Is This the Best Korean Show on TV Right Now?

Imagine a show with the plot of The Incredibles, the melodrama and slice-of-life scenes of the best K-drama romances you’ve ever watched, and the grittiness of a Park Chan-Wook action thriller, packaged as a Disney+ and Hulu show. That’s Moving for you. Based on the 2015 eponymous webtoon by South Korean writer Kang Full, the show is an epic, action-packed, deeply emotional, and surprisingly romantic 20-episode-long drama spanning three decades, about three high school students and their parents navigating the kids’ last semester of senior year. The twist? The teenagers have powers or “gifts” they inherited from their parents, who all have a complicated past with a South Korean national secret agency and are now in hiding. At the same time, a hitman sent by the U.S. government tracks down the older generation of parents and starts killing them off one by one. Billed as the most expensive K-drama production ever made (a budget of 50-65 billion won or about $45 million), Moving could’ve easily kept expanding the scope of its vastly interesting world of superhumans and substituted CGI battles in lieu of actual storytelling. Instead, it consistently stuck to its emotional heart: its core cast of characters navigating life and their everyday problems in spite of their superpowers and the institutions that want to take advantage of them.

Disney+ and Hulu released the first seven episodes to viewers and critics as part of its early August premiere. The show is one of the first of its kind for the K-drama industry, depicting nearly every sub-genre possible. It’s simultaneously a superhero epic, a spy thriller, a rom-com, a melodrama, and a gorey action adventure. With so many elements, it shouldn’t work as well as it does. But the show is remarkably well-paced, balancing scenes of familial and romantic levity, and propulsive, tense fight scenes between our heroes and their assailants with ease and in ways that could’ve gone badly in the hands of a less skilled cast and crew.

Speaking of the cast, part of what makes the show incredibly excellent is the actors. The first seven episodes are anchored by the young actors who play out an honestly adorable high school youth drama. Our main teenage protagonist Kim Bong-seok, whose lack of control over his emotionally triggered flying abilities and enhanced other senses, is played by rookie actor and sunshine incarnate Lee Jung-ha. He delivers a (very cute) well-balanced performance that makes you root for him and also want to protect him at the same time. It was refreshing to watch a K-drama where the bumbling, awkward male character usually suffering from second-lead syndrome is the male lead for a change. Go Yoon-jung, of K-drama Alchemy of Souls fame, shines as Jang Hui-soo, whose portrayal of inner strength and fortitude takes center stage over her regenerative healing abilities. Her acting here is probably the best performance she’s delivered in all her dramas so far and promises an exciting career ahead. Kim Do-hoon turns in an intense, slightly brooding performance as superstrong and superfast class president Lee Gang-hoon. He does what he can with his minimal dialogue by taking advantage of his soulful eyes and injecting scenes with meaningful pauses, lending complexity to his character with few scenes. These three navigate their growing powers and get the viewer initially invested, tricking the viewer into thinking that the show is just a high school youth drama when in reality it’s so much more.

The show truly hits its stride in the middle arc, where episodes 8-14 pull us back to the past and we get to witness how the older generation of parents met, fell in love, and started their families, all while working for the national secret agency back in its heyday. Here the show flexes its chops as the actors playing the adults and parents are true South Korean acting heavyweights. Led by 36-year-old Han Hyo-Joo, most known for her roles playing young upstarts, delivers a surprisingly convincing turn as Lee Mi-Hyun, the mom to Lee Jungha’s character Kim Bongseok in the first part of the show. She later switches it up when the story takes us nearly three decades back and shows us her character working as a former top agent, whose steady and calm presence grounds the story. Acting opposite her is 42-year-old actor Zo In-sung who finally returns to K-drama land after nearly a decade away from it. Throughout the first seven episodes, you’re wondering where Bongseok’s father is, and there’s this building anticipation to finally meet him. In the second arc of the show, you finally do, and does Zo deliver! Despite being the parent with some of the least amount of screen time, he steals the spotlight in every scene, bringing to life the flying character of Kim Doosik with charisma and the kind of on-screen gravitas many actors could only dream of. Han and Zo give us the dreamiest spies in an office romance arc that is so juicy and captivates us with their chemistry, yet is still rooted in its realism and slow-burn development. Their story made the show for me, and I honestly wished we’d gotten a whole drama of just these two together.

Ryu Seung-ryong plays Jang Hui-soo’s father, Jang Ju-won, who probably has the most amount of screen time out of all the parent actors. While the show heavily portrays the extent of his regenerative healing abilities through gorey action fight scenes, where the show truly stands out is when Ryu balances out his character’s hard exterior powers with his inner sensitive soul. When the show could’ve only shown his badassery (which we got plenty of), it also took the time to show him crying in multiple scenes and worrying about being a good father to his daughter. What’s stunning about his character is he’s practically invincible and is often forced to fight, but Ryu injects the character with so much humanity, gentleness, and soul that Jang Ju-won truly feels like a lived-in character worth rooting for. He also got a love story of his own and it snuck up on me by how equally emotionally stricken I was by it as I was swooning over Kim Bongseok’s parents’ love story.

There are other adult characters too, like a bus driver played by renowned actor Cha Tae-hyun, and Lee Gang-hoon’s autistic father played by Kim Sung-kyun of Reply 1988, both of whom also harbor superpowers. What’s impressive is how the show doesn’t waste a single character. Everyone has a backstory. Every character gets their moment. It’s really a testament to author Kang (who also wrote the show’s script), and the way he effectively first set up the high school characters and then their parents’ stories, despite the parents’ stories arguably being more interesting. And because the show spent 14 episodes getting you invested in these characters’ lives and showing you the history of their relationships, when we get to the third and last arc of the show, we’re truly and irreversibly invested in these characters’ happy endings. We see the callbacks to previous scenes, the clever acting injection of similar character quirks appearing in both the parents and kids, and the effects of the dramatic irony paying off of knowing where the parents end up from seeing them in the first part of the show. The show further digs deep into the theme of family and the sacrifices parents are willing to make for their kids. Even though the show is rooted in Korean storylines, seeing the parents' arc reminded me a lot of learning about my own parents’ Vietnamese American immigrant stories and how they had whole lives before having me.

Because the show spent 14 episodes getting you invested in these characters’ lives and showing you the history of their relationships, when we get to the third and last arc of the show, we’re truly and irreversibly invested in these characters’ happy endings.

What ultimately makes the show stand out is the story’s take on the idea of the hero and what makes superheroes similar to us regular people. Kang revealed in an interview that to him the hero of his story is the Korean family. By forgoing the plot of superheroes having to save the world and instead centering on superheroes trying to save their loved ones, we get a masterclass and an effective persuasive argument for character-motivated storytelling. The strength of these super characters and their appeal are not their powers, but their sense of humanity and their capacity to feel. The show is the emotional equivalent of giving a superhero a dog and seeing what happens.

Moving intimately understands what the superhero genre storytelling is best at: less about what superheroes’ powers are, and instead how the powers affect their lives and the people they care about. Moving elevates the superhero TV genre to heights both U.S. and Korean storytelling haven't seen before—and it frankly blows Marvel and DC out of the water. It’s ironic that this show is produced by the same studio that makes Marvel, because frankly, Marvel has never depicted this depth of humanity in its stories. Instead, it’s always trying to go bigger with spectacle and cameos. Moving is what happens when you take the original source material, which is already good, and bring it to life with faithfulness and a focus on its most human elements. This K-drama has changed the game and entered my all-time favorites. Together, Moving is really a family drama masquerading as a spy thriller and superhero coming-of-age story, with its central ethos being that at the end of the day, we are all human trying to survive and protect each other as best as we can.