Although this doesn’t hold true for every drama, it certainly does for Strong Girl Nam-soon, a show whose desperate desire to please stands out even in the hyper-commercial realm of Korean dramas.

It’s a K-drama version of a jester abasing themselves in a palace court to curry the favour of the king.

Each element of the show feels like a distraction designed to mask the emptiness of the story and the sloppiness of its storytelling.

Characters don’t behave consistently and, rather than a narrative, what we’re drawn into is more like an endless parade of vignettes.

At least there’s a nugget of a story to get things started. Kang Nam-soon (Lee Yoo-mi) is accidentally separated from her father in Mongolia as a child and for the next decade her pawnbroker mogul mother Hwang Gum-joo (Kim Jung-eun) searches desperately for her.

After first welcoming an impostor into her home, Gum-joo is eventually reunited with Nam-soon, thanks to stalwart narcotics detective Kang Hee-sik (Ong Seong-wu).

Mother and daughter meet in a burning building when Gum-joo catches Nam-soon after a fireball blows her out of the window.

Married with the emotion of the reunion, the show’s silly and surreal action visuals pay off in this one scene. But once the show switches to its narrative about dangerous drugs being smuggled into Gangnam, Seoul, and never looks back, it loses its momentum and we never to get to feel anything like that again.

Nam-soon gets closer with Hee-sik and reconnects with her mother and, to a lesser extent, her grandmother Gil Joong-gan (Kim Hae-sook) during the protracted drug investigation.

Dozens of other characters orbit the leads, some with little to no connection to what’s happening on screen. Most egregious are Nam-soon’s erstwhile homeless buddies Ji Hyun-soo (Joo Woo-jae) and Teacher Noh (Park Gyeong-ree) who keep popping up in head-scratching asides that are utterly divorced from the rest of the show.

Although he is ultimately shown to have a secret criminal role in the proceedings, the unscrupulous financier “Bread” Song (Kim Ki-bum), who keeps butting heads with Gum-joo, isn’t much better.

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The show also boasts one of the weakest screen villains of the year in Ryu Si-o (Byun Woo-seok), a dapper drug lord whose entire personality is built around repetitive scenes of him brooding in a dark gym.

The super drug he creates is rather confusing. It sometimes gives people super powers and makes them a little crazy. Si-o’s motivations for making it are very vague and, worst of all, he stumbles completely as a fearsome villain.

Halfway through the show he hires a blatantly undercover Nam-soon as his assistant and, despite her continually idiotic and suspicious behaviour, he never for one moment suspects anything is awry.

One might argue that this is really a drama about family, but even there it fumbles pretty badly. Nam-soon’s adoptive Mongolian mother drops by to visit when the family take a friendly trip to Busan during all the dangerous-drug chaos.

Rather than have someone escort her to the airport when there are dangerous criminals clearly out to harm them, Nam-soon’s family leave her to find her own way. Naturally she is targeted by Si-o, who has someone slip a bomb into the bags she carries onto her flight. And how exactly did that get through security?

Every K-drama is allowed its slips and occasional indulgences, but the ones that work, the ones that endure, do so because they care about their stories, their characters and their audience. Ultimately we viewers were all just a trophy for Strong Girl Nam-soon to parade around on its ratings victory lap.

Plans are already afoot for a third “Strong Girl” series. Let’s hope we get a real story and some characters worth caring about next time.

Strong Girl Nam-soon is streaming on Netflix.