Pachinko

In its second season, Pachinko masterfully explores the legacy wrought from Hansu’s rigid tenet of survival — not just on Noa and his father, but the many generations to come.

Pachinko Season 2 is a masterpiece of storytelling, performance, production, costume design, cinematography, and direction.

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.

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.

Pachinko continues to be a show that deftly handles its sprawling settings and themes to make for a compelling multi-generational drama.

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.

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.

A stirring small-scale epic of heritage, hate, and hope. In its sophomore go-round, it remains one of television’s finest.

The series is so finely tuned that it proves quietly flooring the more it comes together. Pachinko is an experience that is painful, joyous, melancholy, and moving, a masterful tapestry with the power to endure over lifetimes.

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.

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.

Gorgeous and understated, these discreet yet unmissable connections also accrue between generations, and the show’s overlapping timelines develop their own sense of compelling, unified empathy.

The poetic photography evoking wartime desperation and the brash 80s (when the titular arcade bars were popular) with equal zeal. Pachinko is prestige drama with a big, fat neon “p”.

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.

His [Solomon's] struggle this season is similar enough to season one that his stretches become a bit less interesting—will he learn to prioritize family over business—but they track quite elegantly with Sunja's struggle for a better life in Japan-dominated Korea.

It’s the personal stories that make Pachinko special, not the Oriental spin on Wall Street, and it’s on safer territory when it gets back to those.

We are left wondering how much better Pachinko might be if the 1980s scenes were junked and we stayed with the younger Sunja throughout. .... As it is, though, this is still an excellent drama powered by a rare emotional intelligence.

There may be a bit of gear-grinding in getting fully engaged with “Pachinko,” but the performances are uniformly good.

It is a transitional season, which ends with little resolved and gaps still to fill, and while it offers all the sensual pleasures of the first season’s performances and production, its portion of love and death, it is very much the middle of a book.

If neither side registers as complete on its own, however, in combination they turn into something more complicated, less predictable and altogether richer.