The Devil’s Plan

I just finished a media roundup, but The Devil’s Plan may be of interest to my readers, because It is a Korean “Reality” show focused on games and puzzles. It was recommended (a few years ago) and I just got around to watching it and then binging to finish it.

It is not perfect, but the parts to like:

1. The games are not all winners, but some were highly entertaining, like super escape room but with referees watching via cameras and announcing points/eliminations. The fact that they’d take 15 minutes to explain the rules (with some hidden rules not explained!) shows how complex the games are.
2. The cast is uniformly intelligent and likeable. I haven’t watched much reality TV, but often you’ll have a “broad cross section of America,” which includes an asshole (probably deliberately cast to ‘make good TV’). Here it seems like the people were selected for strategic thinking and even the celebrities (such as a K-Pop star, talk show host, and actors and interviewers) were the sort of people who make you think “I have accomplished nothing with my life.” ¹
3. The strategies were often fun (even when the game was somewhat meh).

So it was a “great idea, wonderfully cast,” but could have used some development work, IMO.

After the first four episodes, I started to wonder if Peter Sarrett (or his Korean equivalent) was the game designer, but then I spotted some poor designs I know he would have tightened up². Also, as the series went on puzzles took a bigger role, which wasn’t bad, but I much prefer games. So it became more academic “huh, that’s clever” watching. And some other nits:

1. I have real trouble telling the names apart, and I’m not great with Korean faces. I had trouble telling some of the contestants apart. Mrs. Tao and I have watched several Korean shows and if you took the leading men and women from all of them and put them in uniforms, I couldn’t tell you anyone’s name or who played which character.
2. The pacing and editing could have been much tighter; like cutting 25% of the show. In particular, sometimes it feels like an age between when a trivia answer is given and then they pause and play suspenseful music before revealing if it’s correct. (Or showing the same scene from two different angles, one after the other).
3. The editing is sometimes deliberately deceptive, leaving out key facts. In some games this is appropriate, but mostly I find it annoying. In their defense, it might matter less to those who can read Korean. (There was a game reminiscent of MicroMacro Crime City where you had to find clues as well as play “Where’s Waldo”).
4. I joked to Mrs. Tao that one of the games should be baseball, “because at least for that one episode, they wouldn’t allow crying.”

Frankly this was an unmitigated recommend after the first two episodes, but my rating dropped a bit each episode. But I finished it and will watch the second season when it drops on Netflix later this year. If you want a brief description of the games (with spoilers), you can check out wikipedia.

1. For example, “The Actress” has a number of patents and “the Young Travel Streamer” worked for the Korean equivalent of the State department. “The Actor” scored in the 99th percentile on their SAT-equivalent and was a mechanical engineer. All the participants were bilingual — the word game was in English! — and several were tri-lingual at least. ︎
2. Unless of course he was over-ruled by the producers who worried that a non-gaming audience was already overwhelmed. ︎