Letter #115: Hierarchy

 Good morning, Erin.

So…I feel kinda stupid. And more than a bit embarrassed. 

Like, more than usual, I mean.

That I am a total slacker when it comes to proofreading my letters to you is not news. Typos, dropped words, noun/verb agreement—all rookie stuff, all very easy to spot, all very much the kinds of things I would catch if I took the time to, y’know, read over what I’ve written. Which I don’t—at least, not before I post my letters.

“But Daryl, you charmingly lackadaisical scribe,” I hear you say, “if you don’t proofread your letters, then how do you know you’ve made all these mistakes?” 

Well, dear Erin, because, while I don’t proofread my letters, I do sometimes read them. Like, when I want to cross-check a similar note or refresh my memory about what I thought of a show. Or want to listen to the sound of my own voice whatever it’s totally normal lots of people do it. I read them, roll my eyes at my past self—and, on occasion, notice that I’ve left things out. 

In this case, I noticed that I left out the most important note of all in my The Atypical Family letter—the one that I was, in fact, most excited to share: I-na is, initially, deliberately rude to Da-hae, constantly referring to her as “scammer” every time they talk…except my ears were keen enough to notice that, though this was what the subtitles said, what I-na was actually calling Da-hae was “ajumma.” I caught it right away and thought it was quite funny every time she said it. (Because of the compromise translation of the subtitles, I mean. Though calling Da-hae old was still amusing on its own.)

I’m still kicking myself. I cannot believe I left that out. 

I’ll understand if you never forgive me. 

…that said, I’ve got a few things to say about Hierarchy, if you do.

1. In many ways, this show was Veronica Mars meets Gossip Girl, and I loved it for that. That is, at its best, this show feels like a loving homage to 2000s-era swanky-teens dramas. 

2. Ultimately, though, the story is terrible. It starts well enough, really digging its heels into the delicious absurdity of the “mega-wealthy high school kids” tropes, but it gets to a point where the story makes absolutely no sense—in how it is written, if nothing else. (And, yes, we’re going to get into that.)

2A. It’s very watchable, though, if you’re interested. Even if it does fall on its face (in my opinion). 

3. Added to the list of things that make this very much like a 2000s teen drama: bangin’ soundtrack. 

4. Now, we both know why I started this show…but did you know she’s not the only actor I recognized?

• NJ from Our Beloved Summer as Jae-i, the female lead(?)

• the daughter’s best friend/boyfriend from Crash Course in Romance as Ha, the male lead(?)

• Ms. Choi from Hotel Del Luna as the principal 

• the dude on the writing team from Frankly Speaking as the lackey for the rich-kid lackeys

• the cute assistant from Welcome to Samdal-ri as…uh, the cute scholarship student with lines

• the main girl’s shrink from Doctor Slump as He-ra’s father

• Maidservant Kim from Alchemy of Souls as…um…well, I’ll talk about that later

5. Roh Jeong-eui doesn’t smile, here, and it is a crime against humanity. I don’t care that it’s an important element of her character—I have rights!

5A. Also, Roh Jeong-eui being Jae-i is probably the only reason I cared about Jae-i at all. I didn’t find her interesting or especially sympathetic—which is entirely down to the writing. I just don’t know what they wanted from this character, apart from her practical role in the plot. (Which is going to play a big part in my thoughts on the later episodes of the series—but we’ll get there.)

5B. Also also…she’s lost weight. Maybe it’s the last of her baby fat, but her face isn’t as full as it was. I mean, she’s still gorgeous, but, y’know, I just want to be sure she’s feeling okay. That she’s eating. Definitely out of altruistic concern and not solely because I have a thing for squishy cheeks. 

6. He-ra, the (supposed) second female lead, though…now she was fantastic. Easily the best character and, perhaps relatedly, the best performance. She not only stole the show but, to me, sort of was the show—and, for a long time, I think the show thought she was, too…though perhaps accidentally. The story’s more often about her, what she’s doing, what she wants to do, and how she feels than it is about anything else—and everything she says or does or wants is grounded and compelling. She far-and-away has the most going on and the most to do, and the latter-episode shift away from her in favor of Jae-i and Ri-an (we’ll get to it) absolutely hurts the show. It’s less interesting, less fun, and—despite tying much more closely to the (ostensible) main plot of the show—somehow less relevant than He-ra’s personal struggles. Plus, she’s introduced with two snooty lackeys, and you know I love a pair of tertiary assistant girls (...lackeys are like assistants; it counts). As such, she is—bar none—very obviously #bestgirl. 

7. I also liked Woo-jin (the third-ish male lead). I thought his character had a lot to dig into. But, unsurprisingly, the show didn’t agree.

