Source:
https://scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/arts-music/article/3174397/best-shows-week-twenty-five-twenty-one-netflix
Post Magazine/ Arts & Music

The best shows this week: Twenty Five Twenty One on Netflix, Earth Day specials on BBC Earth

  • Netflix K-drama Twenty Five Twenty One is an endearing, nostalgic fable about the importance of holding on to one’s dreams
  • BBC Earth celebrates Earth Day with an all-day marathon of landmark series including The Green Planet, as well as The Mating Game: The Making Of
Nam Joo-hyuk and Kim Tae-ri in Twenty Five Twenty One, a romantic comedy-drama on Netflix. Photo: Netflix

When the hero of a romantic comedy-drama rides in on a newspaper delivery boy’s bike instead of a white horse, you know times are hard.

So they prove for Baek Yi-jin (Nam Joo-hyuk), whose father’s companies have fallen victim to the 1997 Asian financial crisis in Twenty Five Twenty One (Netflix; first series now available).

Into his life, and reduced circumstances, comes Kim Tae-ri, looking something like half her age as adolescent schoolgirl and sometime fencing prodigy Na Hee-do.

Her gold-medal dreams have evaporated partly because of her youth, a disapproving mother and a lack of funding for school sport – another casualty of the crisis.

Nam Joo-hyuk and Kim Tae-ri in Twenty Five Twenty One. Photo: Netflix
Nam Joo-hyuk and Kim Tae-ri in Twenty Five Twenty One. Photo: Netflix

Mature, conscientious Yi-jin is desperate for any work – hence, for a 22-year-old, the unlikely paper round – which facilitates his improbable meeting with Hee-do.

This involves his even more improbable dislodging of the appendage of a copy of Belgium’s celebrated Manneken Pis statue, whose inclusion is almost certainly not some form of sexual innuendo, but you never know.

As their friendship blossoms, both must deal with dour, grumpy Ko Yu-rim (Bona), who may be a former girlfriend of Yi-jin. She is a decidedly former idol of Hee-do, who marvelled at her Olympian fencing skills and wanted to be her best friend forever – until she discovered that her heroine was made of arrogant clay.

All of which sets up a surprisingly subtle and endearing, nostalgic fable about the importance of holding on to one’s dreams, especially when you’re at the wrong end of a literal or metaphorical sabre.

A still from The Mating Game. Photo: BBC Studios
A still from The Mating Game. Photo: BBC Studios

Lush looks at our planet

To celebrate Earth Day on April 22, BBC Earth will feature marathon showings of two landmark series: Eden: Untamed Planet and The Green Planet.

Accompanying the latter is the one-off The Green Planet: The Making Of. Paying tribute to the usually unheralded crews who go to inordinate, sometimes dangerous lengths to put together the corporation’s renowned wildlife shows, this short documentary also reveals how unique gadgets must sometimes be invented to show us what’s out there, such are the technological teasers to go with the physical and mental challenges of filming.

It also introduces the man who thinks like a plant and who is called upon to relieve a giant water lily of choking algae. Using a toothbrush. Oh, the glamour of television.

A still from The Mating Game. Photo: BBC Studios
A still from The Mating Game. Photo: BBC Studios

Restoring its sex appeal is The Mating Game: The Making Of, a surprisingly less-than-coy appreciation of how the bedroom secrets of horny beasts the world over were captured on film for a series that could almost be tabloid television for the animal kingdom.

Chameleons, chimpanzees, zebras, humpback whales, spiders, seahorses … they were all at it when their big moment came; and quite right, too. For where would any species be without some rumpy-pumpy?

The Lakes with Simon Reeve. Photo: BBC Studios
The Lakes with Simon Reeve. Photo: BBC Studios

Up hill and down dale, meanwhile, is the ever-affable Simon Reeve, wide-eyed with the “wow” factor that assails visitors to England’s largest national park: the Lake District, timeless inspiration for poets and tea towels.

It’s also an inspiration for troops of tourists and is, like the rest of the world, testing climate-change positive. In The Lakes with Simon Reeve such prickly problems line up alongside fragile ecosystems, fretting farmers on the financial brink and even rewilding schemes that counter-intuitively involve uprooting forests in a land where bison once roamed.

It’s biodiversity, Jim, but not as we know it.