Netflix's enormous dark thriller series looks like it might do something you've never seen before in first trailer
The East Palace blends genres in the best way
I love a good genre mashup; whether a show is one half sci-fi and another half whodunnit, or horror inflected with comedy, it's always really fun to see material that doesn't just stick to one lane. In the streaming era, I'd argue that some of the biggest platforms (like Netflix) are starting to realise that these blends can work really well for audiences, too.
That would explain some of the logic behind its new show The East Palace, a Korean drama that does things quite differently. At points in its debut trailer you could think that it's going to be a traditional prestige historical drama, but as things go further you'll start to see that it's got heavy dashes of fantasy too, and a little horror to spice things up.
Set in a fictional but deliberately credible historical era, the show will star Nam Joo-hyuk as Gu-cheon, a ghost-slayer. His unique power is that he can in fact transform into a ghost himself (and it's him you'll see with a cluster of swords on his back in the trailer's latter stages) in order to slay demons and ghosts, before returning to his corporeal form.
He'll apparently be teaming up with a courtly lady, Roh Yoon-seo as Saeng-gang, who can hear the dead and indeed communicate with them, making her a very useful asset to him. They're going to be hired to investigate paranormal situations and hauntings associated with the titular East Palace, to try to figure out what on earth's causing so much trouble there.
Beyond that (much of which is from the show's blurb), the trailer is actually fairly ambiguous – we don't really get a look at a main antagonist, for example, which doubtless will exist when it's available to stream on 17 July, in a month's time.
Regardless, though, it looks really sumptuous and has oodles of visual character to boast about, including some CGI sequences that look absolutely draw dropping from the glimpses we see in tightly-edited sequences. Whether the show can live up to the promise this trailer gives off, we'll find out in due course.
