If you’d told us earlier today that we’d be getting all emotional over a Coldplay cover we wouldn’t have believed you. But that was before we saw the trailer for season two of Pachinko, Apple TV’s award-winning historical drama. The trailer for the returning second season features a gorgeous version of Viva La Vida performed by BLACKPINK’s Rosé, and it does a great job of setting the tone: with stories set in 1945 and 1989, the new season promises to be even more epic than the first.
Pachinko’s first season was “so good it makes the competition look unworthy,” the LA Times said. At its best, which is most of the time, it “is a lesson in how to do melodrama right.” It’s a very expensive show featuring beautiful people in beautiful but dramatic situations that tells the story of four generations of the same family in Korea and in Japan. This new season of the best Apple TV Plus show continues the time traveling stories, this time moving between the final days of World War II and the greed-is-good late 1980s.
Why Pachinko is worth playing
The show, which is one of three highly-rated Apple TV Plus series that we can’t get enough of, is based on the best selling book by Min Jin Lee and is unusual in that it’s trilingual: the characters speak in Korean and in Japanese with English as the third language.
As the LAT explains, it’s “a story of racism, sexism, classism, submission, resistance, assimilation and the quest for self-knowledge in a society that tells you who you are, where you belong and what you can do. If you are not prepared to weep copiously, you probably have no business watching it.” According to CNN, “from the first frame to the last, [it] earns your attention – and occasionally, your tears.”
Season two continues the story of the matriarch Sunja, this time in Osaka in 1945 where she has to make dangerous decisions in order to secure her family’s survival. And the more modern storyline follows Solomon, Sunja’s grandchild, who has to explore new and considerably more humble beginnings in Tokyo in 1989.
Apple clearly has high hopes for the show: it bagged 11 international awards for season one and currently has an impressive 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not all the reviews are glowing – some reviewers have identified problems with the depiction of Korean families – but most are effusive: Empire Magazine said it was among “the most satisfying TV of the year so far.”
Season two of Pachinko will premiere on Apple TV Plus on August 23, 2024.
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