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Review | Netflix K-drama review: A Model Family – Breaking Bad this isn’t; crime drama starring Jung Woo merely serves up reheated leftovers

  • Don’t expect Breaking Bad levels of thrills in A Model Family – the crime drama mines familiar tropes but is filled with weak characters you’ll fail to care for
  • The show’s slick but unremarkable cinematography cannot save the K-drama, which has a curiously incongruous soundtrack and sloppy editing

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Jung Woo in a still from A Model Family, which mines family drama and gangster tropes but is filled with weak characters you’ll fail to care for. Photo: Narda/Netflix

1.5/5 stars

A Model Family, Netflix’s latest Korean original offering, dovetails two of the country’s most popular genres, the family melodrama and the gangster saga.

The tears of the former meld with the blood of the latter in a story that revolves around a bag of money and the succession of bad decisions it inspires.

The title is, of course, a misnomer; the family in question is about as functional as a car with no wheels – a comparison that, sadly, also fits as a description for the series as a whole, as the wheels come off within a few episodes.

Jung Woo (Mad for Each Other) stars as the hapless Park Dong-ha, an associate professor of literature with a lot of problems.

His wife Kang Eun-joo (Yoon Jin-seo) wants a divorce, his bratty teenage daughter Yeon-woo (Shin Eun-soo) hates his guts and his angelic son Hyun-woo (Seok Min-gi) is in need of a heart transplant.

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