Only eight more days until white collar crime procedural Mad Dog premieres, starring Yoo Ji-tae (The Good Wife), Woo Do-hwan (Rescue Me), and Ryu Hwa-young (Father Is Strange)! And to help us get excited for its arrival, more teasers and stills have been released. Yay!
The plot synopsis for Mad Dog is very similar to Police Unit 38: a refreshing drama that sends a counterstrike punch to a system that normalizes insurance crime, especially for the upper class. The character descriptions are also familiar: veteran police investigator who crosses moral boundary lines to catch his criminals (Yoo Ji-tae), check; young scam-artist-turned-temporary-good-guy-for-money (Woo Do-hwan), check; and beautiful female investigator (Ryu Hwa-young), check. But the similarities may end there, because in these new teasers, you can tell it’s going to be a totally different drama from the get-go.
Setting a thriller tone with its overcast colors, the teaser begins by announcing: “Korea, The Republic of Insurance Fraud.” A series of typical insurance scams are shown, like a car accident and a biking collision. Ryu Hwa-young whispers to someone that a man running healthily on the treadmill recently received a billion won for a supposed heart condition.
But not all accidents are planned—some are real tragedies. A plane crashes in midair leading to pandemonium, and Yoo Ji-tae cries in agony. Then Woo Do-hwan offers him a proposal: “If I can prove that this wasn’t an accident, I’ll take the 2.3 billion won insurance payment.”
In brief glimpses, we see other issues that are rooted in unjust allocation of insurance funds, which end up benefitting only the upper one percent as opposed to the people who really need it. Ryu Hwa-young is shown at a public demonstration against a careless construction site that killed people. A woman asks if everything can be solved with money, and a man replies coldly, “What other than money will you use to solve the problem?” The teaser ends with Yoo Ji-tae’s statement: “Korea isn’t a nation that listens to people who are powerless and poor, but I will listen to your story.”
The other 10-second promo clip doesn’t go that much into plot detail, but I love the gritty cartoon-photo-collage style of it. Both Yoo Ji-tae and Woo Do-hwan are shown, as the copy flashes onscreen: “Dark hero insurance investigation team refreshingly turns the world upside down.”
After playing an unscrupulous prosecutor in The Good Wife, Yoo Ji-tae seems a perfect fit in Mad Dog as an anti-hero, the leader of an investigation team who doesn’t care about what methods he uses to pursue justice. And I can’t wait to see Rescue Me’s breakout star Woo Do-hwan as an intellectual criminal who ends up working for the good guys.
Ooh, I’m getting chills of excitement already. KBS’s upcoming Wednesday-Thursday drama Mad Dog will begin airing on October 11.
