Zombie Detective
7/10
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| Zombie Detective |
Genre: Episodes: 12 Year: 2020
Comedy
Fantasy
Synopsis:
Kim Moo Young is a zombie who has learned to imitate human behaviour. He works as a private detective and has no memory of his life before becoming a zombie. Gong Sun Ji works as a current affairs writer and becomes involved in moo Young’s detective agency while working on a kidnapping case.
Cast:
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| Choi Jin Hyuk (Kim Moo Young) |
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| Park Joo Hyun (Gong Sun Ji) |
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| Tae Hang Ho (Lee Sung Rok) |
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| Lee Joong Ok (Wang Wei) |
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| Ahn Se Ha (Lee Tae Kyun) |
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| Lim Se Joo (Kim Bo Ra) |
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| Kwon Hwa Woon (Cha Do Hyun) |
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| Ha Do Kwon (No Poong Shik) |
General Thoughts:
This drama was so unexpectedly good! When I started the show, I was kinda expecting it to be…well honestly, I thought it would be terrible. I’d watched a lot of good shows in 2020 and was actually trying to balance it out by picking one I thought would be a bit of a dud. Well, that so didn’t happen.
Why does this drama work? This drama totally shouldn't work
‘Zombie Detective’ is obviously not going to be a perfect, visually stunning show free of plot-holes, but it just goes to show that a drama doesn’t need to be those things to be good. ‘Zombie Detective’ branded itself as a comedy, and it did comedy well. Which kind of surprised me. I have not really seen Choi Jin Hyuk do comedy. I saw him in ‘Emergency Couple’ but he played more of a straight-faced character there where comedic things happened around him. In Zombie Detective’ there was nowhere to hide- Choi Jin Hyuk’s comedic timing was front and centre. And it was so unexpectedly brilliant.
While there is a certain level of overacting that has to go into creating a ridiculous situation such as a zombie training to be human and maintaining a human facade, it never felt like Choi Jin Hyuk crossed the boundary into ridiculousness. Sure, he overacted (as was necessary), but he didn’t over-overact. I’ve not seen Park Joo Hyun in anything before, but she did well here as our heroine. She was fun in a non-slapstick way, and had a really sweet chemistry not just with Choi Jin Hyuk, but also with Ahn Se Ha, who played her character’s brother-in-law. The two had a really quirky and endearing relationship, and it was nice to see such a cute, platonic, familial relationship play out on screen. While the characters were fun and interesting, the plot also had to be substantial enough to old these interesting (if slightly ridiculous) characters up, and this plot was just beefy enough to do that. While the show didn’t take itself too seriously it still had some pretty serious plot lines weaving through it. The show also did a really great job at balancing those plot lines so that the sow always had something going on. The plot moved from Moo Young learning to be human and finding his feet as a detective, to finding the culprit behind a kidnapping case that Moo Young was involved in when he was alive, to capturing the corrupt man behind creating the zombie virus that infected Moo Young. 
So silly, so fun 
It was suuuuper satisfying when his zombie traits came in handy
Each big scenario led nicely into the next, and it felt like our characters were stepping forward into the next logical issue, and that their discoveries were shaping the newer conflicts. The drama built its tension really well, and there was always a sense of forward momentum in the story. Which is quite amazing when you think about how much filler this show actually had in it. Moo Young and Sun Ji were often off doing unrelated cases or having personal crises that somehow seemed relevant at the time (in hindsight I do wonder how this show was so cohesive, but hey- it was), and a few random characters got a fair amount of screen time too. But the episodes were always interesting and fun to watch, and there was never a time that I could feel myself getting bored with the show.
Choi Jin Hyuk weirdly rocked the mo makeup
I think a big part o this is that the show didn’t try to push for 16 episodes. There was enough content for 12, and the show didn’t try and draaaaw itself out- it just stuck with what it had, which allowed each episode to carry on with a consistent momentum and avoided making the show feel long and drawn-out. The costuming for Moo Young as a zombie was pretty, uh…silly, so I’m glad the drama went into how he could put on a human disguise, because I’ not sure how seriously I could have taken the show with Choi Jin Hyuk wearing such a ridiculous costume.
I guess they did it to make him appear more funny than scary, but a part of me does still wish that Moo Young’s zombie form was a bit more…zombie-ish. Kinda more like the evil vet’s zombie form. Which was actually reminiscent of a zombie.Speaking of the evil vet, he did potentially feel a bit out of place in this show. It’s strange, because the rest of the bad guys in this drama fit into the show well, despite being more serious than the heroes. However, Poong Shik did feel just a touch too dramatic for this particular comedy. Because his character was introduced late in the show, there wasn’t a whole lot of time for him to get any sort of character development. He was pretty vanilla compared to the other bad guys Moo Young had to face, which was a bit of a bummer for the finale. I quite enjoyed the santa case and how that all played out, and while I wouldn’t change how the show did anything, it is a bit of a shame that the final case wasn’t as strong and impactful as the first. I must also say that I didn’t super love how the show finished up. Moo Young wasn’t cured of his zombie-ness, but he also didn’t stick around to continue running the detective agency with Sun Ji. Then he just appears again in the last episode (presumably for good), and he’s still a zombie and nothing has changed? It was just a bit weird.
Santa story was really intriguing
What Was Great:
Choi Jin Hyuk-larious:
So Choi Jin Hyuk is great at action. He is also great at drama. No I can officially say with confidence that he is also great at comedy. It was an unexpected surprise, but not an unpleasant one. There were a few slapstick moments early on, and Choi Jin Hyuk handled them with complete confidence, and completely owned the role of Zombie Kim Moo Young. 
10/10- would watch in a comedy again
While Park Joo Hyun did a brilliant job as our heroine, it never quite got to the point that it felt like no other actress could have done the role as well. However I 100% feel like no other actor could have delivered the same deadpan humour in such a wonderful way as Choi Jin Hyuk did. He completely embodied the zombie detective and I’m not sure the show would have been as entertaining had the male lead gone to someone else. Choi Jin Hyuk kept me engaged and invested in both his character and the show as a whole from the first episode until the last.
What Wasn’t:
Too Much World King:
Perhaps one of the show’s biggest weaknesses was that there were not very many characters. Our titular zombie and his helper, Sun Ji, were the only main recurring characters, and then we had the two recurring support characters in the detectives at World King Agency. Sure, we had a lot of good characters in Sun Ji’s family and I definitely enjoyed the scenes they were in and what those characters and actors brought to the table,
but they were certainly playing support to the support characters. That is to say, they weren’t in the drama very much. Really any time the show wasn’t focusing directly on Moo Young and Sun Ji, it was focusing on Sung Rok and Wang Wei at World King. And while I enjoyed these two bumbling slapstick characters for a time, it did start to feel like a bit of overkill that we had to see so much of them. While I liked a lot of the humour that was going on in ‘Zombie Detective’, the humour that was involved in World King Agency felt like the type of humour that is used for cheap laughs. You know, kinda like fart jokes. A little is okay, but if you use it too much it can become a bit of a turn off. This hit especially hard as I really like the time we spent with Moo Young and Sun Ji, so any time away from those two was already not as fun, but having World King take up so much of the leftover time wasn’t great. I think the way the writer injected their two characters into the show was done really well- it’s not like Sung Rok and Wang Wei were popping up at places with no reason for being there. I just kinda wish they hadn’t been there. At least so much. Their type of humour just wasn’t my style.
Just...not my style
Recommend?
If you’re looking for a lighthearted laugh then yes, if you’re after a more serious show then this will not be the one for you.
This show was a good laugh right when I needed one
