Letter #158: Newtopia

Good morning, Erin.

So, the janitor stopped by my office the other day to essentially (but also very politely) congratulate me on having such a beautiful girlfriend…and, as I blinked at him in confusion, he pointed to the picture of Jung So-min I have taped to my computer monitor. I then had to tell him that, sadly, she is not my girlfriend but simply an actress I like—leading him to make an expression that seemed to me to indicate that this state of affairs made a lot more sense to him than the alternative. 

Which…I mean, I laughed, but…it didn’t not hurt my feelings. 

(I leave it to you to decide whether his lack of comment about the photo of V you gave me—which is right next to the picture of Jung So-min—is noteworthy or not.) 

Anyway. 

I’m willing to bet “zombie apocalypse comedy starring Jisoo from Blackpink” was not your top guess for how we’d kick off the pop-star bloc, but here we are, dear seonbae. Because I like Jisoo? Because it’s only 8 episodes long? Because I looked at my K-drama downloads folder and said, “What the heck is Newtopia? Oh, right—that zombie show with…wait, Jisoo is a pop star!”? 

We may never know. 

What we do know is that hanging a Blackpink poster in my office would make the janitor wonder if I’m a polygamist. 

1. Newtopia is lavishly colorful, painstakingly choreographed, and fundamentally meh: too successful a pastiche of better things to leave you scrolling through your phone as it plays, yet so utterly ephemeral as to make you wonder if you’d actually watched it once it finished. It has some wonderful moments, some dumb moments, and a lot of nothing that seems like it should be something but doesn’t feel like it. I just don’t know what the show was supposed to be, really. I found the highs pretty darn pleasing, the lows more a nuisance than bad, and the rest of it inoffensive but dull—but gradually more frustrating as the show continued, because the dull moments pile up. I wouldn’t say not to watch it, because it is a relatively short series with some genuinely enjoyable stuff in it, but, at the same time, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. If you want to support Jisoo (or really, really like The French Dispatch), give it a shot. Otherwise…have you watched Friendly Rivalry, yet? Friendly Rivalry is great. 

2. Whoever designed and directed this show seems to have been heavily influenced by those parody Wes Anderson movie trailers: sets are all retro kitsch and stylized, costumes are bright and deliberative, and every shot has the actors (or whatever is meant to be the subject of the shot) in the dead-center of the frame. It’s kind of fun, at the start, but it does become a bit too much (...not unlike Wes Anderson movies) when it becomes clear it is the style of the movie and not a stylistic element deployed by the movie when it will have the best effect. (See: Rushmore vs. those Roald Dahl adaptations he did for Netflix.) A lot of these kinds of choices make the whole thing feel less serious than it should, even for a frequently silly comedy, because there’s no change in tone, which makes distinguishing the range of storytelling moments much harder to do on the part of the audience (emotionally, not intellectually), lessening their impact and contributing to the sense that the show is a trudge. 

3. The story is split between the two halves our main couple: Jae-yeon, who is doing his compulsory military service with an anti-air unit based on top of Seoul’s tallest skyscraper, and Young-joo, who is desperately trying to make her way to him to let him know she doesn’t want to break up with him (after dumping him—not without reason—several hours earlier). The choice, in and of itself, is perfectly sound, with the two plots giving us both different perspectives on the zombie outbreak and the ability to grant a reprieve when one situation gets overwhelming (by switching over to the other plot). It eventually starts to jump back and forth a little too frequently, often breaking up action sequences into unnatural micro-segments that each leave us on artificial mini-cliffhangers we don’t particularly need—and which, if left to play out in full, would probably have felt more naturally tense.

4. HOWEVER…the upside to this is that we get two very distinct groups of heroes to follow, allowing for a much more diverse cast of characters than we’d be able to adequately handle if things were restricted to just one of the storylines. And, whatever else we might be able to say about them, the characters are easily the best part of the show. 

