The Devil Judge 악마판사 [tvN]

The Devil Judge was written by a former judge and adapted into a 16-episode drama with Ji Sung and Kim Min-jung in the lead roles in 2021. 

Set in a South Korea ravaged by a viral pandemic (familiar huh) with an anti-foreigner president raving about a nation with pure-bloods (again familiar huh) and the country essentially ran by a tight group for their own greed disguised as altruism, The Devil Judge was provocative with the idea of having the populace vote if criminals were guilty and on the punishment to be meted to the criminals via televised court proceedings.

How would people behave if they had the power in the hands (or DIKE app in the drama) to decide if a criminal was guilty?  The Devil Judge provided a glimpse of this, as well as the unconventional idea that the jury (in this case the populace) could be manipulated by judges (instead of conventionally, defense attorneys).

In The Devil Judge, there was no virus but a rumor created by the powers-that-be to drive people out of slums in the guise of quarantining the infected and acquire the land with low prices.  Again the scare of a virus was used to keep people out of certain areas of interest with curfews and lock-downs.  Watching this play out in the midst of an on-going pandemic certainly felt surreal, what with some people firmly believing that the virus is a hoax and vaccination a conspiracy.

Ji Sung gave a pretty convincing performance here, and so did Kim Min-jung as an over-the-top villainess trapped by her own desire to escape the trauma of a childhood in poverty.  Ji Sung's character told Kim Min-jung's character more than once to remember her place - that I didn't quite get, yet this theme of constantly being reminded to remember one's "place" is a recurring bit in k-dramas I watched.  I wonder if this is a legacy of being so steeped in Confucianism?    

I was quite tickled to see Kim Jae-kyung's turn here as the initially naive-then ambitious-and eventually with her head and heart in the right places Judge Oh, as she also appears in the 2018 OCN Life on Mars that I was concurrently watching, as a slightly ditzy aunt of Jung Kyung-ho's character.

Ahn Nae-sang's performance here was slightly disappointing, it could be due to the limitation of how his character was scripted.  Park Gyu-young's character was baffling for me, and I thought it won't have made any impact even if her character was totally written out of the script.