The Potato Lab, Netflix review - a K-drama with heart and wit

When the world’s darkness is too much, there is a Netflix rabbit-hole you can disappear down to a kinder place: the Korean romcoms section. This is a recommendation for romcom fans, a warm indulgent bubble bath of a watch. It's like turning the clock back to more innocent times, while full of contemporary pizzazz. 

The latest series to drop, a Netflix coproduction, is the most accessible yet, and the funniest. Having said that, The Potato Lab sounds as if it comes from the People’s Republic in the north. It’s a variant of the workplace comedy that’s been in TV’s DNA since The Rag Trade, bundled with a love story. These invariably inventive hullya scenarios can land anywhere – a parallel universe, the long-gone past, a modern convenience store. The couple will battle weird barriers, from one of them being a hologram to both being separated by the DMZ; at the least, they will have differing social status, the man inevitably the richer. The course of their relationship will then unspool for 16 to 20 hour-plus episodes, a scale that allows texture to build up in an almost novelistic way. 

The Potato Lab is unusual for lasting a mere 12 episodes, but that’s no bad thing. It’s tightly and wittily written, driven by the standard love-hate dynamic familiar from Pride and Prejudice, but heavier on the social comedy and prone to larky screwball antics. Think Ealing comedies spliced with Bridget Jones, but governed by sterner social rules and with much better cheekbones, skin and hair (that’s just the men). 

The heroines are diligent employees, but mischievous and feisty – dangerously so when they come skilled in martial arts, usually thanks to a (now dead) father who trained them alongside the boys in his taekwondo studio. The meanies are impeccably suited and booted corporates, intent on “modernising” and messing with their workers’ lives. The hero will usually start out as a meanie but be gradually softened and moulded by the heroine and the forces of the plot into an acceptable human being. As in Pride and Prejudice, for the first half he is likely to be arrogant at best (think Mr Darcy to the power of three), or even hateful, a heartless machine. Their spats are delivered at a speed the subtitles can barely keep up with.Then at the halfway point the plotting pivots and emotions start to stir – signalled by a tinkly piano, an audible heartbeat, a freeze-frame two-shot, even little pink cartoon hearts popping up on-screen. Now the script has to start throwing up roadblocks to the couple’s happiness: an overbearing and scheming mother, a rich and scheming ex, a rival and scheming colleague. There’s no attempt to disguise this formula; The Potato Lab even has a built-in meta-commentary pointing it out, as the second female lead, a wannabe romance writer, regularly comments on how the characters would be faring if they were In a romance novel.

The corporate meanies in The Potato Lab inhabit a glass Seoul skyscraper, part of Wonhan, a food and drink conglomerate that has bought out the country’s leading crisps manufacturer, rurally based Sunnyeo. The giant has to decide how to handle its new minions, and deploys its head of Strategic Planning, So Baek-ho (Kang Tae-oh, the love interest in another very watchable Korean export, Extraordinary Attorney Woo), to handle the takeover. 

Predictably, Mr So is an impassive Spock-like logician, nicknamed “Tin Man" by his only friend. His fancy car can be controlled by remote control; so can his emotions. Then he comes nose to nose with the life force that is Kim Mi-kyung (Lee Sun-bin), a 36-year-old Sunnyeo lab worker with a passion for breeding potatoes, who keeps cuddly-toy potatoes by her bed. She is, naturally, stunning beautiful. But he may have to sack her, to fulfil his brief from HQ.

Ms Kim had fled product planning at Wonhan six years previously, when her fiancé, an ambitious coworker, discarded her for, surprise, the chairman’s daughter; he is now the executive director. Exit Ms Kim to the rural guesthouse run by her younger brother. Which is inevitably where Mr So chooses to stay while downsizing the potato lab. Joining him there is the chairman’s wayward daughter, a childhood friend; she has dumped her husband, Ms Kim’s ex, and he now wants to keep their divorce a secret. Destiny is putting him on a collision course with the lab and Ms Kim.

The comedy is exceptionally physical (except in the bedroom; clothes rarely come off, though long big hugs are standard). Ms Kim is no martial arts expert but she is a champion pranker, her eyes lighting up at any opportunity to humiliate Mr So, whom she dislikes immediately, despite acknowledging that he is “handsome”. He endures a magpie attack; an epic roll down dusty fields until caught in a worker’s wheelbarrow; and harassment by the local elders, egged on by Ms Kim, who demand he pays them for the right to stay in their district. That’s just in episode one. 

Sometimes the comedy is a touch raucous and broad for Western tastes (think Shakespeare’s mechanicals to the power of three), but at its best it’s genial screwball slapstick. Especially in episode 3, where Mr So shows off his hidden talents at a potato-cooking competition, gained as a military chef (John Belushi’s Samurai Chef is a pale imitation), having already done a spectacularly balletic turn directing cars, after nine months as a parking attendant at an amusement park.

The fun comes in spotting the mechanics of the formula clicking in: minute gestures that indicate budding feelings, especially in Mr So’s case. He's a blank, impassive canvas, but a flicker of a smile and a slightly raised eyebrow hint at a stirring hinterland. And Ms Kim, her face regularly scrunched up into a sneer or a frown, can shed a tear with the best of them (the stars of these series are champion blubbers on demand, though always decoratively so). Importantly, her anger at her former fiancé is the response of a badly treated woman, not the fury of a harridan.

It’s this generosity towards its characters that lifts K-drama above the flippant; it’s goofy one moment, oddly grounded the next. Its characters can look like big kids, overstuffing their mouths at mealtimes, loud and sulky if crossed, partial to brightly coloured junk food, but their lives are not 100% rose-tinted. Many are orphans, like Mr So, or have lost a parent early, like Ms Kim. Tenderness is their stock in trade, but sentimentality is usually avoided, even when the tinkly piano starts up. In a rare act of character rebellion, early on in The Potato Lab Ms Kim swears at it, and it shuts up. 

The chaste, teasing nature of these relationships is a relief after the explicit carnality of today’s TV. The Potato Lab’s leads are comparatively mature, yet still mindful that there are lines they shouldn’t cross. Their older colleagues will point these out, anyway. Single people cannot be seen together in compromising situations if they are not officially “dating” or actually engaged. (“Dating” means being halfway to the altar as it is.) Elders and superiors must be bowed to and addressed formally, unless they say otherwise. Loyalty and honesty are key qualities. Here, just a hand reaching for another hand for the first time can carry a real charge. Respect is as valued as sex appeal.

Hullya stars pay a price for their fame, sadly, besieged by fans, their lives under heavy surveillance – as one leading man is currently discovering, his career cancelled by allegations about his role in his actress girlfriend’s suicide. Before this bonkers bubble pops, though, relax and enjoy the ride. 

• More TV reviews on theartsdesk