La-i-peu on Ma-seu

I'm not a fan of the writing style that pushes the viewers too hard to interpret and speculate. You're expected to accept whatever is presented to you. If writers were to do so, they need a better structure and understanding of world building. Take for example the British series Utopia, it does it brilliantly.

The director must really love the Dolly zoom, although it looked good but I wish there was more visual variations even at the cost of it being experimental. You are already pushing your skill ceiling in all departments so why not shoot for the moon?

Anyway, it's a solid watch and will probably appeal to everyone.

Overall it's a good series and I really hope it end well but its quite disappointing. The acting for the main character was amazingly done. And I really hope that season 2 will come but maybe it will not happen.

Big fan of the original Life on Mars(LOM) and Ashes to Ashes (ATA), not so keen on the American attempt to replicate LOM.

This however was a refreshing, unique and exciting take on both BBC productions. It was a lot of fun, extremely engaging and a just a little bit creepy at times which is great for a crime drama.

The writers managed to take the skeleton characters and stories of LOM and ATA and totally make it their own.

I would have loved a second season but sometimes when writers try to write from scratch it doesn't work out (re: Game of Thrones final season -.-)

I've not watched a lot of foreign language shows but this made me very keen to watch more and broaden my horizons.

I watched the original BBC show, which is great. But this one has more stories and I think depth. The actors are great, the South Korean 80s fantastically recreated, music, direction... I could say that I like more this one than the original and the original is very good! (even though I gave to both 9 stars).

I thought it was good that the show brought up the difference in how women were treated in Korea 30 years ago. I know that Korea is still a very patriarchal society, and so much so that it drives a lot of Korean women to leave the country, and seems to be very big part of the reason for the abysmal birth rate of Korea (2nd lowest in the world). It also seems like a lot of effort was spent on recreating the Korea of 30 years ago. A big part of the charm of such a show is seeing how things have changed. It seems that from similar shows that take place in the current ear, things have changed a lot.

But not sure it this is so representative since 1988 is right after the constitution reform which followed decades of being under a fairly repressive dictatorship, and I would sort of expect a lot of repercussions from the change, and it does not seem like this is so evident in this series.

I am American, so not familiar with what Korea was 30 years ago. However, there is one fact I was able to check up on, and that was smoking. In 2000 it was about 35%, vs about 20% today, and at that point it was already in a steep decline. That would indicate that it had to be somewhere in the 50% range in 1988, and so few men probably did not smoke--And we see no smoking. See modern Korean series with lots of smoking, which I think it probably excessive, and none in this series. Too bad they did not try to do more to make it truly.