Sometime in the past five years, my parents became Korean drama experts. This past month of being back in Singapore, I’ve spent probably as much as a third of my time just in front of the television, letting my parents fill me in on who’s big, who was in what, which shows are worth watching, which ones are just silly—my Dad can even tell me where the streaming video links are! Definitely not a day I thought would come. I thought it was my job to hole up in my room watching TV bootlegs! I guess the apple truly forgot that the tree really isn’t that far off.

Anyhow, here’s my favorite one for the moment: Phantom, or Ghost (choose your preferred translation from Korean). It’s still on air in Korea! Again, I somehow never imagined that the TV channels available in Singapore would start having such close relationships with Korean networks that their shows would begin airing here before they were completely done airing there. I should’ve guessed really, looking at how that’s the way things sometimes are between the USA, Europe and Australia. 

Unlike American/British shows, Korean/Japanese/Chinese shows don’t usually progress in seasons—they are produced and aired as a single intact series, of around 11 episodes (usual for Japanese ones), 20 episodes (I’m coming to understand that this might be standard for big-budget Korean series?), or 30-50ish (epic/period dramas). (Soap operas don’t count, of course; it’s a universal rule that they go on forever.) If they’re very, very popular, and the premise lends itself to continuation, then sequel series get made maybe two or three years down the line, or one/two-time-only “special episodes” for the holidays, but it’s not very common. Viewers are quite happy to simply imagine that the characters really did live happily ever after, and look forward to their favorite stars coming back in a completely different incarnation, thereby proving their acting mettle or their chameleon-esque beauty. Hence, I’d gotten quite used to getting to know of series only after they’d been aired in full in their home countries; following a Korean series while it’s still on the air is a first. 

And this instance just happens to be incredibly frustrating, because of how intense and gripping Phantom is. Its focal point is the world of cyber-intrigue: a detective in the police’s cyber investigations division and his police academy roommate turned anti-establishment hacker get embroiled in a rich man’s very complex power-revenge scheme.

I can’t go into detail about it without confusing the crap out of you, so I’ll just say this: every episode is chock full of techie-hijinks and plot twists that will build your hopes up, tear them down again, yet still keep you believing that this bunch of scrappy underdog detectives are going to make it in the end. The writers really went to town on this one.

Oh, and So Ji-Sub, on top of being a very deft actor, is really easy on the eyes. 

*Photo from Phantom’s entry on AsianWiki.