Netflix’s new mystery-suspense thriller Celebrity premiered this week, full of graphic overlays and jewel-toned lights. The drama digs right in to its story giving us a likable heroine living in an unlikable world. With hashtags for episode titles and emojis galore, I can’t decide if this is supposed to be satire or just superficial fun. Maybe that’s why Netflix dropped all twelve episodes at once — so we wouldn’t be too put off to find out.
Editor’s note: This is an opening review only. For a place to chat about the entire drama, visit the Drama Hangout.
EPISODE 1
When I first heard about this drama, set in the cutthroat world of influencers, I instinctively assumed I’d hate it. But when I heard that Park Kyu-young and Lee Chung-ah were starring, I thought, wait, how bad can it be? And after watching the first episode, I still feel torn between these two positions.
On one hand, the whole thing feels like a meta-ad chock full of closeups on luxury labels and Instagram PPL (how many times can they show us how easy it is to install the app?!). On the other hand, all the leads are so freakin’ likable that I can’t help but wonder if this is building toward a larger message, and we’re being purposefully misled with its vapidity.
We open with an introduction to our heroine, SEO AH-RI (Park Kyu-young) — a power influencer with over a million followers — as she explains to us what an influencer is, what kind of power she holds, and the obscene amounts of money she makes (hint: so much she no longer counts it). We watch her turn a hole-in-the-wall eatery with no customers into an expansive (and expensive) restaurant with a line outside, just by posting one photo on social media.
The interesting thing about the setup is that this character is used to speaking directly to her audience, and so, she narrates to us while looking into the camera. But then, the drama adds another layer and we’re suddenly looking at a phone screen as our heroine addresses her followers. We see that the story she’s telling us is actually the story she’s livestreaming to her fan base. And so, the drama has pulled a little narrative trick, where we (the audience) are now lumped in with her fans as they hang on her every word. I have a feeling this is more than just a stylistic choice, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
With this storytelling method, we end up with two timelines. We’ve got the present time, where Ah-ri is livestreaming about how she got to where she is. And then we’ve got the backstory, shown in flashback, as Ah-ri narrates. In the past, we learn that Ah-ri is originally from a rich family but when she was 18, the family went broke (possibly something to do with her father’s death?). For the past 13 years, she and her mother (Nam Ki-ae) have been trying to make ends meet, living together in a humble house, with Mom running a tailor shop in Gangnam and Ah-ri selling cosmetics door to door.
Ah-ri is the number one sales person at her company, and we see her peddling her wares to a group of domestic workers in the home of a wealthy woman who we’ll come to learn is YOON SHI-HYUN (Lee Chung-ah). Ah-ri is a born product pusher, and we can see right away how she’d fare in the world of influencers, who are, after all, sales people.
At the start, Ah-ri has no social media accounts and isn’t interested in following anyone — online or in person. She has her own enviable style, natural self-confidence, and enough money problems to occupy her every waking thought without worrying about what other people are doing. So, she teases us, aren’t we curious about how she got into this business? She learned there’s a cheat code for becoming an influencer — don’t we want to know what it is?
It essentially starts because she has a connection to a power influencer named OH MIN-HYE (Jeon Hyo-sung). Ah-ri and Min-hye went to high school together, when Ah-ri was Burberry-backpack rich and Min-hye was taking her hand-me-downs. But now the tables have turned. When these two randomly run into each other, Ah-ri learns that Min-hye is uber rich from influencing, which makes Ah-ri curious about this online world of moneymaking she knows nothing about.
At the same time, Min-hye still thinks of Ah-ri as the rich, popular, naturally influential girl she went to high school with (with no clue about Ah-ri’s loss of money and status). So, Min-hye decides it could be beneficial for her to start hanging out with Ah-ri again (even if she thinks Ah-ri is a snob).
The kicking off point is that Min-hye gets mixed up in an online scandal amongst a group of power influencers (who all know each other offline) and their reputations are suddenly at stake. The top influencer, BINIIMOM (Jin So-yeon), has publicly posted her text conversations with the other influencers, showing their true (pretty bitchy) selves, which are not in line with their online personas. We come to find out that Min-hye initially became famous by linking up with Biniimom, and now that they have beef, Binnimom is airing all their dirty laundry in public.
When Ah-ri attends a party with Min-hye, she learns this “secret” about how to get famous: be a parasite. If you latch onto someone who’s already famous, you can get famous yourself. This is the cheat code she’s told us about at the beginning. Our Episode 1 flashback ends with Ah-ri looking on as Biniimom causes a scene, crashing the party she’s not invited to and smacking Min-hye in the face as everyone looks on. This, it appears, is what Ah-ri decides she wants to be a part of.
We end our episode in the present timeline, with Ah-ri livestreaming the story we’ve just witnessed. Then she speaks directly to all the influencers we’ve been introduced to. They must be afraid of this broadcast, she says — not because she’s giving away their secrets — but because she’s supposed to be dead.
We then see all the catty women from the influencer scandal looking at their phones in various parts of the city almost in hysterics about the fact that Ah-ri is alive. Ah-ri says she knows her murderer, who goes by the screenname _bbbfamous. This wraps our first episode with an intriguing mystery set up for both the viewers and the players in the story.
And so, I come back to my initial statement. I almost want to binge this one because I think they did a good job setting up the suspense (and I heard Junho has a cameo in Episode 12, which, I mean, what a way to entice me!). But the world the drama sets up is so icky — and just a little too on the nose — that I worry I’d be hate-watching the whole thing. Still, the visual storytelling device that pulls the viewers into the world of the drama — and makes us feel like Ah-ri’s followers — makes we wonder if this is going to be a cautionary tale. Will we be implicated in this (attempted) murder at the end as well?
The other thing that has me enticed is that all the leads are so likable. Who’s not in love with Park Kyu-young? That’s a given. But I’m also a fan of Lee Chung-ah, going all the way back to Flower Boy Ramyun Shop. And then there’s Kang Min-hyuk, who only showed up briefly but boy did he make an impact. I realized I have not watched him in a drama since Heirs ten years ago, and while he’s all grown up now, he’s still got that cutie-patootie smile that you can’t mistake anywhere. Just the few minutes he and Park Kyu-young appeared together had me a little hooked, not gonna lie.
In the end, my decision about watching comes down to this: what if my hunch is wrong and there isn’t a moral to this story? What if it’s a straight-up suspense thriller with no real social commentary? Can I sit through it then? And the answer is no. The first episode grated on me with its cattiness, gossip, backstabbing, and generic name dropping. And the ads for Instagram, along with a slew of designers, make this drama (on first impression) seem like a caricature of its content. Is this a real drama? Or are they just trying to sell us stuff? But then, is questioning that the entire point?