by Michael McCarthy
I recently decided to watch the Korean series Teach You A Lesson, which proved to be one of the most challenging series I’ve ever seen. For better or worse, this series seems to keep changing genres on you from one episode to the next. And it does it so often that you’re frequently dumbfounded, unsure if you’re meant to laugh or be horrified. (Note: as I mentioned in the subject line, this review contains spoilers. Major spoilers.)
The premise is that schools in Korea have gotten so toxic that nothing shy of physical violence is going to get the kids to behave. As a result, the government creates the ERBP, which stands for Teachers’ Authority Protection Bureau. The teachers – well, they call them “inspectors,” – are actually allowed to use violence against the students. Or at least that’s the idea behind the first two episodes where Inspector Na Hwa-jin (Kim Mu-yeol) literally beats up students who won’t behave.
In episode one, the bullies drive one person to suicide and nearly drive a second student to do the same so when Na Hwa-jin shows up and starts beating the heck out of them, it works like a great revenge drama where you want to see the villains punished — even if they are high school students and the person roughing them up is a teacher. However, Kim Mu-yeol plays the inspector like he’s acting in an action comedy, always smirking as he smacks the kids around. Because of this, the show has already proved to be rather controversial. Some viewers feel like the kids deserve to be hit, while others feel like that’s a line that should never be crossed. Personally, I kept changing my mind. During the first two episodes, I was relieved if not happy when the bullies got a taste of their own medicine. But in later episodes, the punishment does not always seem to fit the crime.
The series seems to get its “let’s beat up the students” gimmick out of its system with the first two episodes. In later episodes, the students aren’t even necessarily the targets of the ERBP. In one episode, the target is a mother who constantly harassed and eventually stalked a teacher. Another episode focused on a mom who gives her kid illegal study aid drugs. In still another episode, a teacher is caught selling exam answers to students. When it was tackling these issues where the adults were to blame for the problems at the schools, the series tended to take itself seriously and the drama could be pretty intense if not entirely dark. And the series worked well when it was telling those stories. But when the kids were behaving like cartoon villains and getting slapped around, it was pretty hard to take the show seriously.
If you look at Teach You A Lesson like an anthology series where the rules keep changing with every episode then you’re probably less likely to be frustrated with it but I was just expecting a normal ten episode limited series so I kept getting annoyed when I couldn’t tell how I was supposed to interpret the inspectors’ actions. In one episode, they make a mom study for med school since she nearly drove her son to suicide by pressuring him to do the same. At first, I found that hilarious. The mother truly is a monster. And yet… at some point it felt like she had already learned her lesson but they just kept torturing and torturing her because they found it entertaining. Then it turns out that the lead inspector’s fiancé was murdered by a student and a corrupt politician accuses him of beating up students because he wants revenge.
Although I kept wishing that Kim Mu-yeol would stop looking so gleeful when he was beating up students, I found his performance here to be a fairly solid one. But actress Jin Ki-joo steals the spotlight when she shows up in episode three as Inspector Im Han-rim. It’s often hard to guess what Na Hwa-jin is thinking, but Jin Ki-joo shows layers of vulnerability, anger and heartache with her performance, which I think was the strongest acting in the series.
The frustrating thing about Teach You A Lesson is that buried beneath all the absurdity is a much better show. The series raises genuinely interesting questions about authority, punishment and revenge. Several episodes suggest that the ERBP inspectors may be motivated as much by personal trauma as by a desire to help students. Unfortunately, whenever the series starts to explore those ideas, it usually abandons them in favor of another over-the-top case, another cartoonishly evil villain or another wildly implausible action sequence. By the end of the season, I found myself less concerned with whether teachers should be allowed to hit students than with whether the writers knew what kind of series they wanted this to be.
Finally, I cannot finish this review without mentioning the ridiculous ending. Na Hwa-jin ends up getting stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen by the same student who murdered his fiancée in exactly the same fashion. His fiancée dies from her injuries, yet Na Hwa-jin is soon walking around as if nothing happened and never even appears to visit a hospital. The scene perfectly illustrates the show’s biggest problem: it wants realistic emotional stakes and action-movie consequences at the same time.
If a second season happens, I hope the writers trust the serious drama more than the action fantasy because that’s where Teach You A Lesson came closest to becoming something genuinely memorable.
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