The Manipulated (조각도시)

What’s the Show? The 2025 Korean series, The Manipulated (조각도시)

What’s It All About, JG? Genial, mild-mannered delivery guy Park Tae-jung (Ji Chang-wook) is going about his normal life when he gets a call asking him to return a mobile phone that’s been lost for the promise of a reward. Deciding to, indeed, return the phone, he is instead framed for a murder and sent to prison. This is all a dastardly plan by An Yo-han (Doh Kyungo-s00), a sculptor/bad guy who is paid by very high-ranking clients to frame someone else for crimes they’ve committed. In this case, the son of an Assemblyman killed a woman in a drug-and-sex-fueled rage, and Park Tae-jung is framed for it, so the son gets off scot-free. The rest of the show is Park Tae-jung’s attempts to escape, clear his name, and bring down the whole conspiracy. He’s helped on the outside by a friend he made in prison, No Yong-sik (Kim Jong-soo), imprisoned for murdering his wife and trying desperately to reconnect with his estranged daughter on the outside. Along the way, there’s a fight to the death via car chase, assassins a-plenty, all the high-speed chases one could reasonably expect, some really strong character work, and a great collection of characters. Can Park Tae-jung clear his name and get his life back?

Why Did You Give It A Go? As you might have gathered, I have a lot of affection for K-Dramas. They make a refreshing change of pace from western shows, they’re often very well written and well put together, and this one came with a decent reputation and was easily available on streaming in the UK (Disney, in this case). And it had been a while since I had a new Korean drama to watch so this seemed like a good point to pick a new one up. And – last one, I promise – I’m just back from visiting South Korea and fell deeply in love with Seoul. So there’s that! Didn’t encounter any assassins but maybe it’s the off season?

Is It Any Good? Way, way better than it has any right to be, I’m pleased to report it absolutely is! And look, let’s be honest, “man falsely imprisoned for a crime her didn’t commit and has to clear his name” isn’t the most original pitch for a TV show ever. What makes The Manipulated remarkable is how well it takes what should be a very simple premise and spins it out into twelve incredibly compelling episodes without ever really feeling that it falls back on cliché or anything even approaching predictability.

One of the ways it achieves this is by being very light on its genre feet. The first couple of episodes gives us Park Tae-jung’s life – he’s got a girlfriend, a brother, a group of friends, and he works as a delivery driver while helping in a business selling plants (in a rather delightful ongoing plot thread, it turns out he cares about plants deeply). It’s all pretty standard stuff until it’s unrelentingly stripped away from him piece by piece, and that’s kind of the point. We get to see someone living a normal, workaday life, and while it’s nothing remarkable, its loss is still devastating. That’s true for him and it’s true for the audience too, who of course know he’s entirely blameless. Yet the conspiracy to frame him has been set up so well (right up to stealing condoms from his bin to get DNA evidence planted on the victim!), it’s not hard to understand why prosecutors, and even his friends and girlfriend, would judge him guilty.

The show then shifts to being a prison drama and all the various ways that Tae-jung has to survive on the inside. Some of this is, again, fairly familiar material – there’s an implied shower rape, people jostling for the position of top dog, and an escape attempt – but all executed with much more care and attention than a show like this would typically get (in either Korea or the West, to be clear). There’a real panache to it all but it also includes a key detail – despite having to harden up to survive, Park Tae-jung’s fundamental decency still comes through, which allows him to make friends with both No Yong-sik, whose help becomes vital to his survival on the outside, and prison guard Yang Chul-hwan, a good man trapped in a corrupt system who’s instrumental in helping to clear Tae-yung’s name.

After that, we shift to a slightly Squid Games-esque sequence where our Big Bad, An Yo-han, has prisoners race to the death. In honesty, this section is probably the least compelling of the show, since it really does feel derivative of Squid Game, rather than being a play on it or undercutting it in some way. It’s just a bunch of prisoners racing to the death for the amusement of rich clients and its only real plot contribution is that Tae-jong comes to understand who it is that’s so royally screwed over his life. It’s not badly done but it never approaches satire (beyond, “rich people pay for evil things”, in case you didn’t know that) and it feels a touch superfluous. Well shot, though.

Then he escapes and it’s off to life on the outside as a fugitive. And so on. The show keeps moving from genre to genre, which means not only does it never get stale, it develops a compulsive narrative drives that never lets up. There are slower moments, to be sure, and the very delicate, hesitant way in which No Yong-sik inches towards a reconciliation with his daughter is one of the show’s understated triumphs. It ought to be hackneyed, really, but because the performances are so strong, it becomes entirely believable. Kim Jong-soo delivers an incredibly regret-filled, sad performance, the reason for which only becomes clear toward the end of the season but he absolutely lands it. As his somewhat brattish daughter, No Eun-bi, Jo Yoon-su turns in a performance that straddles the line between an impenetrable outer shell matched with a real inner fragility at having been rejected by her father (ostensibly for her own good) and makes what could otherwise be a fairly rote part come alive.

