In the early hours of December 21, 2024, the palace burned down. A fire swept through a production facility in Yeoncheon County, South Korea, taking the main set buildings and a warehouse of lighting equipment with it. The set was empty and nobody was hurt. What burned was the home of The East Palace, a Netflix series about a royal residence with something wrong inside its walls, and the production's answer was to build the palace again and keep shooting. Nineteen months later, the show that came out of that second palace is the number two non-English series on Netflix worldwide, charting in the top ten in eighty-one countries by FlixPatrol's count. The one place it has not landed is the American Top 10, and that absence says more about the chart than about the show. A Ghost Slayer, a Court Lady, and a House Where Heirs Die The setup is clean. In a fictional version of Joseon-era Korea, princes keep dying inside the East Palace, and the court has long since filed it under a c...
Personal essays on television and film. One viewer's honest thoughts on the stories worth watching — written with care.