Itaewon Class: Revenge & Korean style

Itaewon Class is a Korean revenge drama, recently released and ripe for bingeing.

It joins an ever-increasing collection of “K-dramas” on Netflix and includes all the foodie-delights, sumptuous fashion and bucking against the rigidities of class and cultural conformity we’ve come to expect from South Korean TV & cinema.

The show is a slow boil 16-episode story of revenge against the powerful. But the journey will make your emotions yo-yo with the ups and downs of our heroes’ struggles. And some of the baddies may even redeem themselves – and some of the good guys may not be all that good.

It all begins with the main character Park Sae-Ro-Yi (surnames come first) as a teenager in a new town. There he protects a fellow student against bullies but in standing up for justice both he and his father are destroyed by the bullies’ powerful parents.

Itaewan Class is a class act; a slow boil story of revenge against the powerful

One thing leads to another and Sae-Ro-Yi has been in prison for three years and has spent seven years on brutal long-haul fishing jobs to earn enough money to make shrewd investments and start-up a restaurant.

But he’s not in it for the food. The plan is to bring down the people who destroyed his family by out-competing and taking over their company, Jangga Group.

Okay, maybe it’s a bit far-fetched but corporate power, greed, family machinations, splits among investors and the cut-throat Korean competition sort-of make it doable.

Sae-Ro-Yi, played by Park Seo-Joon, sets-up his restaurant in Itaewan, an up-and-coming and trendy district of Seoul and is backed by a set of young trendy friends. These include a wizz-kid financial investor and a set of super-talented talented young people who are trying to make a name for themselves working all-hours for the new business.

The love interest for Sae-Ro-Yi – but it better not get in the way of his plan – includes his former high school crush and a young intelligent business manager, both of who work at the restaurant.

Who will he end up with? I won’t tell you. But I fell in love with just about all the characters. This is helped by the superb acting on show throughout the ensemble cast.

Itaewon Class also dives into a number of topics that K-drama‘s often run scared of. In a society that is often quite conformist it takes advantage of the edginess of Itaewan (“an exotic ‘foreign’ section in the middle of Seoul”) as a cover to cover homosexuality, transsexuals, racism, and tattoos.

And this did not get Koreans reaching for the remote; it was one of the smash-hit shows of the year.

The chef at the restaurant, the character Ma Hyun-Yi is a transsexual transitioning to female. The show portrays her as strong and bold even when her identity is revealed competing for the restaurant at a cooking show.

Another worker at the restaurant is Tony Kim, a Guinean-Korean man who moved to Korea to look for his father. As a black man and foreigner everyone assumed he could speak English and help deal with the tourist trade. But whoops – Guinea is French speaking. The show even raises the racism Tony faces when a bouncer keeps him out of a club because of the colour of his skin.

Itaewan Class is a class act and shows off some of the real diversity of South Korea’s mega-city Seoul – which will be a surprise to some.

It will leave you on the edge of your seat and rooting for the gifted young people trying to remake South Korea and make a place for themselves in the world both in the show and in the real world.