Extraordinary Attorney Woo - General Discussion

[greekmom]

Quote

Woo Young Woo is a young lawyer with Asperger's syndrome. She boasts a high IQ, an impressive memory and a wonderfully creative thought process, but she struggles with everyday interactions.

Netflix. Korean Drama. 

[khyber]

Very charming series.

[twoods]

I loved the first season- can’t wait until the second season comes out.

[greekmom]

Really enjoyed it as well. Loved the cases.  I did find the Young Woo's mother very frustrating character and the lawyer who is jealous of Young Woo.

I hope they develop the relationship between YW and her brother next season.  As well, resurrect the relationship between YW and Joon-ho.

 

[shapeshifter]

I started watching this show because Rotten Tomatoes currently rates it at 100%.  
And I floved the first episode for making me LOL and cry, considering it superior to Ted Lasso.
I don’t mind formulaic shows, but by the second episode, I found myself criticizing the writing over the premise that Woo Young Woo was the only one who came up with the legal solution.  
But the recently rebooted Law & Order episodes have the same type of weakness.🤷🏻‍♀️
I’ll watch at least one more.

[Anela]

I have friends who loved it, but I tried watching when it first aired, and I wasn't in the right mood. I have to get back to it soon.

[shapeshifter]

I'm just starting Episode 7 now.
Episode 2 was not as good as the pilot/Episode 1, IMO, which threw me off.
It got better after that. 
Do Korean series not do a "pilot" like in the U.S.?

[Anela]

2 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

I'm just starting Episode 7 now.
Episode 2 was not as good as the pilot/Episode 1, IMO, which threw me off.
It got better after that. 
Do Korean series not do a "pilot" like in the U.S.?

I don’t know. 
is this related to Divorce attorney Shin? I noticed the threads popped up at the same time.  

[shapeshifter]

56 minutes ago, Anela said:

is this related to Divorce attorney Shin? I noticed the threads popped up at the same time.

Just looking at Wikipedia and Rotten Tomatoes:

• They are both in the "legal drama" genre.
• Both are recent productions.
• Both are from South Korea.
• The casts, writers, and directors are entirely different.
• Both have a 100% Fresh rating on RT.

So I think it's just one of those things where if you like one and wish there were more episodes, you might want to try the other.

[shapeshifter]

I just finished episode 12, "Yangtze River Dolphin," in which:

• "Young-woo encounters Hanbada's dark side while working on a wrongful termination lawsuit. Jung Myeong-seok fears he has a target on his back."

The case of the female employees being targeted for downsizing by being offered compensation packages they could not refuse was eerily similar to what happened to me when I was retired 6 years early, which is something I've been dwelling on lately, so it got kind of depressing, realizing how carefully orchestrated it had been.
But then when the Women's Rights attorney read the poem, I felt uplifted:

• Though there are many sayings, 
  life is to gladly become a piece of coal for someone other than myself.
  From the day the floors grow cold
  to the day spring comes,
  the most beautiful thing 
  in the streets of the Korean peninsula
  is a truck that fervidly climbs up the hill with coal.
  As if it knows what it has to do,
  coal burns endlessly once its body catches fire,
  but I was oblivious even though
  I had warm rice and soup every day.
  Because I feared becoming a lonely lump of ashes
  after loving others with my whole being,
  I haven't become coal for anyone.
  When I think about it,
  life is to shatter myself into pieces.
  I had never thought of clearing the streets for others to tread when the world is slippery from early morning snow.

Aside from the message of living a life to lift up others, the last line reminds me of the 15 years I lived on the slopes of the dormant volcano, Mt. Shasta, where the winter roads were treated with "cinders" instead of salt.
"Cinders" were small pebbles of volcanic rock readily obtained in that area where it would have been economically impossible to purchase salt for the snowy mountain pass roads in winter.
Even though these "cinders" were sharp rocks that pocked the windshields of cars when logging trucks kicked them up, "cinders" still implies "ashes."

[Bajoner]

In the finale of Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Woo is offered more than double what she is making now at Hanbada if she starts working for Taessan in Boston. But when I look at salary statistics I find that the median salary for law school graduates is 215,000 USD per year (https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/what-type-of-salary-can-you-expect-with-a-law-degree ). I also found information that attorneys in South Korea with 1-3 years experience earns an avarage salary of ₩78,141,301 (https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/lawyer/south-korea/seoul) which is around 58,000 USD. I couldn’t find any information on what they earn specifically in Seoul. Woo is probably earning slightly more than this amount since she is working at one of the top law firms. But I don’t think she earns more than 100,000 USD per year. If Tae Su-Mi really wanted Woo to move to Boston then she should have offered Woo more than what she would have made if she was from the US and had gone to law school there and then started working in Boston. Or am I missing something?

[aghst]

Clearly money isn’t a big motivation for the character.

If they told her that they’d locate her near a coastal habitat for some species of whales or dolphins, she might have been enticed.

But despite her condition, she’s emotionally bonded with her friends and some of the co workers, so leaving them behind to go to Boston seems unlikely.

Her mother offered her the job to get her out of the way, so that it wouldn’t interfere with her political ambitions.

The actress is terrific, almost makes me want to see her other shows, to see how she dealt with more normal roles.

Supposedly  the show has been approved for a second season, which isn’t common for K-dramas, it seems.  But the actor who played the love interest has reportedly started compulsory military service so it may be another year or two.

[aghst]

Never saw the movie Free Willy but This American Life just did an episode on Keiko, the orca which starred in that movie.

Unfortunate story, he was captured when very young, before it had developed survival instincts in the wild or learned to communicate with the rest of its pod.

Keiko lived most of his life in captivity, subject to unusual conditions.  The people who trained him and the legions of adoring fans believed he was happy but his living conditions were making him unhealthy and there was an effort to return him to the wild.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org

In any event, this story made me think of this show, particularly in an episode where Young Woo talks about the poor fate of whales which live in captivity.

I've only been to a marine park once, to see dolphins and orcas jump through literal hoops.  The advertising seemed to show excited and presumably happy animals, probably made people think that these creatures were happy and easily adapted well to captivity and were friendly so that they loved performing for people and playing with them.

Certainly children and others love these creatures.  Keiko was a huge star in Mexico City, with movie stars there trying to get private sessions to swim with him.

When they airlifted him to Oregon, where they had facilities thought to be better for him, throngs of people lined up the route from the marine park to the airport, trying to climb up to the tank transporting him.

 

[shapeshifter]

8 hours ago, aghst said:

In any event, this story made me think of this show…

Coincidentally, also recently, I've been reminded of Extraordinary Attorney Woo by another production:

I've been watching HPI Haut Potentiel Intellectuel on Hulu — which is the original French version of the new ABC show High Potential, and, like Extraordinary Attorney Woo, is dubbed in English rather than shown with English captions while the original language is spoken.
The dubbing voices in HPI sound like they are the same people that did Extraordinary Attorney Woo. Is that likely? Or is it done with AI?

While I appreciate the ease of watching a dubbed foreign (to me) language shows rather than reading captions, I do miss hearing the original actors' voice and their speech inflections, especially since I read the captions anyway, regardless of language.