Thursday, May 11, 2023

TV You Might Have Missed 4 — Tale of the Nine Tailed


The nine-tailed fox is a magical creature that appears in the folktales of East Asia and legends of Korea. It can transform into a beautiful woman, often to seduce men in order to eat their liver. Korean television plays fast and loose with this idea, as television often does, to create an urban fantasy where the titular nine-tailed fox is an enigmatic man, Lee Yeong. 

He works on earth for the the gods' Department of Immigration of Life After Death — hunting down mythical beings who kill humans. A lovely television producer, Nam Ji-Ah, whose show investigates the supernatural, suspects that he is involved in a murder case. She investigates him and he investigates her. Ji-Ah's looking for her long lost parents and Yeong's on the lookout for the reincarnation of his lost love. Naturally they will work together. Just as naturally, nothing is as it appears on the surface.

The plot just gets deeper, more intertwined, and definitely more fun from there. With 16 episodes of over an hour long, there is plenty of time for the obligatory romance of the K-dramas along with the many adventures into the supernatural. The writers did an extraordinary job of skillfully leading us to expect plot developments and then yanking the rug out from under us with twists and turns for every episode.  We also really enjoyed seeing the supernatural creatures from Korean culture which were often really different from anything American.

Tale of the Nine Tailed is a sixteen episode roller coaster ride of that never fails to leave you wondering how they'll get out of each predicament, while the romance keeps things feeling cozy in the background.

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