Pachinko

Eight episodes is not enough. Every rich moment satisfies, and each will make you ache for more. ... "Pachinko" is a pure and flawless beauty.

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.

Language is no barrier when the drama is such a thing of beauty.

Written and produced by Soo Hugh ("The Terror"), with Kogonada and Justin Chon splitting directorial duties, Pachinko is peppered with heartbreaking situations and brilliant dialogue.

A a masterfully crafted, beautifully photographed, magnificently acted and profoundly resonant piece of work you’ll never forget.

A sprawling, stunning drama chronicling four generations of an immigrant Korean family — is truly "it's time to start tossing around words like 'masterpiece'" TV.

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.

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.

“Pachinko” is a groundbreaking, stunning, Asian-led production. Easily one of the best-looking narratives on Apple TV, the series weaves a meticulously wrought tapestry woven from the fabric of a scattered history.

Pachinko is a triumph of visual storytelling that goes in its own direction and finds a destination that leaves you absolutely floored in how masterfully it executes its vision.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That idea of having a clear glimpse at some portions of the past and only being able to grasp at others seems fundamental to the idea of a shared family history. It makes “Pachinko” a lovingly crafted paradox, one worth giving yourself over to.

Pachinko is a sprawling, moving saga of parental sacrifice, feminine resilience and cultural identity threatened by an oppressive regime. It's also one of the few streaming series I wished was longer than eight episodes. [28 Mar - 10 Apr 2022, p.6]

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s a vast, sumptuous, dynastic political TV series of the kind scarcely made any more, complete with swooning strings from Nico Muhly’s score.

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.

“Pachinko” may not have the grandiose, accumulative power it seeks, but it does have many facets to recommend it, including the power of its storytellers, in front of and behind the camera.

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.

"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.

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.

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.