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What a viewBest shows to stream this week: Netflix K-drama Green Mothers’ Club and HBO’s Barry

Jealousy, arrogance and spite are the stars of Netflix’s Green Mothers’ Club, a story about Korea’s education system

Meanwhile, in the bleak HBO series Barry, a lonely assassin ponders his life and tries to get work as an actor

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Netflix show Green Mothers’ Club follows entitled Korean mothers as they try to get their children lined up for the best universities. Photo: Netflix

Published: 5:15am, 15 May 2022Updated: 5:48am, 15 May 2022

Critics, according to the Netflix show Green Mothers’ Club, suffer from (and make careers out of) Salieri syndrome: a raging jealousy directed at those with actual talent.

Whatever the truth of that, it isn’t a simple task to identify who is envious of exactly whom among the club’s five women, who must be the most dour and depressing group of parents obsessed with sending their children to South Korea’s finest universities. That the children aren’t much older than toddlers as the 16-parter tells us, somewhat predictably, to the serial’s theme of scrutiny of the Asian education system – one that’s loaded in favour of the socially elevated.

But as much as they are concerned about their children’s prospects, the infamous five seem consumed by preening overconfidence or an enervating inferiority complex (something else that apparently identifies critics). The former is manifested in prize-winning artist and product of privilege Jin-ha (played by Kim Gyu-ri); the latter in lesser artist (she believes) Eun-pyo (Lee Yo-won), now a professor.

Eun-pyo has inadvertently moved into Jin-ha’s neighbourhood, but this immediately leaves her so downbeat she often seems unable to speak. Fair enough: Jin-ha was her best friend in school, but then stole Eun-pyo’s boyfriend and married him, and now lives in a penthouse flat and has resurrected her sly campaign to undermine her former sidekick (whose main usefulness was only ever to make Jin-ha look good by comparison). Or perhaps it’s because Jin-ha drives a Maserati, and Eun-pyo a Ssangyong.

A still from Netflix show Green Mothers’ Club. Photo: Netflix

Among the five, the tittle-tattle has no bitchiness boundaries, every social interaction has an ulterior motive and the wider neighbourhood, arrogant junior school teachers included, would like to run Eun-pyo and her disruptive son, who can’t concentrate in class, out of town. So much for the joys of childhood.

Is Jin-ha really so sure of herself? Will saintly, silent Eun-pyo slay her tormentor? Is the group’s acidic one-upwomanship sustainable? Four episodes from now, we’ll know. Each of the quintet, even Eun-pyo, is as green-eyed as the other. With friends like these, who needs … friends?