Suits

Overall Rating: B+
Subtitles: I think these were good subs– I don’t remember being bothered by them.
Brief Synopsis: A man with a photographic memory lands a job at a prestigious law firm with a top attorney. Watch it on Netflix here.

**Full show spoilers below the image. If you do not wish to be spoiled, do not proceed**

Ending Type: This one had a happy ending. Our main man got his girl and even if he had to serve jail time for lying about his credentials, his best bud/mentor was there to welcome him back to society when he returned.
Characters:
Go Yeon Woo (Park Hyung Sik)
Choi Kang Seok (Jang Dong Gun)
Kang Ha Yeon (Jin Hee Kyung)
Hong Da Ham (Chae Jung An)
Kim Ji Na (Ko Sung Hee)
Full review:
I have not seen the American version of this show so I won’t and can’t compare the two.
I watched this because I love Hyungsik, and he never disappoints me. He’s just incredibly charming and he brings a great energy to all of his roles.
I was initially super into this as well, and spent a lot of time texting my brother about it because he did watch and LOVED the American version. However it kind of lost me a little halfway through, and while I never disliked it or was bored enough to stop watching it I definitely left with an overall, “Yeah it was OK” kind of feeling.
The strengths in this show were definitely in the relationships– the bromance between Kang Seok and Yeon Woo was paramount and highly adorable and satisfying. The Yeon Woo/ Ji Na romance was wonderfully cute and sweet. Kang Seok and Da Ham and their deep friendship (kind of romance?) was also highly compelling and very moving. I loved the chemistry of the whole group (adding Ha Yeon in there because she also had great chemistry with the group) and was definitely invested in them as characters and their relationships with each other. This show did a great job of writing their emotional rollercoasters both personally and with each other. I was very into all of that.
But it fell short for me in the overall writing and overall story arc. Like yes, I think both Kang Seok and Yeon Woo grew as people and learned a lot and figured out how to take responsibility. That was kind of the overall message of the show. But the individual threads were pretty messy. There were characters that kind of disappeared without ever being mentioned again despite how important they seemed, Yeon Woo’s photographic memory, which was the key focus for the first few eps, fell off entirely as a concept towards the latter half of the show. Focus shifted all over the place in the middle and then the latter half and I think the final arc tried too hard to paint Kang Seok as the good guy despite the beginning of the show establishing that he was the kind of lawyer who would represent anyone (and this didn’t feel like a growth thing, like it wasn’t that he changed his tune it was just that we got a villain so he had to be painted more like a hero).
Not of it was egregious, I still enjoyed the show and think there were lots of great things about it, but there was enough off about it to make me feel like it was overall kind of average as a show.
That said, if you like lawyer stories and are fans of any of these actors, it’s definitely worth having on your list.
High Points: The chemistry between the leads (all five of them) was on point, the story itself was fun, they definitely get you with the emotional investment.
Low Points: Inconsistency in story and pacing– too much crammed into too little space while still somehow having too much filler. Big grievances include: the one friend Yeon Woo had who he was maybe dating until she disappeared randomly from the story and was never mentioned again, the complete absence of reference to Yeon Woo’s photographic memory in the latter half of the show.