Quick Review #61: Fukurou to yobareta otoko - Spring 2024

Title: Fukurou to yobareta otoko / フクロウと呼ばれた男

Rating: 3 / 10

Recommended for: 

Those who want to see a political suspense drama but will be OK with no conclusion and answers OR are fans of Tanaka Min

Liked:

- This is ultimately Tanaka Min's show. No questions about it. He was brilliant as the fixer who stays in the background with a sharp eye and doesn't draw attention to himself just like the owl in the night. However, the downside to this was that he had such strong screen presence with his subdued charisma that even the supporting cast which can be considered star-studded really paled in comparison to him. And it was so boring in that sense because there was hardly anyone who could give him a run for his money. 

A match is only interesting if both players are of similar standards and keeps the rally going. If it's so one-sided, it's good for the dominant player but it just doesn't seem to elevate the whole production.

Disliked: 

- The concept of featuring the behind-the-scenes fixer rather than the politicians who pull the strings in the country was refreshing and had potential to be a very engaging story. However, execution and presentation were the problems here again and a drama series cannot be considered successful if it fails to "hook" the viewers to have the urge to watch the next episode. It took me way longer than expected to finish the series (just 10 episodes) because after each episode, I would just click the "X" button to close it rather than "next episode" to continue watching it. Each episode never really ended on a cliffhanger or suspenseful point to "lure" me to check out the next episode and it was quite painful from the midpoint to even watch one episode in a single sitting. No doubt things sped up considerably, that was in Ep 10 and it was already too little and too late for me. 

I understood from an interview by Variety with David Shin, the showrunner, that this drama was meant to be a multi-season series like "Alice in Borderland" by Netflix. However, the fundamental question boils down to, if this is the quality of Season 1, why would I bother checking out future seasons? While I can take it that Season 1 may just be the introduction or the beginning to the end (the ending promises better things to come), I don't think I would want to wait for months or even years for the next season to be out since Season 1 was only released in April 2024. By then, I would have clean forgotten about what I watched in Season 1 and certainly have no intention to refresh my memory by re-watching it. 

- As I mentioned above, Tanaka Min's dominance, whether by accident or by design, was a double-edged sword. What cannot be denied though is that his dominance was largely perpetuated by the storyline. While the story was positioned as a political suspense drama, a huge part of the airtime dealt with the fixer's family problems i.e. his children. This was where stereotypes of such rich and influential families were replicated here without much surprise - a father who is too busy with his life outside the family and has frosty or distant relationships with his offspring, the good-for-nothing eldest son who wants to earn the praise and love of the father but keeps fumbling, a capable daughter who probably can't be the leader of her generation because of gender or marriage issues, a second or younger son who turns out to be more like the father but is the rebel in the family or at odds with the father and a youngest child who either is the pet of the father or an outlier compared to the older siblings. And because of this, everything became so predictable and there was hardly any novelty along the way. If you are expecting some classic or very emotionally-charged family clashes like what you see in dramas such as "Karei naru ichizoku", you won't find it here because this family hardly speaks about how they truly feel to one another and emotions are subdued to the point that it feels that everyone cowers in front of the father even though the father doesn't actually do things like shout at them to shut up or threaten to do anything to them. While I don't appreciate grand dramatic outbursts, the non-action and quietness of these family scenes were draggy and sleep-inducing.

In the political arena arc, things were also bland and moved at a snail speed. Suspense was hardly noticeable because the adversary was already out there in the open from Ep 1 and frankly speaking, the villain was no match at all for Tanaka Min in terms of screen presence.

- The excessive nudity in sex scenes seems to be the norm these days in dramas on non-TV station platforms like Netflix and Disney+ where censorship rules is more relaxed. As I mentioned before in an earlier review, if such scenes do not value-add to the story, I find them extremely redundant and unnecessary for the cast to do. Nowadays, not only are actresses baring it all, even the actors go beyond baring their butts. Which makes me wonder, why were they made to do that for no reason? Sacrificing for the arts? Simply baffling!