‘It’s so weird’: the TV show about a woman who turns into a chicken nugget
Last December, Netflix released an exhaustive report entitled What We Watched, detailing the time its subscribers spent watching every film and television programme on its platform. One of the biggest surprises was the sheer number of foreign-language productions we consume. In total, these productions accounted for a full third of all streamed Netflix content.
And leading the way was South Korea. The report revealed that, following the planet-conquering phenomenon that was Squid Game, the Kdrama series The Glory was the third most-watched Netflix show globally. This, you have to admit, is incredible. There is a huge global hunger for Korean output. If it comes from South Korea, people will watch it in their droves.
Possibly. Because the newest South Korean series to hit Netflix is Chicken Nugget. It’s a television series about a woman who turns into a chicken nugget and, as such, might be one of the oddest things currently available to watch.
Based on a webcomic by Park Jidok, whose previous work includes comics called Potato Village and Killer Farts, Chicken Nugget is almost aggressively esoteric. The story is about a hapless intern at a machine company who harbours a crush on his boss’s daughter. But then a mysterious machine appears in the office, and she gets into it and accidentally says the words “chicken nugget” out loud, and it turns her into one. Imagine a version of The Fly where Jeff Goldblum gets fully turned into a fly after just 15 minutes and you’re on the right track. Also, in this version of The Fly, Goldblum gets turned into a small piece of chicken, one of the only things on Earth that is less dramatically interesting than a fly. That’s roughly where we are.
Unlike something like Squid Game, which came swaggering in laden with extremely expensive Hollywood-level production design, Chicken Nugget was very clearly made on the cheap. It’s bright like a daytime soap opera, it has very few traditional action sequences and a big percentage of its visual-effects budget seems to have been spent on making a chicken nugget wobble very slightly. It’s so weird and bargain basement-y that there is a good chance you will get a few minutes into the first episode and decide that Chicken Nugget is simply not for you.
But this would be a mistake. I was fully ready to bail on the show, until a brief sequence where the father of the woman who turned into a chicken nugget grieves her predicament. He remembers bringing her up alone after the death of her mother. He’s scared and overwhelmed, but he’s proud of the woman she’s becoming. And I’ll be damned if it isn’t one of the most unexpectedly moving things I’ve seen in an age. Somehow this stupid show, one that often feels as if it was free-associated rather than traditionally written, wrestled a true emotional response from me.
From there, inexplicably, Chicken Nugget keeps getting better and better. It becomes less about the weirdness of a woman who is trapped in chicken form, and more about the bonding that happens between the two people who try to get her back. Soon, the girl’s father and the intern team up to try to discover what exactly happened to her, uncovering a long and complicated conspiracy that branches off down a number of incredibly strange tributaries that, among other things, provide a whistlestop journey through Korean culinary history.
Given its meagre budget, the show takes some bold formal leaps, too. We travel hundreds of years into the past, and several decades into the future, in our attempt to figure out exactly what happened to this poor nugget lady. Extraordinary new characters are introduced. There’s an ambition here that cannot be tamed. Had Chicken Nugget been given the blockbuster treatment, there’s a chance that all this would have come off as overwrought, as something being prestige just for the sake of it. But the show’s shonky, cheapo production prevents that. It has to rely on charm alone to get by, and this is something it has in spades.
Realistically, Chicken Nugget won’t get close to equalling The Glory’s popularity. If it even makes the top half of the next What We Watched report I’ll be staggered. It’s far too bizarre and homemade for that. But those who will watch Chicken Nugget will love it completely, and isn’t that really the best metric?
meets a very unpleasant end early on – this is not a show for the squeamish). But Yoshii Toranaga, a powerful daimyō(feudal lord) and one of the five regents vying for ultimate power, suspects that Blackthorne, with his knowledge of western weaponry, might be worth keeping around.
Inevitably, Shōgun has been compared with Game of Thrones, because we are obliged to do that with any historical drama where lots of people violently cark it. Shōgun does, though, have a better claim than most. In its succession-crisis plotting, unashamedly antiheroic lead characters, and lashings of gore, it does strikingly resemble Thrones’ first season, back when the fantasy drama was going very light on the fantasy, and instead focusing on political intrigue and gnarly beheadings. In both seasons you can see intemperate heads prevailing over cool ones, malevolent figures tinkering away in the background and peace shifting slowly into war. Given where Game of Thrones ended up, a show that seems to take the qualities of its earlier, more grounded seasons, rather than its later ones, is welcome.