8. Now, in fairness to most of the actors, the script is very bad. Some of the actors are equally as bad (cough Ri-an and probably Ha cough cough), but the script didn’t do them any favors. But we’ll get to it. 

9. And in fairness the script, there are a lot of moving parts, lots of well-defined motivations for the characters, lots of organic conflict—but seven episodes was nowhere near enough room to do them all justice. Which is a pity. And maybe the crumbling final couple of episodes owe more to the episode limit than the writing.

10. If this show is anything to go by, the Korean term for “French kiss” is saying “deep kiss” in English. Which is interesting. And perhaps deserves a little parsing, because I think you can tongue-kiss without it necessarily being a “deep” kiss. 

10A. …which is definitely not the kind of thing I would feel compelled to take a moment to go over while in the middle of making out with a girl. Y’know, in case you were wondering.

10B. Or heard something.

11. Great early setup of the narrative path the He-ra/Jae-i relationship will be on by having them meet for the first time in months while one is wearing white and the other black. I mean, the dialogue prior to that moment has been more than enough to clearly establish it, too, but…you know I like a color-coded moment.

12. Actually, there are a few big plot…points? reveals? twists? Well, whatever they are, there are a few story beats that are in some fashion meant to be kept secret from the characters for a while, but which the show is pretty good about making clear hints about well before they are shown to the audience to be true. Which I quite liked, particularly because, when these secrets are finally shown to the audience, they aren’t presented as dramatic revelations—because the show assumes you picked up the hints four episodes ago and, as such, they aren’t showing you anything you don’t already know.

13. There may or may not have been two simultaneous fake relationship plots. And they may or may not have been too short for my liking. But they also may or may not have been great anyway because fake relationship plots are the best.

14. There’s actually a bit of product placement when we get the big reveal about how a character is killed. It’s amazing. 

15. I would like to take a moment to point out that one of the bullies on this show—unironically—does up-close magic (that is, things like card tricks). I was flabbergasted. I mean, I assume it’s just something that the actor knows how to do, and so he was doing it as a sort of stage busywork when he didn’t have anything specific to do in a scene. But what an odd, geeky choice for a thuggish character. I guess nerdpop even changed the bullying landscape cliches. Now, anybody can bully or be bullied! Hooray!

15A. …no joke, though, he literally uses magic to bully kids, at one point. 

16. One of the most consequential decisions a character makes in the series backfires because, as a boy, he cannot understand the mercurial ebb and flow of teenage girls’ relationships with each other. It’s brilliant. 

17. In a highly consequential segment of the plot, two teenagers end up bonding over a movie—and, of course, that movie is 20th Century Girl. Presumably because they spent so much money on racing Ferraris in Episode 1 that they couldn’t afford the rights to (500) Days of Summer.

17A. Though, given the choice, I’d pick the one with Kim Yoo-jung, too. 

18. I noticed that Roh Jeong-eui’s hands shook anytime we saw her holding something. There’s one scene where this is absolutely an understandable dramatic choice (because of how upset she is), but the other instances of it seem far less…by design. Rather, it looks like the actress is dealing with a bit of stage fright (which I find very hard to believe) or, I dunno, some kind of ailment. I very much hope she’s all right, of course, but…I mean, I will direct you to my worry that she’s not eating enough. I mean, it looks like she’s struggling to lift a tea cup. Maybe it really is just the jitters, and I haven’t really ever had cause to see her hands in anything before. She seems fine in the promotional stuff. 

19. Got some loud-and-proud Hyundai logos, which made me happy.

20. All right—we’re gonna get all Daryl on this one: in Episode 4, there’s a scene in the kids’ English literature class, where the teacher is reciting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”), and we get the very Netflix-y thing of not putting up subtitles when the teacher speaks in English. So, we get her saying, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” in English, then saying, in Korean (according to the subtitles), “May I compare you to a summer’s day?” Which…I cannot explain. 

20A. Of course, it is entirely possible that there is no direct-enough equivalent to “shall” and “thee” in Korean, and so, when the line she speaks is then translated back into English, she will have literally only been able to say “may” and “you.” (Which seems a little too strict constructionist, but…hey, if it’s accurate…) Or perhaps the teacher was just saying it in Korean in a way the kids would understand, and that’s why it was then translated without the more archaic language. After all, she does say that the language might be hard for them to understand since it’s an older version of modern English.

20B. Regardless, there’s an issue with using “may” instead of “shall”: shall means “should.” The speaker is wondering if he should compare the young man he addresses to a summer’s day because that would undersell his beauty. If you say “may,” it implies that the speaker is asking permission, which is not at all correct. (It is also possible this is a confusion on the part of the translator over the relationship between the words may and might. In that “Might I compare you” could be an accurate enough way of translating the line, since might implies a measure of doubt about doing so.)