5. Strangely, the best characters are those only tangentially related to the two main groups: Arron Park, the “legendarily” intense hotel manager (who is by far the highlight of the series); Soo-jeong, the strict hotel VIP lounge employee; and Alex, a tech CEO. The hotel employees bring a lot of charm to the weirdly dry Jae-yeon side of the story, while Alex being much-needed groundedness and calm to the absurd yet intense Young-joo storyline. 

5A. And I really want to highlight Arron Park, because he doesn’t have nearly as much screen time as he deserves, but he still manages to outshine everyone else. He’s fantastic (and probably one of my favorite K-drama characters ever—he’s that good). I mean, at one point, he makes himself a suit of protective armor out of fancy couch cushions…and still pins his nametag to the chestplate. Because he’s the hotel manager, dammit, and he needs to properly represent the hotel. It’s wonderful. And we deserved more. 

5B. Plus, as you can probably tell from his name, he’s American—and the actor’s American accent when he breaks out into English is really good!

6. I recognized a surprising number of actors in this show:

• Jisoo from Blackpink as Young-joo

• the dumped boyfriend in One Spring Night as Arron Park

• the healer girl from Alchemy of Souls as Soo-jeong

• #bestboy from Welcome to Samdal-ri as Jin-eok, Young-joo’s amorous seonbae

• the gay security guard from Inspector Koo as a soldier

• the hot streamer girl from Behind Your Touch as Young-joo’s hot co-worker

• the ponytail guy from Sweet Home as one of Young-joo’s co-workers

• Batchelor #23 from The Matchmakers as the chow officer

• the main host of Heart Signal as himself

7. The flashback to how the main couple met in college is ADORABLE. (And amusing, if you know anything about engineering students.)

8. Relatedly: I love that Young-joo has a “uniform” for when she’s acting on her feelings about Jae-yeon (a red shirt). 

9. There are what I assume to be a lot of Korean military service-based jokes that I did not get, so I have no way to know if the jokes were good or not. 

10. I love that the American chef’s reaction to the hotel descending into zombie anarchy is to shout that he’s an American citizen. Very amusing.

10A. Less amusing was that he was concerned that the soldiers’ behavior while using the hotel dining area as a temporary base might bring down the hotel restaurant’s Michelin rating. There are other little things he could have done to show us, amusingly, his priorities are mixed up (such as how he treated their reactions to the food he made them). This? Far too silly. Like, SNL sketch silly. 

11. Silly but not too silly was the salon owner who said the zombies were just a ploy by the big corporations to scare the mom-and-pop shops out of the neighborhood. 

12. The subtitles thought they could get one over on me, but I’m too clever: when Jin-eok tries to woo Young-joo away from her army-serving boyfriend, the subtitles tell me he wants her to call him “Jin-eok” instead of “sir”—but my ears could hear that he tells her to call him “oppa” instead of “seonbae.” And those two sentiments are VERY different, subtitles. 

12A. That said, the subtitles for this show (that I saw) never subbed anything that was written out or spoken by someone we couldn’t see. So, the million text messages Young-joo and Jae-yeon sent each other? Or literally every phone conversation we spent with the person who was listening to someone speak to them? No idea what was being said. But, given how they would often result in Young-joo or Jae-yeon crying, I’m guessing something very dramatic was being said. 

13. It was an interesting choice to have our protagonists mostly be made up of the people in zombie movies who are typically too stupid to survive. That they repeatedly seem not to understand how zombies operate while continually referring to zombie movies is…also interesting. 

14. The batch of survivors we get at the end surprised me a little. But not in a bad way. 

15. The closing song for the series is rad: “Sunrise” by Primary, ickyvichie, and Puggi.

And that’s that. Whatever it is.

I know. Over too quickly. But we must bear the pain of parting so that we can later experience the joy of once again coming together. 

“...with a show I’ve yet again not watched?”

Not…y’know, not necessarily. You could have seen it. You don’t know.

I mean, you haven’t. But you could. Who’s to say? (The janitor thought I was dating Jung So-min. Stranger things have happened.)

Regardless, you’ll never guess where we’re going next—nor where we were supposed to go next but which I got way too annoyed with and put off to the side. (And why you’ll be mad at me when we get there.)

But 10 points if you do. 

More soon.

—Daryl