What a viewThe best shows to watch this week: Netflix K-drama My Liberation Notes, and Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough on BBC Earth
- Time is of the essence in this week’s television highlights, including what is lost (mainly love) to the daily commute in Netflix satire My Liberation Notes
- Meanwhile, the dramatic last 90 minutes of the Cretaceous period are examined in Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough on BBC Earth
If there’s an agrarian revolution in the wind, it may begin with satire My Liberation Notes (Netflix).
Seldom can white-collar workers, holding down steady (if unspectacular) jobs in a shimmering city such as Seoul, have led such miserable lives – and all because of their daily commute from the distant, semirural suburbs, and their shared failure to find marriageable partners. Really? That’s life, is it? A long journey into a love desert?
Siblings Mi-jung (played by Kim Ji-won), sister Ki-jung (Lee El) and brother Chang-hee (Lee Min-ki) gripe about wasting hours every day travelling from the family smallholding to Seoul and back. Without partners and overpriced urban flats, they are worthless.
Marriage, city living and consumerism dominate. “All of the magic happens inside a car,” complains Chang-hee, who doesn’t have one, but believes that that’s the only place in which he’ll be able to kiss a girl. Naturally, he wants one, but his father disapproves, despite Chang-hee’s being of consensual car-buying age.
Mi-jung is secretly ashamed of her debts – which aren’t entirely her fault – and Ki-jung is publicly ashamed of her overly frizzy new hairdo. The most intriguing character, meanwhile, is lonely, often non-verbal alcoholic handyman Mr Gu (Son Suk-ku), a dodgy type who has a power over Mi-jung he can exercise if so inclined.