SBS’s newest venture so to speak “The Killing Vote” is finally here, let us discuss the drama’s 1st episode.
Note: this article is a first-impression review, it doesn’t mean this is the writer’s final thoughts on the drama. This is a spoiler review.
There has been considerable buzz around the drama ever since the casting news was revealed. The drama gained even more attention after Lim Ji Yeon became involved in a very successful K drama earlier this year, “The Glory,” making people even more excited to see the combination between her and Park Hae Jin as she had been filming it when “The Glory” came out.
SBS opened a specific time slot for this drama, and It will only air once every Thursday and will be 12 episodes long. For starters, before I get into talking about the script, the acting, the pacing and all of that, I want to talk briefly about the scheduling for this drama.
To note, originally, the drama was supposed to air the 1st two episodes on the same day but due to broadcasting of a special news report that plan was scrapped.
I personally like to see two Kdrama episodes per week. This is something I’ve been used to for over a decade now, and something that I don’t really like to See disrupted in any way. I think that one episode of Any K drama is not enough weekly, but I could be among the few who think so. Maybe some people find it a bit more appealing if we have only one episode weekly that stretches over a longer period of time.
This is a gamble on SBS’s part because I think such drama would’ve found massive success if it was pushed back to the Friday-Saturday famous slot, definitely.
From a Broadcasting perspective, I totally understand the angle they’re going for. This drama will only be 12 episodes long and if they air two episodes weekly, then the drama will be done in about a month, along with the cost, this must have taken a lot of planning to do. So, I totally understand their approach to this, but I don’t think I particularly agree that it should air once weekly.
Regardless, we’re finally here and the first episode has aired. So, what did I think of it? Let’s discuss.
I really like the combination of the casting. They always do well.
The idea behind the drama is based on a web comic with the same title, and quite honestly, I really like the basic idea. Some people have pointed out that their drama script is very much similar into many other scripts about vigilante sort of ideas [The death note, the devil judge, to name a few], and while I do agree, I’m intrigued to see how this was carried out and how the Masked man came to be, not as a concept because I get it but as in the execution part because I bet it wasn’t easy.
It’s difficult to sympathize with somebody who distributed child p*rnography, so I don’t really feel particularly sorry for the character that died, and I totally understand why people would be more so intrigued to take action into their own hands because of the incompetence of the police.
But of course, police will ignore this message and still be determined to attack and arrest the person who does this. Not reflecting particularly on the level of incompetency within their force, but rather on punishing anyone who takes matters into their own hands… which wouldn’t have happened if the justice system wasn’t so corrupted and outdated/badly executed to begin with.
From the police perspective, its understandable, we can’t have people running around taking matters into their own hands because everyone’s definition of justice will be slightly different, and if the wrong person thinks they’re right, it’s a huge problem.
I think that the professor character is the one that is orchestrating all of this from the get go. He apparently killed the person who raped his daughter, which I totally understand. It explains why Moo-Chan did not kill him.
I think he’s somewhat orchestrating with people from the inside and outside to kill the people they believe deserved to be killed because of the crimes they’ve committed.
I think there’s a lot of room to say some very profound things and important things about society through this drama. And I think 12 episodes would be more than enough to delve into this subject and many others surrounding it. I think an interesting case about this would be when the public isn’t so quite sure about the likelihood that a person should be killed or not.
On the characters side, I did not particularly like any of the writing for any one of them, yet. I think each character is fairly the typical character you’d find in a police drama, one episode is not enough to judge, let us hope the characters will see more development. This might not happen because the focus will mostly be on the masked killer instead of who is chasing him.
It goes without saying that everybody did such a great performance in the first episode, and I expect no less of them. I think I’ll continue to enjoy their performances for the foreseeable future. For now, I think I will put this drama on hold, and once a lot of episodes accumulate, I will go back and watch it.
This will take 12 weeks to be exact, it will end in late October, which means this will air for the next three months. I think this will allow people to either examine this drama much more closely, or not find it interesting enough to continue to watch it as time goes by.
If a drama can do either its probably one like this, I think SBS wants us to speculate and discuss the drama and build hype around it as each episode airs weekly. This is definitely a gamble on SBS’s part and we’ll have to wait to see whether it pays off or not.
The fact that the streaming service is taking a massive chunk of the audiences attention span in South Korea at the moment is definitely a source of concern to them and reducing the episodes count is hurting their bottom because they don’t have enough content to fill in the specific time slots which leads to more spending and draining of resources. This might become the new norm depending on how successful the drama becomes.
So these are my thoughts on The Killing Vote 1st episode, so what about you guys? did you like the episode? let me know what you thought in the comment section below.
