#prisonplaybook

Prison Playbook (슬기로운 감빵생활)

Dark comedy

Originally aired on tvN (2017). Distributed by Netflix in the U.S.

Written by: Jung Bo-hoon (정보훈)

Directed by: Shin Won-ho (신원호)

Rating: 2.5/5 Hotteok’s

This post CONTAINS spoilers for Prison Playbook.

Content Warnings for Prison Playbook: violence, rape/sexual assault, homophobia, drug addiction, death penalty (mentioned)

Summary: Kim Je-hyuk is a talented baseball pitcher who recently signed a contract with Major League Baseball in the U.S. With his departure to Boston imminent, he witnesses a man attempting to sexually assault his sister. He confronts the perpetrator and saves his sister but is convicted of assault and is sent to prison. It follows Je-hyuk’s eventful journey as he tries to make a new life in the prison. The show also revolves around Je-hyuk’s cell mates and the correctional officers at the facility.

Earlier this year, I watched Hospital Playlist and absolutely loved it. I enjoyed how the show focuses more on telling the stories of the characters rather than solely being focused on the plot. Then I learned that Hospital Playlist is a second show in the Wise Life series, and there is a show called Prison Playbook which is the first in the series. (Prison Playbook and Hospital Playlist’s Korean titles, 슬기로운 감빵생활 and 슬기로운 의사생활, mean Wise Prison Life and Wise Doctor Life, respectively.) While I wait for Hospital Playlist’s second season to come out next year, I decided to check out Prison Playbook, also directed by Shin in 2017.

Kim Je-hyuk (김제혁) is an extremely famous and beloved baseball player (baseball is very big in South Korea). He finds himself in jail overnight, after he attacks a man who attempted to sexually assault his sister. Against the public’s assumption that he would be released on the grounds of self-defense, the court convicts and sends him to prison. He has to learn how to live a new life in the prison, on the verge of losing everything.

How Je-hyuk makes his comeback despite all of the struggles, is quite an amazing story. Additionally, similar to the structure of Hospital Playlist, Prison Playbook also invests a lot in telling many different characters’ stories, rather than focusing only on Je-hyuk. I enjoyed this format that lets you get to know each character more in depth. And the show does a good job with its dark comedic components. It manages to talk about prison life with levity, humor, and warmth. I think the main story that they wanted to tell is that a life in the prison may not be so much different from our own lives, in a way that you can grow through the relationships you build with people around you. And it does send this message well. But even though I binge watched the show, I’m only giving it only 2.5 out of five hotteok’s, mainly because of how it handles its female characters, drug addiction issues, and homophobia.

I guessed that the show would be heavily focused on its male characters because we are following a cis-gendered male character in the South Korean prison system which still operates on the binary gender system. But I was still disappointed in the roles that the female supporting characters had in the show. Kim Ji-ho, Je-hyuk’s girlfriend, is a typical ‘good’ girlfriend. She supports Je-hyuk throughout his baseball career and his prison life. Not that she shouldn’t, but she does everything that is expected from a good girlfriend/wife in the Korean society. There is even a word for that in Korean: 내조, which literally means the wife’s help (from ‘inside’, as her place is to be at home) for her husband so he can succeed (in the outside world, where he belongs). And a woman is often praised or criticized for her good or bad 내조, especially when she is in a relationship with a public figure. While the male characters go through their own redemption or reconciliation, there is not much of character development for Ji-ho. The only main struggles that she faces in the show are (temporary) break-ups with Je-hyuk – the first time because he is too busy playing baseball, and the second time because Je-hyuk tries to let her go after he goes to prison. And while the set-up that they knew each other for most of their lives and how Ji-ho is the daughter of Je-hyuk’s baseball coach who passed away, is supposed to make everything more meaningful and sentimental, can we talk about their age difference? To some extent I do believe that age is just a number, but it also seems like Korean shows and movies are usually too okay with telling stories about a man who falls in love with a younger, underage woman, waits for her to turn 18 to start dating (ex. Parasite, and many more). To be fair, it seems like Je-hyuk starts to have feelings for her only after she goes to college maybe? But the flashbacks showing how Ji-ho was a little kid when Je-hyuk was about to go to college did make me feel a bit uncomfortable. And there are also Je-hyuk’s sister and mother, and Kim Min-chul’s daughter, who do not deviate at all from the roles that they are expected to play as good sister, mother, and daughter.

How Yoo Han-yang’s character, who is a gay drug addict, is portrayed is another issue I had with the show. There are multiple scenes where they mention that Han-yang’s drug addiction is due to his lack of will to stop using drugs. And his addiction is portrayed as evil. The show really let me down at the end when Han-yang is finally released from prison, but there is his seller waiting for him, and Han-yang gets high and gets caught by the police right away. (It was a setup by the police to tempt him to use drugs again so they can take him back.) His story ends with his parents and boyfriend waiting for him in an empty restaurant. I really don’t understand what message they wanted to tell with this ending for him.

I was quite surprised to see Han-yang and his boyfriend in the show, since the Korean media often avoids anything that are not patriarchal heterosexual relationships. But even though the show had a chance to contribute to normalizing LGBTQ relationships, all it does is explicitly show the society’s bigotry and prejudice towards LGBTQ members. For example, Yoo Jeong-woo, one of Han-yang’s cell mates, accepts Han-yang as a friend but says that he cannot accept or understand Han-yang dating a man. One could possibly argue that the show attempted to show the ugly side of the Korean society as criticism, but to me it did not seem that way and the show did a poor job with their only queer character.

Overall, if you would like to watch the show, I would not stop you from watching it, but I will not actively recommend the show to people. It has a compelling storyline and it will make you care about each character by the end of the show. However, I cannot ignore its bias and prejudice against its female and LGBTQ characters. It also has an uneducated and quite hateful stance on drug addiction issues.

Cố gắng hết mình, nhưng cũng đừng phủ nhận bản thân. Hôm nay, trở về nhà, vỗ về bản thân mình một chút, tự nói với chính mình: "Vất vả nhiều rồi. Bạn là nhất, bạn xứng đáng những gì tốt nhất!"Ngày mai, lại cùng nhau cố gắng nhé!