No lie: the title character of the comedy series “Chicken Nugget” becomes a fried ball of chicken meat in a sauce with sesame sprinkles thanks to a mysterious machine. Her desperate father, together with the intern who has a crush on the girl, who is also an unfulfilled singer with a very strange sense of style and an even more unconventional artistic temperament, spend nearly 10 episodes looking for a way to restore her human form. And along the way, a lot of everything happens, just not what we expect.
“Chicken Nugget”. Netflix’s new Korean series is more than a surprise
“Chicken Nugget” is not about showing a talking chicken nugget. We have here a mixture of genres that is difficult to expect in even the wildest pastiche. This may be too much for many people, but there is also something absolutely fascinating about it. On the one hand, we get a galaxy of Korean movie stars, jokes about the band BTS (so popular that even a layman knows something about it), references to popular K-dramas [to określenie na koreańskie seriale – przyp. red.] and the beauty of the absolute acting idol Cha Eun Woo (the scene in which one of the characters shouts his name in the machine transforming people because he would like to look like him is already a hit on Tik Tok, and the series appeared on the platform only on March 15), which should provide suitable fodder for K-drama lovers. That doesn’t mean they bought it uncritically, but more on that later.
On the other hand, in “Chicken Nugget” there are controversial but funny special effects, a really abstract sense of humor, a lot of crackers, industry jokes (e.g. there is a scene in which former lovers meet and start to reminisce about the past, and the hero accompanying them a voice complains that they are starting a relationship flashback), references to horror films, spy films, etc. There are also elements of melodrama and an unhappy romance, the story of a single father raising a child (you can be moved), as well as stories about the toxic demands of parents planning their children’s lives and the rebellion expressed in specific wardrobe choices. All this includes a narrative about a crazy but brilliant scientist, sci-fi inserts (cute robots!), futuristic visions of the future, some philosophical reflections on the nature of humanity, inserts about the history of Korean poultry farming and oil production, branding pineapple on pizza and mint chocolate (great dialogue, really), as well as a lot of strange songs and pushing the action with dialogues that are surprising from the point of view of a Western viewer. I don’t think it’s something that a mainstream viewer, the so-called “normal”, can swallow on a runway. However, I think that an exemplary meme lover, a lover of meta jokes and general absurdity, should appreciate the flavors as much as possible.
In fact, the series is crazy even by Korean standards and it causes a lot of excitement among millions of K-drama lovers, because it has a lot of top stars, including the cast.
It must be emphasized that “Chicken Nugget” is not the original vision of writer and director Lee Byeong-heon. This one is known for the film “Extreme Job”, which in 2019 attracted 16 million viewers to cinemas in Korea, which gave it the title of the second most popular film in the history of the country in terms of viewership. One would expect that the new series will be a sure hit. Especially since “Chicken Nugget” is an adaptation of a popular webtoon (i.e. Korean internet comic) with exactly the same title. From what I read in the opinions of the much smaller but satisfied viewers, it is also a very accurate adaptation. In one of the films, the director emphasized that he was delighted with the originality of this story, which he initially interpreted as a cutting satire on prejudices against human appearance. He decided to deepen the message even more, although his intentions may ultimately cover truly nonsense solutions.
Current market practice has shown that film adaptations of webtoons, and those with an all-star cast, guarantee a definite success. Meanwhile, the production arouses extreme reactions among viewers: some are delighted with the fresh approach to the topic, others definitely believe that it is pure absurdity and not worth their time. Google shows that users gave the production only four percent. positive opinions, which is a shockingly low rating. I assure you, I’ve seen much worse things (in order not to look too far, I’ll use “The Invisible War” by Patryk Vega as an example), this one is simply unconventional and too focused on the fact that it has to be cool with a capital F. I’m not sure whether as many as 10 were needed half-hour episodes. It could have been condensed, because sometimes some issues were presented too slowly. I’ll admit without hesitation that I watched the series with an acceleration of 1.25, which made everything run quite smoothly and eliminated the problem of long delays.
Another thing is that you really need to be at least slightly familiar with the world of K-dramas to appreciate all the jokes and references; without this knowledge, the series “Chicken Nugget” undoubtedly loses its charm and meaning. It is not without reason that I wrote that the production is non-standard for Korean conditions, at least in terms of the structure of the script. Although the episodes are short, they are also packed with gags that do not necessarily fit together into a coherent whole – which is probably why the series is easier for many people to watch in fragments on TikTok.
There is no classically understood plot here, if only because the title character, apart from a few inserts from the past or strange romantic fantasies, does nothing much, she is simply a round chicken meatball. There are a lot of flashbacks, but they do not push the action forward, they only explain why someone behaved in a given scene. We also have a lot of scenes parodying the characteristic elements of racial representatives of the genre, which is not particularly conducive to building internal plot tension, and this is often crucial for K-drama lovers and makes you get involved in the action, no matter how cheesy it is. I think that “Chicken Nugget” can be a series equivalent of “: it was this catastrophic comedy with an ecological message made by an Oscar-winning creator who cast a whole galaxy of Hollywood stars. On the one hand, I even admire the creators’ Uhlan fantasy, but on the other, I wonder who… he thought that it would be possible to repeat the success of “Squid Game” with such an absurd story.
Something else may have been misleading when making “Chicken Nugget”: it’s possible that, following the success of “Squid Game,” someone decided that if a Korean series was to be a global success, it had to be weird in some way. The problem is that “Squid Game”, despite its terrifying message and showing people literally killing themselves for money, was also a story about universal problems that affect people everywhere. In addition, the narrative was captivating and the characters were easy to identify with. Here, the source material is rather unconventional.
Even if we can sympathize with the distraught father, understand the struggles of a young man unhappily in love, his artistic aspirations and the struggle with the demands set by his parents, the human-snack is not what attracts us emotionally. In addition, the series’ execution is supposed to indicate enormous self-irony and distance from the standard features of hit K-dramas, and it probably does it too much. This does not change the fact that the series is painless to watch if you do not experience the strangeness and theatricality of the characters. Unraveling the intrigue does not require an engineer’s degree and you can taste oriental film spices – for our Polish conditions – it’s just fun for those who are patient.
Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
