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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
46
Mixed:
5
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
iMar 25, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Watching a series with such wide scope can be intimidating, but Pachinko never overwhelms – every scene is so absorbing that you can’t help but be swept along with the saga. ... Perhaps it is premature to declare Pachinko the best TV show of 2022 just three months in. But it is going to take something spectacular to knock it off that top spot.
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Mar 23, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Where streaming shows often just pad and repeat, this one takes every opportunity to dig deeper into the human condition. And season one doesn’t even get to World War II! “Pachinko” leaves us with many dangling threads, yet still richly satisfies with testimony to history’s impact on people — and people’s determination to be themselves.
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Mar 22, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Its pace is urgent but measured. Gaps in Sunja’s life allow Pachinko to leave room for surprise and discovery, but the series avoids the clean, overly ordered logic of a jigsaw puzzle. ... Throughout, the series is transformed by the performances of each Sunja. Youn is excellent as the elder iteration, and Kim is absolutely astounding as Sunja in her youth. ... I do wish watching Pachinko could last forever.
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Mar 11, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Kogonada and Justin Chon’s direction, Soo Hugh’s writing, and the work of Pachinko’s outstanding ensemble cast weave together a story that is both huge in scope and humble in its beauty. Pachinko is perfectly exquisite (though not quite perfect) and will stick with you long after the credits roll.
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Aug 15, 2024
Season 2 Review:
If there are a few small problems with this latest run, it’s that Solomon’s story doesn’t quite receive enough screen time to let these plot points breathe and that some episodes end a little too abruptly, feeling more like a sliced-up film than a show with a weekly release schedule. But overall, in its second season, Pachinko has further asserted itself as one of the best TV shows in recent memory.
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Mar 25, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The show is well intentioned and well made, and many scenes stirred my own memories of conversations with my grandparents about their experiences living through conflicts I’ve only read about. But if Pachinko returns for a second season . . . it would do well to be bold in its telling of Sunja’s story, to spotlight history through her eyes rather than in retrospect.
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Mar 24, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Despite being a riveting adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s novel, there are few things that hold Pachinko back from being a perfect adaptation. The most glaring issue tends to be Solomon’s storyline and how it fits into the main narrative. ... Another issue is how the pacing seems in conflict with the story that’s being told. ... Still, Pachinko is a sweeping epic filled with fantastic performances and a captivating story of survival.
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Aug 23, 2024
Season 2 Review:
Pachinko’s expansive saga feels intimate because it distills historic events through the lens of one woman and her loved ones. What is the impact of a global catastrophe on the day-to-day lives of the people who live through it? It’s a big question that Pachinko masterfully tries to answer.
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Mar 23, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The show is at once an educational, sweeping saga (about culture, history, politics, romance, and lineage), and a pointed story about its protagonist, Sunja, and her loved ones at various times in their lives. As such, it’s brimming with ideas, and conveys them really well.
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IndieWireMar 11, 2022
Aug 23, 2024
Season 2 Review:
Hugh and her team, who continue to do justice to Lee’s finely wrought characters and epic historical scope while making ever more of their own mark on the Baek family saga. .... Season 2 honors what came before it while striking out on its own, just as Sunja would want for her own successors.
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Aug 22, 2024
Season 2 Review:
Even as the two story threads feel mismatched — a lot more happens in the World War II plot than in 1989 — the writers always find savvy links between them. They are helped by the remarkable work of Kim and Youn, each elevating the other as we come to understand the root of Sunja’s resoluteness and how she relates to her grandson’s ambition. Paired with Nico Muhly’s stunning and plaintive score, the performances make it easy to become enraptured by Sunja’s story.
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TV Guide MagazineMar 28, 2022
Mar 24, 2022
Season 1 Review:
In its acting, production, respect for character over machination (though there is plenty of machination) and for stillness over action (there is some action), in its interest in domestic details and the limitless depths of the human face, it transforms the most well-worn narrative gambits into something that feels real and alive and lived.
