The Glory won Best Television Drama in the 59th Baeksang Art Awards today, April 28, at 5:30 pm KST or Korean Standard Time (4:30 pm in the Philippines) at Incheon Paradise City. It was being broadcast live on JTBC and streamed on TikTok.
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There were five nominees for Best Television Drama: The Glory, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Our Blues, My Liberation Notes, and Little Women.
Of the five, the front runners and most avidly followed are The Glory and Extraordinary Attorney Woo.
Now, let us look at the numbers for both dramas. Crucial to the determination of who would be chosen as the Best Television Drama for the year are the awards for best director, best screenplay and its writer, as well as technical awards in the various aspects that go into the production of a television series. Performances of the leading actors in a drama hardly determine who will be cited as the Best Television Drama of the year.
The Glory has a total of nine nominations for Best Drama, Best Writer/Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Actress, two nominations for Best Supporting Actress, Best Actor, Best Rookie Actor, and Best Rookie Actress.
Extraordinary Attorney Woo has a total of 10 nominations. Aside from Best Drama, it was also nominated for the Best Director Award, Best Writer/Screenplay, Best Music, Best Visual Effects, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Rookie Actor, and two nominations for Best Rookie Actress.
The Glory does not really tell a new story. Like other dramas in this genre—regular fare in K-Dramaland—it uses tropes to delineate victims from perpetrators, their cohorts, wealth and/or social class, and the justice system, among other variables. Violence is also par for the course.
What set The Glory apart from other revenge dramas is in the storytelling. From the get-go, viewers are thrown right into the midst of a very violent and abjectly cruel scene with the drama’s protagonist, the high school student Moon Dong Eun (Song Hye Kyo), witnessing how another student is threatened, her clothes burned by Park Yeon Jin (Lim Ji Yeon) until she falls off the rooftop. In the next scene, it is Moon Dong Eun’s turn. She is marked for life as Yeon Jin passes the hot curling iron over her arms, legs, and back. The horrific scars that itch and burn all the time, she carries into adulthood. Like voyeurs, viewers are riveted to graphic scenarios of drug use, depravity, gratuitous sex and nudity, and murder.
Writer Kim Eun Sook, who is nominated for Best Screenplay, used the game of Go as a metaphor for how Moon Dong Eun executed her intricate plot with malice to bring down Park Yeon Jin and the other four in the gang of bullies.
In the game of Go, the person who has more territory wins. So you start near the end and move towards the center while building your own territories; you destroy your own opponents, tightening the boundarie slowly in a battle fought fiercely in silence. This is how Moon Dong Eun slowly inches her way to penetrate the world of her tormentors. It takes her 17 years to consummate her revenge.
Isolation is a pervading theme in the story of The Glory, but its writer uses it on many contrasting levels. As a young girl, Moon Dong Eun is alone, isolated by abject poverty with no one on her side. Even her mother was the first to betray her. But as she embarks on her campaign, she comes across other victims who are out for revenge, as well. They become her accomplices. There is the young doctor whose father was murdered by a sociopath, and the maid who wanted to kill her abusive husband.
In contrast, arch villain Park Yeon Jin, although surrounded by wealth and able to use her money and connections to thwart Moon Dong Eun’s moves, eventually ends up in the isolation of prison.
Even if Yeon Jin had a posse as a high school student, there was a hierarchy within the gang. Dong Eun systematically destroyed Yeon Jin by manipulating the group, using their weaknesses and desires until they turned against one another and eventually Yeon Jin.
‘The Glory’ is one of the most well-crafted revenge dramas we have seen
The Glory is one of the most well-crafted revenge dramas we have seen in a long time, and Song Hye Kyo’s Moon Dong Eun is her most memorable role yet. This avenging woman is also very relatable. Unlike others who accumulate wealth and power and come back to retaliate against their tormentors, Dong Eun is a teacher, scarred for life. She is always in dark clothes that cover the horrific scars. After being forced to leave the high school, she took on all kinds of work, clawed her way through the years, living almost always only on kimbap.
Best of all, for a very dark drama that did not stint on violence, it gave viewers a most cathartic experience seeing how its central character destroyed her arch villain and her gang without getting her hands dirty.
Special mention must be made of the cinematography in The Glory, for which it scored a nomination. The director Ahn Gil Ho used a very dark palette in most of the violent scenes and with Dong Eun in them; she also wears dark clothes and is barely made up. But in the last few episodes in Part 2, she has taken to wearing lighter clothes, and outdoor scenes are in full daylight.
Isolation is also a theme explored by Extraordinary Attorney Woo. As a person with autism spectrum disorder, Woo Young Woo faces the daunting task of finding work even with the IQ of a genius and finishing at the top of her class in law school. Even in a crowded train, with her headset on, she is isolated from the rest of the commuters. Navigating the world of work and leaving the confines of the home she shares with her father had to be choreographed for her at the start.
But, unlike Dong Eun, she isn’t alone. She has a father who devoted his life to her, foregoing a career in law to care for her. That scene, after her breakfast of kimbap in her father’s store, when he starts the drill—how many stations on the train before she alights nearest the Hanbada Law building, how many minutes the trip takes, and how many steps when she gets off to find her way to the building—is one of the most touching scenes in the drama.
From a very inauspicious start, with barely 0.9 percet viewership rating for its first episode, Extraordinary Attorney Woo went up the ratings chart and had viewers following the saga of the 27-year-old genius lawyer.
Both director Yoo In Shik and writer Moon Ji Won of Extraordinary Attorney Woo are nominated in their respective categories. They deftly balanced all the elements of the drama, making it an uplifting and inspiring drama. Add to this Park Eun Bin’s thoroughly engaging portrayal of Woo Young Woo, and we have one of the most unforgettable dramas we have seen in a while.
AStory, the producers, spent some 20 billion won on cinematography, props, and styling alone
Moon Ji Won has written one of the best legal dramas thus far even as she tackled issues about autism in a very realistic but sensitive manner. Not one to downplay or sugarcoat the context in which our main character thrives, she does not avoid the more controversial issues in relation to how autism is portrayed in the drama.
To tell the story of the autistic genius lawyer, Moon Ji Won used Woo Young Woo’s fascination—obsession, actually—with whales. It is a masterstroke in plot development. Aside from depicting an autistic person’s singular focus on what interests her to the exclusion of other subjects, or something that fascinates them, the story of how the mother whale stays with her pup, even if it means being harpooned, is central to the drama’s appeal.
We must also make mention of the special effects used for Extraordinary Attorney Woo, for which its has won a nomination at the 59th Baeksang Art Awards. In an early episode, we see that as train speeds up, there, visible from the its glass window, a leviathan swims languidly; Young Woo’s eyes light up. That whale is the first of several CGIs (computer generated images) that appear. AStory, producers of EAW that aired on the previously unknown ENA cable channel, spent some 20 billion won on cinematography, props, and styling alone, a huge part of that budget eaten up by those CGIs.
We kept our fingers crossed on who would bring home the award for Best Television Drama in this latest edition of the Baeksang Art Awards.
