Mysteries Ahoy!

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My Fellow Citizens! (국민 여러분!) is a comedic drama about a con man who discovers on the day of his marriage that his wife is a police officer. If this wasn’t problem enough, a loan shark he scammed catches up with him in search of their money.

Presented as short half hour episodes, this series is at its most successful when Yang Jung-kook (played by the incredibly charming Choi Siwon) is running a con or working to out-maneuver someone. There are several excellent set pieces and a few of the twists in the story are genuinely surprising and quite cleverly constructed.

Siwon’s performance as Jung-kook is very good as he manages to create a character who is simultaneously very charming and yet also often quite frustrating. We know how this character feels about his wife and yet we see that he is unable to find a better path for himself that will remove the barriers to trust in that relationship. We also get a sense of the harm some of his cons can cause which is a bit of a rarity in the con genre which tends to emphasize the style and trickery over its consequences. Still, we also get to see him evolve over the course of the series and while he may not be a good man (at least at the start), we quickly see there are far worse people out there.

Lee Yoo-young is strong and sympathetic as his wife, Kim Mi-young, and she gets to make a truly memorable entrance. I appreciated that she is shown to be passionate and skilled at her work and I particularly enjoyed the way the early episodes play with the idea that she is unwittingly trying to hunt down her own husband. This leads to some brilliant comedic scenes and I was surprised at how well the series sustains this tension.

The show also includes a heavy dose of social commentary, both about the resurgence of populist politics worldwide and about corruption, the influence of money in politics and the decline of civic values. While some of these themes are presented in ways that are quite specific to South Korea and its National Assembly, many are universal and for most of its run the show balances these serious elements well with more lighthearted, comedic moments.

One of the ways it does this is through the character of Kim Joo-Myung, a Member of the National Assembly who has been forced out on corruption charges and who is being blackmailed into helping Yang Jung-kook. This part is played perfectly by Kim Eui-sung who injects a wonderful cynicism and weariness into the character and gets many of the biggest laughs as he tries to keep an unruly political campaign on track only to be frustrated by his independent-minded candidate.

The only disappointment for me was in its ending which shifts the emphasis away from the characters’ relationship problem onto its social and political themes. As a result I felt that some parts of the story were not given quite the degree of attention and resolution that I was looking for. Specifically the resolution of the conflict between Jung-kook and Mi-young feels a little too rushed, which is a shame given the strong build up. Still, overall I found the depiction of their relationship to be enjoyable and really appreciated the way the two actors played off each other.

Finally I have to mention the show’s fantastic musical score. For those unfamiliar with k-dramas, there are typically recurring musical themes and stings that are used pretty frequently at key points in each episode and that is not any different here. This show’s score, which ranges from rap to pop, is brash, lively and often deployed to heighten the humor in the show’s most comedic scenes. In particular, I loved this song which is STILL stuck in my head months after first watching it.

Overall, I enjoyed this series to be consistently entertaining and amusing. If its final few episodes fall a little short of the comedic heights reached in it earliest episodes, the show is still amusing and hits some strong dramatic moments. Fans of heist stories should find enough to enjoy here, particularly if they are open to the series’ romance themes and elements.