Grade: C+
Category
Supernatural
romance sitcom; 16 half-hour episodes
What it’s about
Gu Mi Jin is a nine-tailed fox who lives in human form with her newly human mother and sister. Like so many other
Kdrama heroines, she’s desperate for love, but she’s got bigger
plans for her soulmate than couples rings: she’ll die in
three months if she doesn’t eat the liver of her thousandth man.
Naturally, not just any guy will do, so she's on the prowl for “the
one.”
First impression
My first-ever drama short is proving to be a goofy, upbeat romp with
the added bonus of an intriguing central concept. It’s light as
air, but not necessarily in a bad way.
Final verdict
Episodic and insubstantial, The Thousandth Man brings the
mythical gumiho into the modern urban world, surrounding its family
of foxes with spas and playgrounds and the petty concerns of humans.
There’s little otherworldly magic about them, and being a gumiho
seems to largely involve superhuman speed and the ability to
spontaneously turn into a femme fatale, suddenly sprouting a pleather
catsuit, glamorous red fingernails, and a smoky eye suitable for a
night out on the town.
Like most Korean sitcoms I’ve seen, The Thousandth Man’s
production values aren’t especially different from straight-up
Kdramas. There’s no laugh track and it looks like every other show
on the air. But in addition to shorter episode running times, it seems that most Korean sitcoms feature lots of
characters, each with a little snippet of story that’s only
explored on a superficial, comedic level. Even the impending death of this
show’s heroine is mostly played for madcap laughs rather than the
angsty tears that would be inevitable in a drama version of this
story.
There are moments of sophistication here, notably seen in Gu Mi Jin’s
appreciation of how much the people, geography, and language of Korea
have changed in her thousand-year life. Unlike our current crop of
time-travel dramas, The Thousandth Man acknowledges how
fundamentally different everything in the world has become, “changing
more in the past 90 years than it did in the past 900,” as one
character puts it. The show even goes so far as to make Gu Mi Jin’s
Joseon-era journal utterly uninteligable to people who haven’t
specifically studied old Korean. The story also touches on another gumiho who’s so jaded and tired of living in the world she’s not even sure she wants to live on as a human. (In my dream drama retelling of this story, she’d be the lead.)
On the other hand, the show’s
mythology could have used more development: It never manages to
explain how the gumiho family has managed to live for so long without
anyone noticing that they don’t age. It also never really clarifies
what becoming a human means for a gumiho. When they eat that final
liver, do they start the clock ticking on a normal human lifespan?
Could they have babies? Do they lose their eyeshadowed alter egos?
And what’s the big deal about becoming a human anyway, when the
only drawback of being a gumiho is a taste for organ meats and nine
lovely (but easily concealed) tails?
The Thousandth Man also
suffers from a frustratingly naive and uninteresting female lead.
She refuses to eat the liver of any man who doesn’t love her and
volunteer to be consumed, but the show leaves her almost totally out
of the transaction. Her emotions and motivations—beyond whatever
starry-eyed Joseon chick-lit she read growing up—are at best
glossed over. What must it be like to make someone love you and then
kill them, genuinely believing it’s the noble thing to do? Dull
emotions are shown as one of the side-effects of gumiho-hood, but for
me this isn’t sufficient to explain away the serious issues
surrounding the female lead’s diet.
Far more compelling than Gu Mi Jin are her boy-crazy,
former-fox sister and their pragmatic mother, who loves and wants the
best for her girls, just like moms everywhere. These two get less
screen time, but they still manage to be the most memorable thing
about the show. Also high on the fun-o-meter are a series of Joseon flashbacks that show Gu Mi Jin and her sister as girls.
For
someone who’s drawn to romantic comedies, I suspect The
Thousandth Man would be a fun
twist on the standard plotline. For melo-obsessed me, it was like a
plate of salad to a gumiho: I could get it down, but it wasn’t what
I really wanted.
Random thoughts
• Episode 2.
Did Anna Nicole Smith teach us nothing? The obvious answer here
is to find some old, practically dead guy who will be so happy to
hook up with a hot girl that he’ll give her anything—including his
liver. Or, failing that, meeting Sisyphus, who could have donated all
thousand livers himself.
• Episode 4.
I hope the female lead’s wardrobe isn’t an indication that
80s fashions are coming back into style. I already spent one decade
dressed like Stacy from the Babysitters Club, and it was more than
enough.
• Episode 4.
Isn’t the cute basketball
player a little young for the lead's sister? 985 years is a pretty
significant age difference for a noona romance, after all.
• Episode 4.
On what planet does it make sense to only eat the livers of good guys
who are willing to die for love? Wouldn’t a thoughtful gumiho
exclusively eat bad-guy liver, Dexter-style? I guess this show's lead
is looking to Darwin out the sweet portion of Korea’s male
population. Pity, because as Song Joon Ki knows all too well, there
just aren't enough nice guys in this world.
• Episode
7. The thousandth sign
that I watch too much Kdrama? I’m starting to recognize where
things were filmed. And I don’t mean, “Oh, look...there’s
Namsan Tower!” It’s more like “I think I know that
shrub.” Case in point: the male lead’s house in this drama
was also used to film I'm
Sorry, I Love You.
Watch
it
You
might also like
My Girlfriend is a Gumiho, for
its cute and funny gumiho shenanigans
The
episodic romances of Twelve Men in a Year
