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5.21 - Special Review of Mr. Queen with Ernabel Demillo

Today, we’re doing a special recap and review of Mr. Queen with Professor Ernabel Demillo. For those of you who don’t know Ernabel, or Ernie as we call her, she is Department Chair of the Communication and Media Culture Department at Saint Peter's University and host of the Emmy-award winning "Asian American Life" show on CUNY-TV. We discuss:

  • Why we chose Mr. Queen in the first place for Season 5

  • Our favorite scenes from the entire season

  • The scenes we found the funniest, all of them involving Shin Hye-sun, of course!

  • That we think the show is ultimately about identity, change and transformation

  • How every one of the main characters was transformed in some way

  • Whether the king will love the queen in the same way, now that Jang Bong-hwan has left her body

  • The small issues we had with the show

  • How King Cheoljong DID try to enact some reforms, but was not successful

  • Asian-American Life (AAL), the only monthly TV show devoted to the Asian-American diaspora, life and experience in the US

  • How the theme of identify keeps coming up in episodes of AAL

  • Ernie’s favorite AAL segments, how they find stories, how they convince people to be featured, and how they 

  • How Ernie manages to be a full-time professor at St. Peter’s University AND be a producer and host of AAL; she’s also writing a book loosely based on her mom’s experience as a child in the Philippines during WWII

  • Why we chose Gyeongseong Creature, the show that we will recap and analyze in Season 6 of K Drama Chat

References



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K Drama Chat is a weekly podcast where we take one Korean (K) Drama each season and and recap and analyze each episode. K Drama Chat is available on Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotify and Stitcher.

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