Last December, Netflix launched an exhaustive report entitled What We Watched, detailing the time its subscribers spent watching each movie and tv programme on its platform. One of many greatest surprises was the sheer variety of foreign-language productions we devour. In complete, these productions accounted for a full third of all streamed Netflix content material.
And main the way in which was South Korea. The report revealed that, following the planet-conquering phenomenon that was Squid Sport, the Okay-drama collection The Glory was the third most-watched Netflix present globally. This, it’s a must to admit, is unimaginable. There’s a big world starvation for Korean output. If it comes from South Korea, folks will watch it of their droves.
Probably. As a result of the most recent South Korean collection to hit Netflix is Rooster Nugget. It’s a tv collection a few girl who turns right into a rooster nugget and, as such, is likely to be one of many oddest issues at the moment obtainable to look at.
Primarily based on a webcomic by Park Jidok, whose earlier work consists of comics referred to as Potato Village and Killer Farts, Rooster Nugget is sort of aggressively esoteric. The story is a few hapless intern at a machine firm who harbours a crush on his boss’s daughter. However then a mysterious machine seems within the workplace, and she or he will get into it and unintentionally says the phrases “rooster nugget” out loud, and it turns her into one. Think about a model of The Fly the place Jeff Goldblum will get absolutely was a fly after simply quarter-hour and also you’re heading in the right direction. Additionally, on this model of The Fly, Goldblum will get was a small piece of rooster, one of many solely issues on Earth that’s much less dramatically fascinating than a fly. That’s roughly the place we’re.
Not like one thing like Squid Sport, which got here swaggering in laden with extraordinarily costly Hollywood-level manufacturing design, Rooster Nugget was very clearly made on a budget. It’s shiny like a daytime cleaning soap opera, it has only a few conventional motion sequences and an enormous share of its visual-effects price range appears to have been spent on making a rooster nugget wobble very barely. It’s so bizarre and discount basement-y that there’s a good likelihood you’ll get a couple of minutes into the primary episode and determine that Rooster Nugget is solely not for you.
However this is able to be a mistake. I used to be absolutely able to bail on the present, till a quick sequence the place the daddy of the lady who was a rooster nugget grieves her predicament. He remembers bringing her up alone after the demise of her mom. He’s scared and overwhelmed, however he’s pleased with the lady she’s changing into. And I’ll be damned if it isn’t probably the most unexpectedly shifting issues I’ve seen in an age. By some means this silly present, one that always feels as if it was free-associated moderately than historically written, wrestled a real emotional response from me.
From there, inexplicably, Rooster Nugget retains getting higher and higher. It turns into much less in regards to the weirdness of a girl who’s trapped in rooster kind, and extra in regards to the bonding that occurs between the 2 individuals who attempt to get her again. Quickly, the woman’s father and the intern workforce as much as attempt to uncover what precisely occurred to her, uncovering a protracted and sophisticated conspiracy that branches off down numerous extremely unusual tributaries that, amongst different issues, present a whistlestop journey by Korean culinary historical past.
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Given its meagre price range, the present takes some daring formal leaps, too. We journey tons of of years into the previous, and several other many years into the longer term, in our try to determine precisely what occurred to this poor nugget woman. Extraordinary new characters are launched. There’s an ambition right here that can not be tamed. Had Rooster Nugget been given the blockbuster therapy, there’s an opportunity that every one this is able to have come off as overwrought, as one thing being status only for the sake of it. However the present’s shonky, cheapo manufacturing prevents that. It has to depend on attraction alone to get by, and that is one thing it has in spades.
Realistically, Rooster Nugget received’t get near equalling The Glory’s reputation. If it even makes the highest half of the following What We Watched report I’ll be staggered. It’s far too weird and do-it-yourself for that. However those that will watch Rooster Nugget will adore it fully, and isn’t that actually the very best metric?