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Mar 11, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The performances are beautiful as well. Youn benefits from a liberal expansion of Sunja’s story from the last third of the book, and no actor so conveys the polar extremes of the material’s sadness and ebullience, sometimes with precious little dialogue. ... This is a strong, stirring, timeless start.
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Mar 11, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Pachinko is technically impressive on all levels — it’s visually stunning, with a knockout score by Nico Muhl. The show is also gorgeous to look at in in each era it covers. ... But early and often, Pachinko makes clear that where our people come from, and what they’ve been through, is always a part of who we are in the present. And it delivers that message with precision force throughout. Don’t miss it.
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The Mercury NewsAug 22, 2024
Season 2 Review:
There are many other developments in the lives of secondary characters’ in a transcendent series that so precisely evokes two different eras and illustrates the painful decisions and sacrifices that loved ones make that can haunt them through life. It remains one of the most meticulously crafted series running.
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Aug 16, 2024
Season 2 Review:
Hugh has successfully translated a complex novel to television without losing its depth, while giving Lee's story a TV-friendly shape, complete with episode-ending moments of high drama. And, if this season is any indication, it's the sort of show that will only grow richer with each new season.
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Mar 16, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The limited series is an artfully staged and detailed historical epic that alternates between three time periods, juxtaposing the present with poignant memories of one family’s experiences across generations. ... For all of Pachinko’s rich multi-generational plotlines and compelling secondary characters, it’s Sunja who remains the story’s heart. ... [Lending] Pachinko its dramatic heft and most heart-wrenching moments.
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Aug 23, 2024
Season 2 Review:
Less successful is how this season tiptoes into manipulation, over-relying a bit on montage sequences and musical cues to ensure our emotions follow the creators’ intent. It’s an unnecessary flourish for a show that through its writing, acting, and framing gets us there anyway.
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RogerEbert.comAug 23, 2024
The Daily BeastMar 21, 2022
Season 1 Review:
While Pachinko isn’t as idiosyncratically lyrical as his recent film After Yang—thanks to its more conventional episodic TV format—Kogonada’s stewardship remains light, graceful and empathetic, and fellow director Chon likewise imbues the action with a deep reverence for the hardships braved by these protagonists.
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Mar 25, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Yes, this adaptation is less than perfect; the disservice it does to the structural integrity of a novel that gains momentum and poignancy as the decades progress shouldn’t be understated. The overall impression is of an epochal masterpiece cut into snippets and reassembled out of order. That’s frustrating. Even when you account for its shortcomings, though, TV’s Pachinko remains the rare show of both artistic and historic import.
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Mar 25, 2022
Season 1 Review:
"Pachinko" takes an often beautiful, artfully cinematic and languorous journey through the history of 20th-century Korea, and Koreans. ... But considering the catalog of characters and multiple languages—helpfully, the Japanese subtitles are in blue and the Korean in yellow, linguistic orthodoxy being a critical aspect of the story—it might be tough for some of us English-speakers to engage, especially given all the flashing back and forth. In this case, an ever-shifting storyline is a deterrent to traction.
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Mar 25, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The TV series compellingly channels this unknowability of Sunja to her grandson, too. But after Solomon washes his hands of the deal he came to Japan to finesse, the show gives him an overly familiar and rather soapy storyline that, no matter how skillful the tugs at the heartstrings, deflates the season’s back half.
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Mar 24, 2022
Season 1 Review:
As visually satisfying costume drama, the period sections of “Pachinko” are unimpeachable. Also impossible to argue with is the excellence of the show’s large, mostly South Korean and Japanese cast. ... Too often, though, their work is wrapped in several layers of Hollywood gauze; the subtlety of their performances gets obscured by the general tendency of the production toward tasteful schmaltz. ... The TV “Pachinko” melted away while I watched it.
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Mar 24, 2022
Season 1 Review:
While she [showrunner Soo Hugh] conjures moments of immense power, and of connection, throughout, “Pachinko” does not, finally, cohere. One yearns for the show that let its key moments sing without the at-times forced collisions between eras, ones that can keep viewers feeling both on the hook and in the dark.
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