Soo Hugh writes television about what history does to people who never asked to be in it, and she is unembarrassed to call the result melodrama. On the evidence of Pachinko she is right not to be embarrassed.
Fi1m perspective
The subtitles in Pachinko come in two colours. Korean is yellow and Japanese is blue, and after an episode or two you stop reading them as a courtesy and start reading them as a scoreboard. A character who switches from one to the other in the middle of a conversation is buying something or paying for it, and the colour tells you which before the line does. That is Soo Hugh's method in one device: the large facts of history arrive as small choices made by people at a market stall or in a bank.
She came to television from marketing and advertising and served the usual apprenticeship in other people's rooms, as a staff writer on The Killing (2011) and Under the Dome (2013). The Whispers (2015), a supernatural drama, was her first series as creator. The Terror (2018) was horror, and she ran its first season with David Kajganich. Then came Pachinko (2022), adapted from Min Jin Lee's novel: one Korean family across most of a century, sixteen episodes over two seasons, in Korean, Japanese and English. It is the work everything before it now looks like preparation for.
Her governing decision is not to tell the story in order. A girl hauling fish through a Busan market in the 1920s and a man in a good suit in a Tokyo lift in 1989 share the same forty-odd minutes, and the cut between them does the work the dialogue does not. Kogonada and Justin Chon, who direct much of the series, hold both eras to the same unhurried pace, so the join never jars. We will admit that the first of those cuts, from the girl to the man, caught us harder than we had braced for. It was the plainness of it, one face and then another, and the decades between them left for us to count.
It does not always come off. The historical half of Pachinko is as fine a stretch of television drama as we have seen in years; the modern half, in that Tokyo bank, is a decent programme sharing the same hour, and the intercutting means it is never allowed out of the other's shadow. Viewers who do not know the novel have found the structure hard to follow, and some critics think the whole thing is too much of a melodrama. Hugh would not apologise for the second charge. "I’m very much interested in storytelling about the big forces of history with a capital “H,” how that’s lived out by the everyday people on the ground," she has said, and she uses the word melodrama for her own work without flinching.
She is developing a feature to direct herself, and we are curious. Sixteen hours let her follow one family across a century. Two will make her choose which decades to drop, and choosing what to leave out has not so far been the thing she is known for.
Biography
Soo Hugh is an American television writer, producer and showrunner. She began her career in marketing and advertising before moving into television writing, with early staff writer credits on series including The Killing (2011).
Hugh created and served as showrunner on The Whispers (2015) and was co-showrunner on the first season of The Terror (2018). She is the creator and showrunner of the Apple TV+ series Pachinko (2022–), an adaptation of Min Jin Lee's novel, for which she also wrote episodes. The series received a Peabody Award in 2022.
Her other writing credits include episodes of Under the Dome (2013), See (2019) and The Whispers. She is based in New York and has signed overall deals with Apple TV+ and Media Res.
