and the entire rest of the cast kept referring to her contact lenses as her “eyes” (that is, saying things like, “Oh, you didn’t bring your eyes, today?”), which is what my sisters do. Is this just what people with contacts do? Or was this a coincidental mistranslation by the subber? (Like how glasses in Spanish is anteojos, which you could translate literally as “before eyes.”)
24. Hearing Na-ra mumble her way through the big song from Dirty Dancing (in a “Come on, young people, everyone knows this!” moment) was incredible.
25. At one point, Jennie quietly hides all of the other team’s shoes so they can’t follow after her team when they move to the next location—without knowing whether they’ll even need to change locations. She just really, really wants to win.
And that, I think, is all I have to say about Apartment 404. Which took a surprisingly long time to complete, given how few pages of notes I took. But, hey, since when am I ever incapable of saying with a thousand words what someone else can say in five? It’s part of my charm. As I’m sure you know.
Next up, though, is Transit Love 3—and that one is going to take some work. Obviously, you haven’t seen it and (I’m guessing) probably won’t unless I somehow force you to, but I absolutely need to strip down my 26 pages of notes regardless of whether I decide to go full spoilers or not. We’ll see how it goes.
And after that…who knows? It could be anything. It could be Dormamu.
(…ten points if you remember what that means.)
Back as soon as I can be.
—Daryl
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