Netflix K-drama midseason recap: Strong Girl Nam-soon – tacky action comedy with more fat shaming and drug demonising than story building

This article contains mild spoilers.

Lead cast: Lee Yoo-mi, Kim Jung-eun, Kim Hae-sook, Ong Seung-wu, Byeon Woo-seok

Latest Nielsen rating: 8.7 per cent

Creating stories for the purpose of entertaining the masses seems like a frivolous thing on the surface, but popular media can have considerable influence over the society from which they are born.

We grow up learning about the world around us through media and, given that we live in an era where households are likely to have two working parents and at least that many screens capable of distracting young children, their influence has never been more powerful.

The K-drama series Strong Girl Nam-soon is the definition of frivolous entertainment. It is a scatterbrained mishmash of strung-together jokes, loud costumes and illogical storytelling with hokey dramatic interludes occasionally wedged in along the way.

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And why shouldn’t it be? There’s a need for that kind of entertainment, the kind of airy fluff that blanks out the tribulations of a long day; anything more demanding might send you right to sleep. Even by those generous standards this is a particularly inane creation.

However, light entertainment still has a responsibility to maintain certain standards and in this regard Strong Girl Nam-soon is an alarming failure, although by no means a singular one.

The show engaged in egregious fat shaming and sensationalised drug abuse right from the get-go, and has kept on plucking at this low-hanging fruit throughout its first 10 episodes.

Superpowered Gang Nam-soon (Lee Yoo-mi) and her mother, Hwang Geum-ju (Kim Jung-eun), and to a lesser degree grandmother Gil Joong-gan (Kim Hae-sook), have been on a mission to rid Gangnam in Seoul of the scourge of drugs.

The drugs are being produced by a company headed by the dashing Ryu Si-o (Byeon Woo-seok). The synthetic narcotic it creates in a glass-domed lair worthy of a James Bond film is destructively addictive and gives users superpowers while also making them violent and deranged.

Si-o appears to use the drug himself, but his motivations remain unclear. He’s just a grimacing, sharp-suited villain. He also hires an undercover Nam-soon as his assistant and is trying to make a business deal with Geum-ju, a hugely successful entrepreneur. Why he does any of these things is a mystery.

Also looking to take down Si-o is narcotics detective Kang Hee-sik (Ong Seung-wu), who has steadily been getting closer to Nam-soon during their joint investigation.

One of Hee-sik’s colleagues, Ha Dong-suk (Jung Seung-gil), accidentally ingests an infinitesimally small dose of the drug, some of which they have recovered as evidence.

He turns into a hopeless addict and soon debases himself by sticking his head down a faeces-smeared toilet – the drug is activated by water.

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Meanwhile there is Nam-soon’s brother Nam-in (Han Sang-jo), who is overweight, a fact which is constantly and mercilessly pointed out by his family. He is repeatedly shown binge eating.

Later, a pretty young woman appears before Nam-in, offering him a magic diet pill. Spurred by his low esteem, he starts taking them and quickly becomes a drug addict.

Then there is Nam-soon’s uncle, a weakling who can barely walk by himself.

The show asserts that the women in Nam-soon’s family all possess super strength, while the men born to these women are weak. Strong Girl Nam-soon is meant to be an empowering women’s drama, but it would be nice if it could dig a little deeper than its tediously repetitive joke of women carrying men around.

Moral implications aside, it’s a sad state of affairs when the mere suggestion of drug abuse on Lee’s part has been enough to torpedo the career of his wife, actress Jeon Hye-jin, in addition to his own, as well as the future of several completed films and drama series, each of them costing tens of billions of won and representing the blood, sweat and tears of hundreds of workers.

Strong Girl Nam-soon’s depictions of overweight people and drugs might not be so off-putting if more thought had been put into them. But given the tackiness of the rest of the show, that seems too much to hope for.

Strong Girl Nam-soon is streaming on Netflix.