When at its best, which is the case through nearly all its eight-episode first season, "Pachinko" is a lesson in how to do melodrama right. 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. That is a sort of trick, of course — this is a TV series, after all, expensively mounted, with good-looking people in Dramatic Situations. Yet it makes the competition look obvious, overwrought, unworthy.
Adapted by Soo Hugh ("The Terror"), with significant additions and rearrangements, from the 2017 novel by Min Jin Lee, and directed variously by Kogonada ("After Yang") and Justin Chon ("Blue Bayou"), it tells the story of four generations in a Korean family, first in Korea under Japanese colonial rule and then in Japan. The series is trilingual, with Korean and Japanese represented in different colored subtitles, English being the third language; who can or cannot understand whom adds a layer to the characters, and to the storytelling.
Set among the population the Japanese call "Zainichi" — Koreans who came to Japan during colonial rule and their descendants, who were subject to legal restrictions and general discrimination — it's a story of racism, sexism, classism, submission, resistance, assimilation and the quest for self-knowledge in a society that tells you who you are, where you belong and what you can do. If you are not prepared to weep copiously, you probably have no business watching it.