And indeed, she embodies what makes The Manipulated great. Everything is just done so much better than it should be. The cast is a real notch above what you’d normally have in this kind of genre show. The stunts – of which there are many – are almost always spectacular and executed with real flair and realism. There’s very little evidence of CGI, and everything feels practical and tactile and, well, real. In particular, a late-in-the-day car chase through a long tunnel in Seoul, with Park Tae-jung on a bike pursuing a Maserati while being shot at, is simply spectacular for a TV show and a real highlight. You don’t need to have a car chase this good or this extended for your TV show. But it’s there anyway, maintaining The Manipulated‘s high standards right to the end of the show.

This show really is just great!

How Many of These Have You Watched? Oh, plenty. This is another Korean series that seems to exist for essentially one series and one series only. It’s twelve episodes long and, while there’s a tiny hint at the end that it could be spun out to an additional season or two, I wouldn’t expect it.

Would You Recommend It? Oh yeah, it’s fantastic! It’s actually the best action/thriller series I’ve seen in a very long time and there’s an assuredness and confidence about it that just makes it an incredibly compelling watch.

It’s also pleasing to see it break from some of the traditions of Korean TV that I’ve commented on in the past. For one, there’s no central romance running through it. Park Tae-jung has a girlfriend at the beginning of the series and reconnects with her at the end, but this isn’t a love-across-all-obstacles storyline – she’s more a framing device to indicate what it is that Tae-jung loses rather than anything more passionate. She’s important, but she’s not what the show’s about. Similarly, while they clearly (sort of) like each other, there’s no burgeoning romance between him and No Eun-bi, despite this being a bit of an obvious route for the show to go down (again, we see the show making smart choices rather than obvious ones). That means the narrative doesn’t get too cluttered and we escape from the cliché of soft-focus and swelling music.

This is also an astonishingly well-directed series. I’ve criticised more than a few Korean dramas in the past for having clearly well put together fights or action sequences, only to undermine them with shaky camerawork that makes the whole thing look like it was shot on an iPhone held by someone suffering from the DT’s. Not here. Car chases are coherent and it’s easy to keep track of what’s happening. Fights are incredibly well choreographed and put together, with a visceral realness that makes them just incredibly watchable. It all just flows and fits together.

I also couldn’t discuss the series without paying particular mention to our bad guy, the absolutely loathsome An Yo-han, delivered with a genuinely insane, giggling sincerity by Doh Kyungo-s00. He’s simply brilliant in the role, coming across as genuinely psychopathic and insane in a way that almost no TV villains do. It’s a performance that’s absolutely key to the success of The Manipulated, giving the sense that this is a real, genuine threat. He’s an absolute lunatic in the best possible way but the fact that he’s also a sculptor gives unusual shade to the piece as he uses the cover of his art for his crimes. There’s a moment when it’s revealed that his ever-attendant and unshakably loyal nanny was blinded by Yo-han when he was younger by pouring mercury in her eyes, and she describes it as, “an act of love”. It’s utterly repellent, genuinely horrific, and speaks to the incredibly twisted relationship between them without the need to go all Grand Guignol. In fact, it’s a quiet moment of revelation and all the more effective for it.

But the star of the show really is the star of the show. Ji Chang-wook is simply brilliant as Park Tae-jung, inhabiting the likeable, easy-to-be-around version that starts the series and the hard-bitten, intent-on-revenge version that he becomes. The hard-bitten version still manages to retain some of Tae-jung’s fundamental decency, and in this, Ji Chang-wook excels, never letting the circumstances Tae-jung’s been forced into overwhelm who he fundamentally is, even when battling through a whole horde of bad guys with a home-made nail gun (did I not mention that before? I probably should have mentioned that before). His cautious friendships, his desperation to clear his name, his indignity at what he’s been forced to go through, all resonate clearly and it’s a remarkable performance. This is even more important when Tae-jung and Yo-han finally face off.

Because of course that’s what it all comes down to, a battle between the two. This really needs to convince as the culmination of everything that’s come before, and thankfully, it does. It’s a terrific final battle that I won’t say any more about here but which absolutely justifies the twelve episode build-up. It feels like a worthy conclusion as Tae-jung finally gets to confront the person who, pretty much on a whim, chose him to take the fall for someone else’s crime and in the process destroyed his life.

If there’s a flaw to The Manipulated, it might be that what follows this final confrontation is maybe a trifle rushed. It’s all logical, it all makes sense, but it could have done with maybe just a few more minutes to make moments of reconciliation land or to make the emotional beats have slightly longer to register. But really, beyond that, this has turned out to be an absolutely terrific TV show – compulsive, engaging, emotional, heartfelt, and just stuffed to the gills with action, adventure, stunts, twists, and turns. It’s a brilliant show and a lovely way to get back to watching some more K-drama.

Scores on the Doors? 8.5/10 The ending is fractionally rushed and the Squid Game redux really isn’t necessary, though it’s only an episode and a bit long.