If you had told us today that we would be very excited about a Coldplay cover, we wouldn't have believed it. But that was before we saw the trailer for the second season of PachinkoApple TV's award-winning historical drama. The trailer for the returning second season features a gorgeous take on Live life performed by BLACKPINK’s Rosé, and does a great job of setting the tone: with stories set in 1945 and 1989, the new season promises to be even more epic than the first.
Pachinko The first season was “so good it makes the competition look unworthy,” the LA Times said. At its best, which is most of the time, “it’s a lesson in how to do a melodrama well.” It’s a very expensive show that features beautiful people in beautiful but dramatic situations that tell the story of four generations of the same family in Korea and Japan. This new season of Apple TV Plus’ best show continues the time-travel stories, this time moving between the final days of World War II and Greed Is Good in the late 1980s.
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Why is it worth playing Pachinko?
The show, which is one of three highly-rated Apple TV Plus series we can't get enough of, is based on the best-selling book by Min Jin Lee and is unusual in that it's trilingual: the characters speak in Korean and Japanese with English as a third language.
As the LAT explains, it is “a story of racism, sexism, classism, submission, resistance, assimilation and the search for self-knowledge in a society that tells you who you are, where you belong and what you can do. If you're not prepared to cry profusely, you probably don't have to watch it.” According to CNN, “from the first frame to the last, [it] “Win your attention and, occasionally, your tears.”
The second season continues the story of matriarch Sunja, this time in Osaka in 1945, where she must make dangerous decisions to ensure her family's survival. And the more modern story follows Solomon, Sunja's grandson, who must explore new and much more humble beginnings in Tokyo in 1989.
Apple has high hopes for the series: it won 11 international awards in its first season and currently has an impressive 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not all reviews are glowing (some critics have identified issues with the depiction of Korean families), but most are effusive: Empire magazine said it was among “the most satisfying TV shows of the year so far.”
Second season of Pachinko will premiere on Apple TV Plus on August 23, 2024.
