I expected “Castaway Diva” to be a light, feel-good comedy about a marooned girl finding her way back to society and chasing her dream as a singer. It was a jolt then that the first episode is the most harrowing piece of TV I’ve seen this year. Park Eun-Bin’s follow-up to her lauded lead performance in “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” does become the bouncy comedy I was looking for, but it’s also so much more than I expected.
CW: child abuse, suicidal ideation
We meet Mok-Ha in 2008, when she’s a young student living on a rural island. She wants to become a singer and enters a video contest judged by her idol, Yoon Ran-Joo. She gets her unfriendly classmate Ki-Ho to film her video because he has a camera. The two are very unlike each other, which leads to assumptions…that give way to their mutual realization that both Mok-Ha and Ki-Ho are physically abused by their fathers. A plan hatches to escape, to chase at least one of their dreams.
That Mok-Ha becomes stranded on an island for 15 years is the very first thing any preview about the show will tell you. Most of the series’ story is about what happens after she’s found and rejoins society.
We also see that idol’s story play out 15 years later. Yoon Ran-Joo is fallen, a has-been celebrity with few fans left. She’s tied to a contract with an enormous goal she’s about to miss when her path intersects Mok-Ha’s. It occurs to me that the only medium I’ve seen love English puns more than social media is Korean television. Mok-Ha is never a diva. Castaway can also mean thrown out. The show’s title refers to Ran-Joo just as much, and she’s brilliantly realized by the show’s second lead, Kim Hyo Jin.
This doesn’t even get to the two brothers who find Mok-Ha, one of whom may (or may not be) Ki-Ho in hiding. How this all ties together can become a little too coincidental if it weren’t the stuff of fairy tales, and while “Castaway Diva” folds in thematic drama and cheesy comedy, it is best viewed as a modern fairy tale.
That first episode has a shot that made my heart sink. It’s edited in so well and so suddenly that it immediately carved itself in my memory. It’s terrifying and shocking, but also so matter-of-fact that without context it would seem ordinary, everyday, unremarkable. The terror plays on what we know, and what goes unseen to the rest of the world. I’ll remember it like a painting. I surprised myself by making a guttural sound when I saw it, as if that single shot had forced the air out of me. It captures what losing hope is like.
When those feel-good comedy elements show up, they feel earned. The series fights hard for its sentimental moments because they carry meaning in contrast to that reminder of what was escaped. Yes, we get a scene of Mok-Ha and Ran-Joo partying in as cheesy a way as possible. It’s right after they share with each other how they’ve both considered suicide. The show’s agility in shifting between these modes is phenomenal.
The ensemble’s rock solid, but this is Park Eun-Bin and Kim Hyo Jin’s show. As we get further in, those performances open up. Mok-Ha is described at one point as a girl who never grew up because – stranded on an island – there was no one to grow up alongside. The adult Mok-Ha can veer between complacent and cringey at points. That makes her hard to identify with…until she starts taking on responsibilities and becomes assertive and fiery.
By contrast, Ran-Joo has given up. She coasts along, drinking the last vestiges of her celebrity away. She seems insubstantial and inconsiderate…until she begins to recognize the ways things are very deliberately stacked against her. Several episodes in, there’s a moment where it dawns on her. The side of her face others can see remains frozen. The side only we can see sneers as she finally understands.
Both of these women are flawed human beings and more than a little scared, waking up to the fact that there are more important things on the line than worrying about imperfection. As the performances become less about each individually and more about what they bring out in each other, they take on sudden dimension and clarity.
In many ways, Mok-Ha’s isolation as a castaway isn’t about her experience on the island. This is touched on, but much less of a focus than you’d expect. It’s really about her as someone who’s social understanding is frozen in 2008, entering a world where everyone has a public and private face, a fantastically presented version of themselves for others and a vulnerable one loaded with baggage that they lock away. Mok-Ha’s a stranger in a strange world, blunt and headstrong. Only one version of herself exists, even as she’s drawn into others’ varied presentations of themselves.
We’ve got the light, feel-good comedy “Castaway Diva” looks like from the previews…and we’ve also got something more thematically deliberate and poignant at play. We’ve got a semi-musical series since the pair need to perform in their careers in the music industry, averaging a song per episode. And finally we’ve got a superb sense of metaphor – realized in framing and perspective, in visual conceits, flashbacks, flash-forwards, and some extremely effective ones in the dialogue.
There are absolutely some tradeoffs. Some of the comedy is nuanced and clever. Some of it can feel overplayed or even forced. Park does her own singing and knocks it out of the park, but early on, her dramatic performance can echo facets of her “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” role a little much. That “Castaway Diva” tells a few stories before getting to its main one is a strength, but can also come off a little frustrating as the series backfills the information that brings them all together. The first episode is needed and it’s remarkable, but there is a severe tonal shift when its lighter episodes start joining in. That drama and heavy undercurrent is still there, but it takes some time to balance the two.
There are also numerous coincidences and cliches at play. Fate is how fairy tales often bring their themes to bear, so be willing to view through that lens. Some viewers won’t want to for something that’s set in modern times and lacks fantasy elements and that’s fair.
What I’ll say is this: I’ve seen plenty of very good dramas that don’t plumb this deep, incorporate metaphor this complexly, or achieve a fraction of the poignant, moving moments “Castaway Diva” does. It can take a bit of time to find the center between its various tones and characters. As it does and those two lead performances open up, it shows rare ability to press a moment home viscerally and emotionally. That’s more than enough to keep me invested in where it goes.
“Castaway Diva” is on Netflix.
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Gabriel Diego Valdez 