Stream It Or Skip It?
Thrillers about people who are wrongly accused make us uncomfortable, but not in a “thrilling” way. We get frustrated that the characters can’t see the obvious signs that the main character didn’t commit the crime he or she is accused of. But in a new Korean thriller on Hulu, a wrongly-accused delivery guy finds out exactly who framed him, and decides to exact revenge.
Opening Shot: A man runs out of a building and gets on a motorcycle. He chases a yellow car through a tunnel, and eventually rides up a wall in the tunnel to look at the driver and vow that “I’ll drag you down to hell.”
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The Gist: Park Tae-jung (Ji Chang-wook) is a hard-working delivery guy, taking his motorcycle all over the city. But at heart, he’s a horticulturalist; when he sees a small potted tree in the stairwell of a building where brings a delivery, he pushes it out of direct sunlight and leaves a note on how to properly care for it. When an elderly woman asks him to bring a rolling suitcase up a hill for her, he obliges.
He’s working so hard to keep his brother Tae-jin (Ahn Ji-ho) in school, which he feels is his responsibility since their mother passed a few years prior. We see how responsible he is when he chases down a sports car with people who grabbed a delivery he had and threw it on the ground.
He’s also trying to open a nursery/bar, a vision he picked up while working with his mother. He gets help from his buddies and girlfriend, Song Su-ji (Pyo Ye-jin). One night when he’s on his delivery rounds, he hears a phone ringing as he chows down on a convenience store roll. The person on the phone is supposedly the owner, and instructs him to bring the phone to an emergency call box in a tunnel, with the excuse that she doesn’t want random people to her house. He follows the instructions and picks up an envelope with the 300,000 won (about $200) she promised.
The next day, though, police bust into his store and arrest him, accusing him of murdering and dismembering a woman in her 20s. He insists he didn’t do it. Unsurprisingly, the police don’t believe him. Tae-jin, Su-ji and Tae-jung’s friends hire a lawyer and gather up the receipts that should give him an alibi. But when he stands trial, the prosecutor shows evidence that throws the alibi into doubt.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Manipulated, written by Oh Sang-ho, has a feel similar to The Fugitive, at least the more recent series version.
Our Take: The Manipulated is a solid, competent thriller that takes the “falsely accused” trope a step further than most shows in this category might. Tae-jung isn’t going to spend the entire run of the first season rotting in prison insisting that he’s innocent and/or be on the run as a fugitive. He’s going to find out who actually set him up to take the fall for this murder and exact some revenge.
That certainly is going to be what keeps us watching. It’s not going to be an entire season of Tae-jung trying to convince Su-ji, his brother and his friends that he couldn’t possibly do the crime he’s accused of. That would get old in a hurry. We’re looking forward to Tae-jung and his friends finding out the who, how and why he was targeted and using the information to find and get back at the real killer.
The only real issue is how long this will all take, because as far as we’re concerned, the sooner the conspiracy against Tae-jung is discovered, the better it’ll be for the show. We have enough information about Tae-jung to know that he can’t commit the crime he’s accused of, and we know that somehow he’s being railroaded to the point where things he remembers well are shown to be false, at least on the surface. But there’s only so much of that misdirection viewers will take before fatigue sets in.
Sex and Skin: Tae-jung and Su-ji sleep together, but no skin is shown.
Parting Shot: As Tae-jung walks down a prison hallway, the lights shut off in sections.
Sleeper Star: Pyo Ye-jin’s character Su-ji has to cry a lot in the first episode, and she makes it believable, playing a person who doesn’t quite know what to think about the person she loves.
Most Pilot-y Line: During the trial, the prosecutor starts by saying that he believes Tae-jung’s alibi, then starts dismantling it. That definitely feels like a TV-centric legal ploy, not anything that would be done in real life.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Manipulated has enough going on that it shouldn’t get repetitive or tiresome, but we hope that the revenge plot starts sooner rather than later.
How To Watch The Manipulated
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If you want to stream even more and save a few bucks a month while you’re at it, we recommend subscribing to one of the Disney+ Bundles, all of which include Hulu. These bundles start at $12.99/month for ad-supported Disney+ and Hulu and goes up to $32.99/month for Disney+, Hulu, and Max, all ad-free.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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