[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Cheo Yong: The Paranormal Detective" Episode 7

I'm a bit puzzled how a drama can be so generic with a title like "Cheo Yong: The Paranormal Detective". There's really not any other word for it. This drama is just a basic police procedural with supernatural elements kind of arbitrarily tossed in. I don't mean that in an affecting way. If this drama was striving to be normal, to be a mundane look at what the life of a paranormal detective is like, that's not being accomplished.

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This is probably attibutable mainly to director Lim Chan-ik. He is very much directing a cable drama here, with a clear focus to high concept detective action, with emphasis clearly being directed toward production values and focused on storyline movements that sound really cool when discussed abstractly with friends. A person dies. But the circumstances are weird. Also there is a ghost.

Yes that's a bit flippant but stripped to the barest of elements that's all we really have in the mystery this time around. Just more vaguely defined malicious presences that Cheo Yong has to deal with. The overall delivery of the product just ends up feeling terribly empty. "Cheo Yong: The Paranormal Detective" feels like a product created by committee. It has just the minimum amount of hooks necessary to be somewhat passable entertainment for someone who likes mysteries, ghosts, and stuff that's generically cool.

Compared to most episodes, this one actually does pretty decently well on this count. The mystery is fairly clearly defined and the clues are easy enough to follow to the climax. There's just nothing particularly interesting or exciting about any of this. Dramatic tension is almost non-existent. At least part of this is just the problem of having a weekly detective show in the first place, but even so. I can describe the ongoing plot twists as almost interesting, at best.

This isn't a terrible episode, but I can only bring myself to care about it at all because most of the time "Cheo Yong: The Paranormal Detective" is a lot worse. Frustratingly, there's also episodes that indicate the drama is capable of being, if nothing else, genuinely fun. Whether an episode like that is ever going to come up any time soon, though? I have absolutely no idea. The best complement I can give to the drama as a whole right now is that the bad episodes tend to be fairly easy to forget. That's really not much of an endorsement for watching, though. This drama lacks coherency as a full product, and I don't know when or if that will change.

Review by William Schwartz

"Cheo Yong: The Paranormal Detective" is directed by Lim Chan-ik, written by Hong Seung-hyeon and features Oh Ji-ho, Oh Ji-eun and Jun Hyo-seong.