What is particularly impressive about Shōgun is that it gets so much right when the potential for disaster is so high. This after all is an adaptation of a novel about feudal Japan but seen through the eyes of a westerner, a setup that practically begs for accusations of Orientalism. The original 1980 adaptation didn’t even bother to provide subtitles for its Japanese characters, so centred was it on its white saviour protagonist. Here, though, while Blackthorne is the show’s nominal lead, he is just one small thread in a complex tapestry. Jarvis is plenty watchable as Blackthorne, pitching his Protestant plunderer somewhere between Laurence Olivier and Tom Hardy at his most wild-eyed. But just as central a character, and arguably a more compelling one, is Sanada’s Toranaga, a geniuslevel military strategist whose inscrutability and quick-eyed cunning energises every scene he serenely strolls into.
Like Toranaga, always ready to capitalise on his rivals’ mistakes, Shōgun’s creators seem to revel in the shifting allegiances and complex codes of the particularly fraught period of feudalera Japan in which the show is set. But they do sweat the small stuff as much as the grand overarching details – and the series has been praised in Japan for showing precision and respect in its recreation of the period.
The result of all this is the show of the moment. But there’s a catch: Shōgun is being sold as a limited series. Once its 10th episode airs, that – in theory – is it. It’s hard to imagine FX/ Disney not capitalising on its success in some way, and there are further novels in what Clavell called his Asian saga to crib from – though those novels are all set centuries later in different locations (Hong Kong, Singapore, Iran). So this is likely it for Blackthorne, Toranaga et al. Enjoy them while you can.
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‘How do I do this better?’ Employers love that stuff.”
When Alicia entered the world of work, one rule seemed very simple: put in as many hours as possible. “I didn’t set a single boundary and things went crazy well in my career,” she said.
But it was only for so long that she could sustain relentless 12-hour days, sleeping for just three hours a night. “I was getting blurry dots in my vision and could only see the computer screen if I looked at it from a certain angle,” she said. “I lost 20kg because I couldn’t eat, my stomach was constantly churning because I was in flight-or-fight mode 24/7. When I wasn’t working, I was thinking about work. I used to dream about it.”
Another night, another Workaholics Anonymous meeting. In this one, the conversation turned to upbringing. Almost every one spoke of parents, and even grandparents, who were also workaholics.
Ines’s parents were both workaholics, she said, sadly wondering how she had reached 70 and “forgotten to live my life”. Umoja’s mother worked herself to death on the family farm. “My parents drummed their work ethic into me: I never questioned that I was born to work,” she said.
Leena put her head in her hands. “I worry about the message I give my three small children,” she confessed. “The other night I worked until 4am. They woke up at 6am and I predictably ended up with a migraine and had to spend all afternoon in bed because my body couldn’t function.”
Dr Mike Drayton, a chartered member of the British Psychological Society who has written five books on the psychology of work, said the four main varieties of workaholic were the relentless workaholic, who works non-stop; the bulimic workaholic, who oscillates between intense engagement and obsessive avoidance; the attention-deficit workaholic, who gets easily bored and distracted, often leaving projects unfinished; and the perfectionist workaholic.
But what causes the addiction is not well understood: certain people are thought to be vulnerable but only in some circumstances, said Almuth
McDowall, a professor of organisational psychology at Birkbeck, University of London.
“There needs to be an interplay between organisation and individual risk factors such as perfectionism, hyperfocus or hyposensitivity, which means you don’t notice that you need to eat, drink or sleep,” she said.
Certain industries seem to trigger workaholism more than others: Workaholics Anonymous members have set up specific groups for vicars, entrepreneurs, teachers and doctors.
McDowall also said the addiction was often glamourised. “Workaholics look good to organisations: they’re highly engaged, energetic and absorbed by their work,” she said. “It takes time for employers to realise they are actually substantially less productive than their co-workers, can’t work in teams or delegate.”
Prof Gail Kinman, who co-chairs the British Psychological Society’s worklife balance working group, said hybrid working, freelancing and globalisation has “a lot of answer for”. “Hybrid working and freelancing means people can work 24/7 under the radar, and globalisation means you can work across a number of different time zones,” she said.
Marion, 57, has finally given up work after decades of workaholism. “My brain is diseased, I have to accept that,” she said. “I deliberately started candle-making because it was something that I couldn’t put on a CV - then I decided to make it into a business. I got a dog – and immediately began planning to breed her.
Marion is now losing sight in her second eye as well. “Soon I’ll be blind and I need to figure out a way to live like that,” she said. “I may, one day, learn to just ‘be’ and not achieve but I will always carry the lifelong scars of workaholism.”
*All case study names have been changed.