K-drama midseason recap: Vincenzo – details outshine plot in Netflix’s overstuffed but entertaining confection

This article contains spoilers.

It’s not an easy thing to know exactly what a K-drama audience will respond to, particularly as that audience keeps growing around the world and becoming more sophisticated. As they try to answer that elusive riddle, there are several ways that writers of Korean dramas can pen their shows: stick to tried and true narratives, craft an involving mystery, or push boundaries with something new and edgy, for example.

Then you have something like Vincenzo, which goes for the everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink approach. Part sanguinary mob thriller, part slapstick comedy and part legal drama, with some romance, corruption and melodrama gluing it all together, the show is frequently schizophrenic as it swings wildly in tone from one scene to the next, but it’s never been less than entertaining.

With 20 episodes, each roughly 85 minutes apiece, to get through, there’s plenty of filler. But in Vincenzo’s case much of the charm comes down to the little vignettes that exist outside the main plot.

This is especially true as we spend time with the residents of Geumga Plaza, the largest gathering of characters in the show, who serve a narrative function as a group but, aside from the occasional plot thread, are generally employed as comic relief. A mismatched mob of crackpots and oddballs, their emotions are febrile, their faces elastic and their clothes loud.