[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Grandpas Over Flowers Investigation Team" Episode 4

This episode the team is investigating a murder. Multiple murders, actually, which sullies the waters here right from the get-go. The essential conceit of this drama is that the investigation team, for all their comedic quirks and in spite of the fact that over half of them have been transformed into old men, are very good at their job. Yet here they're apparently so non-threatening that a murder unfolds right in front of them. That the murdered is eventually unveiled is besides the point. A team this good should be some kind of deterrant.

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Granted this is a somewhat pedantic complaint- the murderers in mysteries typically have a dogged determination about them that defies all logic. The trouble here is that it's difficult to take that kind of single-mindedness seriously when it's coming right on the end of more grandpa jokes and goofy sound effects. "Grandpas Over Flowers Investigation Team" keeps trying to have it both ways, and the result here is a jarring tonal shift.

This might be more forgivable if the jokes were funny, but I think I'm beginning to develop a resistance to the drama's saccharine sense of humor. It works at points- the dinner we see at the beginning is an excellent demonstration of meta absurdity. A grandpa acting like a young person isn't cute- it's just very bizarre. And this wraps around all the way to funny again when the characters themselves bicker about it.

The trouble is this has nothing to do with the rather uninspiring murder storyline, or with the drama's larger point about how these three characters were transformed into elderly men, and what they're supposed to do to get back to normal. It's just a chef soap opera- which I might have found more interesting if I knew anything about cooking TV shows. In the immediate sense the plot is only relevant because it gets some jokes out of Eun-ji's food obsession.

"Grandpas Over Flowers Investigation Team" appears to be stuck on its own concept. Do we want to watch old actors be silly? Do we want to watch mysteries? Let's do both at the same time! But it often feels like the better the drama is at being silly, the worse it is at creating a genuinely compelling mystery, and vice-versa. This isn't coincidental. In many ways the goals here are mutually exclusive. This could be fixed if the writer would do more to experiment with the format. While episodic murder may be a genre staple, there's plenty of room here to play around with the concept.

Review by William Schwartz

"Grandpas Over Flowers Investigation Team"is directed by Kim Jin-young, written by Moon Seon-hee and features Lee Soon-jae, Byun Hee-bong, Jang Gwang, Kim Heechul, Lee Cho-hee, Kim Eung-soo.

 

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