W arrived on MBC in the summer of 2016 with a premise that sounds like a joke and plays like a thriller: a surgeon gets pulled through a computer monitor into her father’s webtoon, saves the hero’s life, and discovers she can only come and go based on how he feels about her. Sixteen episodes, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 22:00 KST, July 20 to September 14. Created by Song Jae-jung. Lee Jong-suk and Han Hyo-joo in the leads. It should not hold together. It does.
Two Worlds, One Monitor
The title comes from the webtoon itself — “W,” the comic Oh Seong-moo is writing when he mysteriously goes missing while finishing the last chapter. His daughter Oh Yeon-joo, a cardiothoracic surgeon played by Han Hyo-joo, goes into his office to look for him. A hand reaches out of the monitor and pulls her in. She lands on a rooftop next to a bloodied man and saves him. Then she realizes who he is: Kang Cheol, the main character of her father’s comic, played by Lee Jong-suk.
That’s the engine. The show runs on the clash between the real world and the alternate universe inside the webtoon, and on a rule that turns out to be crueler than any magic trick: Yeon-joo’s access depends on Kang Cheol’s feelings. She doesn’t control the door. He does, without knowing it. A romance where one person’s emotional state literally moves the other between dimensions is a device, but W treats it as a problem, not a perk, and that’s the difference between a gimmick and a story.
Kang Cheol Is Rich, and That’s the Point
Kang Cheol is super rich, and the show never apologizes for it. He exists in the webtoon as its hero, the man the readers expect to win, and Lee Jong-suk plays him with the exact amount of self-awareness the part needs — enough to be funny, not so much that the stakes collapse. The comedy genre tag on W is earned mostly through this: a man discovering his life has been scripted by a stranger, and a woman discovering her father has been writing her into a romance she didn’t audition for.
The supporting cast is doing real work here. Eugene Jung plays Yoon So-hee, Kang Cheol’s longtime secretary and friend since high school, whose romantic feelings for him are alluded to through her actions and behavior around him — enough that readers of the webtoon generally expect the two of them to marry. So-hee was originally intended to be the main female character who would become Kang Cheol’s love interest. She gets replaced by Yeon-joo when Kang Cheol falls in love with her. That’s a brutal thing to do to a character, and W does it on purpose.
Lee Tae-hwan’s Seo Do-yoon is Kang Cheol’s loyal bodyguard and close friend, the man who trained him to fight and who is always alongside him when bad guys get beaten. The webtoon also carries a secondary antagonist in Han Cheol-ho, played by Park Won-sang — a power-hungry prosecutor and a member of Congress who is also the presidential prospect of a new democratic party.
The Killer Without a Face
The best piece of construction in W is Kim Eui-sung as Han Sang-hoon, the real killer of Kang Cheol’s family. His identity isn’t revealed until much later, and his face resembles Oh Seong-moo, the author. Before Seong-moo gives him a name and a face, he mostly appears as a shadowy, faceless human form. That’s a villain built out of the writing process itself — a character who exists as an absence until the author bothers to define him. It’s the kind of idea that could have been pretentious. It lands because the show commits to it visually and then pays it off.
Cha Kwang-soo rounds out the world as Son Hyun-suk, director of Project W, a program specializing in criminal investigation, and general manager of the broadcasting channel W. The show is aware that it is a show about a show being consumed by an audience, and it doesn’t flinch from that.
The series received praise for its unique premise and ranked first in Content Power Index in its premiere week.
The Numbers Held
W topped viewership ratings in its time slot for its entire run and hit 11.63%. That’s not a phenomenon, but it’s a show that never lost its audience, which for a premise this strange is the more impressive result. The 35th MBC Drama Awards gave it Drama of the Year, a Daesang for Lee Jong-suk, Top Excellence awards for both leads, and a Best Couple Award for Lee and Han. The chemistry between the leads was well-received, and you can see why: the show asks them to sell a relationship where one party has narrative authority over the other, and they make it feel like a romance instead of a hostage situation.
The weakness is the middle. Sixteen episodes is a reasonable length, but the mechanic — enter when he feels, leave when he feels — starts to strain once the show has to keep resetting it. The rules get bent to serve the plot, and the show’s own logic becomes the thing the audience is tracking instead of the murder mystery. That’s a real cost.
What Actually Matters
Here’s the part worth watching, and the part that makes W more than a 2016 curiosity. The show is about a creator who loses control of his own characters, and it understands that the loss isn’t tragic in the way the creator thinks. Oh Seong-moo goes missing while writing the final chapter. His creation develops a life he didn’t authorize. His daughter falls for the man he drew. That’s not a metaphor the show states out loud, and it’s better for it.
The romantic mechanic — access granted by feeling — is the show’s best idea and its most fragile one. When it works, it’s the reason to watch. When it doesn’t, you notice the seams. But a drama that swings at something this specific and mostly connects is worth more than a drama that plays it safe and never misses.
W is not the best Korean drama of 2016. It might be the strangest one that worked, and it holds up as a case study in how to build a fantasy rule and then let it hurt people.
TMDB’s audience score sits at 8.4/10, from 978 votes.
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