I Don’t Watch K-Dramas, But I Had to See Netflix’s Chicken Nugget

K-dramas are not my area of expertise. Of course, I watched Squid Game, like literally everyone in the world, and I’ve seen a bit of Extraordinary Attorney Woo, like seemingly every autistic media critic is required to. Other than that, it’s not a field I know anything about. And yet, when I heard about Chicken Nugget, a K-drama about a girl who gets turned into a chicken nugget, I knew I had to watch this. How do you make a full series about a girl who gets turned into a chicken nugget?

Well, it’s not just about a girl turning into a chicken nugget. That’s the inciting incident and the MacGuffin, but the experience of life as a chicken nugget is not exciting. This isn’t some Sausage Party-style anthropomorphic or animated chicken nugget—not unless you count shaking a millimeter exactly once as “animation”—but just a regular piece of meat that used to be a human being. Choi Min-ah (Kim Yoo-jung) still has some perception of her surroundings in nugget form, but no ability to communicate with the outside world; life inside the nugget is depicted as a direct parody of Matthew McConaughey inside the black hole in Interstellar.

So the main pulse of Chicken Nugget comes from Min-ah’s father Seon-man (Ryu Seung-ryong) and her dorky admirer Go Baek-joong (Ahn Jae-hong) trying to solve the mystery of the machine that caused her transformation, and how to bring her back to her human form. This story is about the power of love, following your dreams in the face of corporate conformity, and reflections on aging and relativity. It’s also about cheesy fight scenes, MacGuyver-ing inventions, breaking the fourth wall, the pineapple on pizza debate, and bad CGI aliens with eating habits way more disgusting than pineapple on pizza. At one point, it even becomes a 19th-century period drama.

If I’m making Chicken Nugget sound like the greatest TV show ever, let me pull back: it’s not. I bet you this would be an absolute banger of a 90-to-120-minute movie (I now want to watch director Lee Byeong-heon’s movie Extreme Job, another fried chicken-centric comedy that became the biggest blockbuster in South Korean history). But with Netflix being Netflix, it’s instead a 10-episode miniseries that starts and ends strong but drags a bit in the middle. Thankfully, the episodes are only about a half-hour long each (part of my apprehension around K-dramas is due to episodes often running well over the hour mark), but five hours of Chicken Nugget is still a bit much. There’s only so long a nonsensical mystery can be dragged out when you know the answer will just be more nonsense.

At its best, Chicken Nugget works by tying its nonsense to complete seriousness. Seon-man is in true pain over his daughter’s predicament throughout the series. The fact it’s possible for the viewer to get caught up in his emotions only makes it funnier. Baek-joong is a more cartoonish character (even wearing the same silly outfit every day just like a cartoon character) and his personal story arc involves a lot of unlikely coincidences; he’s not just entertaining, but someone you’re actively rooting for.

The final episode of Chicken Nugget takes place in the far future, where we see Baek-joong has lived a full life as the rock star “Yellow Pants.” At 78 years old, he’s achieved almost everything he ever wanted—except for saving Min-ah. Would you give up such a full life and all of its memories in the hopes of saving someone else you loved? Baek-joong’s final internal conflict is surprisingly heavy material for the chicken nugget show.

(One strange aside: Chicken Nugget is being review-bombed with 1-star ratings on IMDb—not from people thinking it’s dumb (that would be understandable), but from people angry about a single joke in the final episode about the Saudi royal family. The joke is that the Saudi prince wants tickets to Yellow Pants’ concert, and Baek-joong doesn’t want to pull favors, but ultimately agrees to give them seats in the back of the theater. Somehow, the troll armies have deemed this joke “disrespectful” to the people who assassinated Jamal Khashoggi.)

I have no context as to how Chicken Nugget fits into the contemporary K-drama landscape, except that some characters watch Lee Byeong-heon’s previous series Be Melodramatic and several other Netflix K-dramas get name-dropped in a bit of self-aware product placement. So maybe this show is completely unlike anything else in the genre. However, if there are more K-dramas getting into this A24/Adult Swim-style weirdness, I might have to become a fan.

Reuben Baron is the author of the webcomic Con Job: Revenge of the SamurAlchemist, a member of the neurodiverse theatre troupe EPIC Players, and a contributor to Looper, Wealth of Geeks, and Anime News Network, among other websites. You can follow him on Twitter at @AndalusianDoge and Bluesky at @andalusiandoge.bsky.social.

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