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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Rowoon, Shin Ye-eun, Park Seo-ham, Park Ji-hwan
The iniquities of power and hierarchy are laid bare in the sweeping period drama The Murky Stream, a tale of merchants and bandits eking out meagre lives on the banks of Korea’s Han River during the Joseon era (1392-1897).
Rowoon, Shin Ye-eun and Park Seo-ham lead this Disney+ series as characters from different rungs of society who recognise how broken the system is. At the story’s outset, they look on despondently, but eventually they can no longer sit on the sidelines.
At the small Mapo Naru port, a small group of bandits led by Park Mu-deok (Park Ji-hwan, The Outlaws) forces labourers to pay a tax for the privilege of working on the docks, and then takes another tax out of the “wages” they are paid.


The tiny scoops of rice the labourers receive are barely enough to feed themselves. Take out the tax and eventually a desperate worker summons up the courage to protest, and is beaten to set an example to the others.
“You can delay death, but you can’t avoid taxes.”
This pithy aphorism, voiced by a middle-management enforcer, more or less sums up the focus of the show’s first hour, which provides a bird’s-eye view of sorts of the merchants’ ecosystem and how it feeds into the larger tributaries (and tributes) of power in the land.
The bandits lay down the law, but they are not the lords of the port. Dirty and dishevelled, they are only a rung or two above rock bottom in the pecking order.
They too work for more powerful forces and must pay their own taxes. And if they haven’t squeezed enough out of the labourers to pay those exorbitant taxes, they are also subjected to beatings and humiliation.

The men beating up the bandits also have overlords in an endless hierarchy that goes right up to the higher echelons of governance. Labourers cry foul that they cannot eat, but at the top, government officials insist that the country is struggling, thus the taxes are a civic imperative.
The struggling part is clearly true, but everyone recognises it as empty yet unarguable rhetoric. Everyone knows that as the money goes up the chain, it’s lining fatter and fatter pockets; they just cannot do anything about it.
Bandits are semi-officially employed to carry out the dirty work of collecting these taxes on the ground. Yet as several people lament during the show, there is no use in complaining to the authorities: they’re worse than the bandits.
The Murky Stream is surprisingly clear in how it lays out the various layers of this merchant ecosystem and its little idiosyncrasies: the “rush charge” bribes merchants pay to enforcers to make sure their cargo gets offloaded in a timely manner, or the free labour workers are expected to perform for visiting officials.

What is less clear early on are the main characters and how they all fit into this, beyond their clear distaste for this system and our expectation that they will eventually try to do something about it.
Rowoon, a former member of the boy band SF9, appears as Jang Si-yul, a labourer at Mapo Naru who queues up with everyone else for a chance of some work and a handful of rice day after day.
He looks glum when he sees his fellow workers treated unfairly, but he holds his tongue. His silence does not last forever, and when he finally starts to push back, the bandits quickly realise that the muscular Si-yul is no ordinary labourer.
Rowoon is no stranger to period dramas, having appeared in The King’s Affection and The Matchmakers in recent years.
But after playing genteel scholars and physicians in those series, he gets his hands and face dirty here playing a stoic character who tends to make his point with his fists rather than words once he is finally moved to action.

Shin Ye-eun, currently also on screens opposite Kim Da-mi in A Hundred Memories, is the plucky Choi Eun, the daughter of a nobleman who goes against the customs of the day when she decides to put her business acumen to the test and lead a merchant group.
Formerly part of the K-pop band KNK, Park Seo-ham (Semantic Error) plays Jeong-cheon, a new government official who transfers to the area and immediately rubs up against its rampant bureaucratic corruption.
The Murky Stream features strong production values, which add weight to the hierarchical tableaux formed in these early episodes. But unlike many period dramas that foreground character, this one has been content to meander around a richly drawn backdrop that is aching for a few strong character arcs.
The Murky Stream is streaming on Disney+.


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New Disney+ Korean drama The Murky Stream takes a detailed look at merchants and bandits operating in a corrupt system in the Joseon era


New Disney+ Korean drama The Murky Stream takes a detailed look at merchants and bandits operating in a corrupt system in the Joseon era.


Disney+ K-drama The Murky Stream: Rowoon, Shin Ye-eun lead period merchant tale

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}New Disney+ Korean drama The Murky Stream takes a detailed look at merchants and bandits operating in a corrupt system in the Joseon era

New Disney+ Korean drama The Murky Stream takes a detailed look at merchants and bandits operating in a corrupt system in the Joseon era