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 K-drama 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.
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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?