20C. Of course, the point of the scene has nothing to do with the English lesson, so the actress playing the teacher is left to improvise some lines as we zoom in on the stuff that’s going on in class that matters to the story. (I think everyone was gossiping on his or her cell phone at the time.) But what she says is great: “The poem is old, so the phrasing is outdated. Oh, and it’s in iambic pentameter.” Like she’s just looked up a series of facts about the poem. I found it really, really funny. 

21. There’s a character who gets held up by a revolving door, and I just kept shouting a waltz rhythm at the screen as she struggled. 

22. I mentioned earlier that I liked how the show deliberately signposts its eventual reveals so that they aren't reveals when you get to them. One turn that they kind of botched—which, in fairness, may have been their way of signposting it—was about Ha, the male lead(?), being more than he seems. Now, it would be silly for anyone to be surprised that he turned out to be more than just the happy-go-lucky kid he seemed to be—because of course that’s how these things go, how the trope works. But, in this case, rather than the obvious cliche being the thing that drives your assumptions about him, it’s that he is so monumentally stupid in his interactions with the other students that you have to hope he’s just playing a role—because you CANNOT imagine having to watch someone this dense maneuver through the ludicrous hyper-hierarchy of that school. You just have to assume something else is up with your male lead.

23. …assuming he was the male lead—which is a great way to segue into my big gripe with this show: I don’t have any idea who the story is supposed to be about. 

23A. When it starts, the plot seems to be about Ha transferring into this fancy-dancy school for children of the mega-elite and how he’s going to upset the balance of things as he gets closer and closer to queen-of-the-school Jae-i. Those two are obviously the leads, with He-ra (her best friend) and Ri-an (her boyfriend) being the second leads. Then it mostly turns into a show about He-ra and what she’s trying to do, with the Ha/Jae-i stuff being given equal prominence (just without as much narrative progress). And then, as the show goes on, Ha plays less and less of a role, He-ra’s story sort of wraps up, and we spend the last couple of episodes mostly concerned with the relationship struggles of Jae-i and Ri-an—which is absolutely NOT what the story was about at the outset. Their breakup was always just a matter of fact, plotwise: vulnerability and a fresh start for Jae-i, just in time for applecart upsetter Ha to arrive; and bitterness to further drive Ri-an into conflict with Ha, whose arrival threatens his place not just at the top of the hierarchy but with Jae-i. I get that we have a lot of different things going on in the story (and pretty much all good things, too, as I mentioned earlier), but I cannot for the life of me figure out how the whole thing was always supposed to be about Jae-i and Ri-an’s relationship. And it makes the last few episodes draaaaaaaaaaaaaag. Because, again, where I barely cared about Jae-i (thanks entirely to Roh Jeong-eui), I did not give one iota of a damn about Ri-an—ever—at any point in the series. To say nothing of how much I hate changing protagonists in a story just in general. 

24. In the most meaningless moment in the entire series, there is a very dramatic shot of Oh Na-ra sitting down at a desk in slow motion with light pouring in from behind her. Who is she, and why does her being there warrant this framing? I mean, I believe we know the fundamental reason why she’s there, but not why it would be shot like they were revealing that she’d been Keyser Soze all along. (...that’s, um, from The Usual Suspects. Have…have you ever heard of that movie?)

25. And can you even believe they basically pulled a B**** x Rich and teased a second season in a post-credits scene? I mean, I would absolutely watch another season of this, but…why would we need one?

…which is allI have to say about Hierarchy. 

It’s short, well made, and mostly pretty entertaining—though I freely admit it’s possible some of that could come from the nostalgia rush I got off of it. But, even as it falls on its face in the last couple of episodes, I’d still give it a thumbs up, insofar as saying it’s worth the watch, if it catches your eye. 

Then again, you’ve always been a bit of a mystery to me, so…what do I know?

More soon, seonbae—though not as soon as I’d originally planned: My Sibling’s Romance had its finale a week later than originally advertised, so, rather than finishing it before I got through The 8 Show, I finished it in the middle of watching Pyramid Game. So…the classism (or whatever) trilogy will be taking a short break before it wraps up. 

Hope you had a nice weekend. 

Welcome to July. (Can you even believe it?)

—Daryl

P.S. - Current dating show: Possessed Love. Basically Heart Signal, but with fortune tellers. And Sunny as one of the hosts. It’s enjoyably generic, overall, but they’ve gone out of their way to tease the audience with the promise of drama—with a capital dra-ma-ma-ma-maaaa.