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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Kim Dong-wook, Seo Hyun-woo, Park Ji-hwan, Park Se-wan, Lee Seung-woo
The antics of Seoul’s worst-performing detective squad are brought to the screen for our amusement in the broad procedural comedy Seoul Busters on Disney+.
Kim Dong-wook (My Perfect Stranger) leads the cast as the overperforming Dongbang Yu-bin, a police academy ace working as a professor in the United States who returns home to Korea to fill the post of captain of the severely underperforming Violent Crimes Unit 2 at the Songwon Police Department.
While murder, abuse and suicide do crop up in the show, the tone is light and bright. As the story begins, our bumbling detectives botch a stakeout in a park and their captain takes the blame – and with it a forced transfer to the countryside.


What remains of the team is relocated to the most demoralising temporary office space a team of homicide detectives could ever dream up. Rather than being in a testosterone-fuelled bullpen, they find themselves working out of a former kindergarten.
The establishment may no longer be a school, but no one has bothered to clear away the toys and debris before our protagonists move in. The only team member who does not seem phased by this is Jeong Jeong-hwan (Seo Hyun-woo, Uncle Samsik), who delights in picking up dinosaur toys for his son.
Male detectives are forced to hold their private meetings in emasculating bathrooms, squatting down to pint-sized urinals and sitting down on toilets with partitions that barely reach above their elbows.
What’s more, mothers are still leaving their children in the building to be minded for a few hours, despite the fact that the teachers have been replaced by detectives.

Despite their less-than-ideal surroundings, the real work begins when their new phone rings, informing them of a death that needs to be investigated.
Veteran detective Mu Jung-ryeok (Park Ji-hwan, The Outlaws) and rookie detective Jang Tan-sik (Lee Seung-woo, Vigilante) head to the scene, where they learn that a young man has died in an apparent suicide.
The man was the manager of a leading entertainment star and left behind a suicide note, making it appear like an open-and-shut case. This is when Yu-bin appears, and he raises his doubts to the team before identifying himself as their new captain.
An investigation begins into whether the suicide was real or staged, which includes heading to the entertainment agency where the man worked.

As the plot thickens, the Violent Crimes Unit learn about their new captain, who has a keen eye for evidence and is endowed with a prodigious knowledge of random facts.
Even more so than last year’s Disney+ comedy cop show Han River Police, Seoul Busters is primarily interested in eliciting laughs from its audience. Slapstick abounds, while some of the local humour will flow over the heads of foreign viewers.
The focus on the comedy is so intense that it is frequently at odds with the procedural element of the show. When that first call comes in, Tan-sik initially picks up a toy phone by mistake; then, he and Jung-ryeok first head to the wrong address for a comic interlude before arriving at the scene of the crime.
This approach can work for a full-on American comedy with half-hour episodes in the vein of Brooklyn Nine-Nine – another cop comedy show – but with its longer run times and the likelihood that we will delve into the backstories of its protagonists, Seoul Busters seesaws uncomfortably between its desire to entertain and its need to tell a story.

With straight shoulders and a ready grin, Kim affords the cocksure Yu-bin with a smarmy air in a performance that is reminiscent of Namkoong Min in One Dollar Lawyer.
The heavy lifting is left to the more overtly comic turns of the supporting cast. Seo is efficient as the vaguely sycophantic Jeong-hwan, while Park Se-wan (Doona!) huffs and puffs as the plucky young detective Seo Min-seo and Lee plays the runt of the litter, the scatterbrained Tan-sik.
Most effective of all are the adroit comic stylings of Park Ji-hwan, whose elastic expressions and amusing outbursts frequently steal the show, much as they have in the popular big-screen The Roundup series.
The particular style of comedy offered by Seoul Busters – which includes many instances of toilet humour – aims wide and may hit the mark for a broad range of viewers, while others may find its brand of comedy off-putting.

The humour will surely be tempered as the story evolves and the characters grow beyond the mere caricatures they are now, but only time will tell if Seoul Busters will successfully manage that transition.
Seoul Busters is streaming on Disney+.


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Over-the-top humour and slapstick comedy characterise show about a useless police team and an expert (Kim Dong-wook) brought in to lead them


Over-the-top humour and slapstick comedy characterise show about a useless police team and an expert (Kim Dong-wook) brought in to lead them.
