The Last Empress

 So both my daughter and I like Korean dramas, but our tastes are quite different, and she prefers to watch shorter series than this, so I was describing some of the events of this series to her and I said it's like a soap opera. And she says to me, "What's a soap opera?" so a soap opera for those of you who don't know, like my daughter, was a television show that aired every day usually sometime in the afternoon before kids would come back from school, and after they had been taken to school. The audience mostly was housewives and retired people. And because they had something like 300 episodes every year, some of the plot lines were crazy to keep the attention of Their audience. And this k-drama exactly like that. Some of the things that happened in the plot are ridiculous but in a great way. You kind of get the general idea of what's going to happen, but there are a few really great surprises. It starts out with the audience thinking that there are two clear villains in this piece but by the end of it both of them are somewhat redeemed and the real villains of this piece a power mad mom and a daughter-in-law with a giant chip on her shoulder. She's completely justified in having a chip on her shoulder, but nevertheless, some of the things she does in this series are only excusable because she was treated badly in the beginning of this series. The acting is over the top, writing is over the top, but it somehow manages to be very entertaining and have really powerful moving emotional scenes. Not every scene mind you, but enough where you think wow this is really worth my time. Also, I love how much fun the actors seem to be having by throwing things and breaking them. The plot is too convoluted to go into here, but it involves a timeline where the Korean Empire was never existed and so it just keeps on existing into the modern world. And the crazy thing is that the show doesn't really explore how Korea would be different in any sort of way. The royal family acts as if they are the family of a powerful industrial group in South Korea. The title says that it's a constitutional monarchy, but they don't do many things that would be constitutional. And in the end the heroine actually dissolves the monarchy, which if you think about it doesn't make any sense because if it's a democracy you should have some kind of referendum whether to keep the monarchy or not and just not decide all by yourself that it's over, especially when there were at least two other people who would have inherited the throne. This is a great example of the craziness that k-drama and if you like k-drama don't be discouraged by how long it is you'll enjoy every second of it.