Hey, everyone! How’s it going? Today I’m here to review the drama Pachinko, which delivers Apple TV+’s most emotionally devastating and visually stunning series, weaving together four generations of Korean immigrant history into a masterpiece that explores love, sacrifice, and the price of survival with unparalleled grace and authenticity.
Pachinko premiered on Apple TV+ on March 25, 2022, with season one featuring 8 episodes and season two featuring 8 episodes, each with approximately 60-minute runtime. Season two premiered on August 23, 2024. Based on Min Jin Lee’s acclaimed novel and created by Soo Hugh, this epic family saga stars Youn Yuh-jung, Minha Kim, Lee Min-ho, and Jin Ha in a story that spans from 1915 to 1989 across Korea, Japan, and America.
Pachinko isn’t just another immigrant story. It’s a profound meditation on identity, belonging, and the invisible threads that connect generations across time and geography. The series uses multiple timelines to show how historical trauma shapes family destinies, creating television that functions as both intimate family drama and sweeping historical epic about the Korean diaspora experience.
Across Generations: Love, Loss, and Legacy
Pachinko follows the saga of Sunja and her family across four generations, beginning with her birth in Japanese-occupied Korea and following her descendants through World War II, post-war reconstruction, and the modern era. The story explores how each generation carries the wounds and dreams of their ancestors while fighting to create better lives for their children.
The series excels at showing how historical forces shape individual destinies, as each character’s choices reflect broader themes of displacement, discrimination, and resilience. The narrative demonstrates how love and sacrifice ripple across generations, creating patterns of behavior that both sustain and constrain family members. Each timeline illuminates the others, creating a complex portrait of how the past continues to influence the present.
Sunja: The Heart Across Time
Youn Yuh-jung and Minha Kim deliver extraordinary performances as older and younger Sunja respectively, creating a seamless portrayal of a woman whose strength and determination define her family’s destiny. Youn Yuh-jung brings decades of life experience to show Sunja’s hard-won wisdom and quiet authority, while Kim captures the young woman’s fierce determination to protect her children at any cost.
Sunja’s character represents the series’ exploration of how ordinary people become heroes through everyday acts of courage and sacrifice. Both actresses show different aspects of the same indomitable spirit, demonstrating how survival requires both flexibility and unwavering core principles. Their combined performance creates one of television’s most complete and compelling female protagonists, showing how strength can manifest as both fierce protection and quiet endurance.
Hansu: Lee Min-ho’s Complex Protector
Lee Min-ho delivers a career-best performance as Koh Hansu, the wealthy Korean businessman whose relationship with Sunja spans decades and shapes her family’s fate in unexpected ways. Min-ho brings both charm and menace to the role, creating a character who’s simultaneously protector and threat, savior and destroyer. His performance avoids simple categorization, showing a man whose love expresses itself through control and manipulation.
Hansu’s character explores themes of power, identity, and the moral compromises required for survival in hostile environments. Min-ho shows us a man who has achieved success by becoming indispensable to the Japanese power structure while never forgetting his Korean identity. His relationship with Sunja becomes a metaphor for the complex negotiations required to maintain dignity while surviving oppression.
Season Two Expansion: War and Survival
Season two deepens the series’ exploration of World War II’s impact on Korean families living in Japan, showing how war transforms ordinary people into survivors who must make impossible choices. The season expands beyond Min Jin Lee’s novel to explore new storylines while maintaining the source material’s emotional authenticity and historical accuracy.
The second season demonstrates how historical trauma creates cycles of behavior that persist across generations, as characters repeat patterns of sacrifice and survival established by their ancestors. Without spoiling specifics, the season shows how individual choices during wartime continue to influence family dynamics decades later, creating consequences that ripple through time in unexpected ways.
A Community of Survivors
Pachinko features outstanding supporting performances from Jin Ha as Solomon, Anna Sawai as Naomi, and Jimmi Simpson as Tom Andrews. Each supporting character represents different aspects of the Korean diaspora experience, from successful assimilation to cultural preservation to the ongoing struggle against discrimination.
The series particularly excels at showing how immigrant communities create networks of mutual support that become essential for survival. Every supporting character brings distinct perspectives on what it means to maintain Korean identity while adapting to life in foreign countries. The ensemble work creates an authentic sense of community that grounds the epic scope in intimate human relationships.
Success on Apple TV+
Pachinko achieved unprecedented critical acclaim, earning a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes for season one and 93% for season two. The series earned multiple Emmy nominations and widespread international recognition, establishing Apple TV+ as a destination for prestige international content. Pachinko demonstrated that subtitled content could achieve mainstream success when combined with exceptional storytelling and production values, paving the way for more authentic international narratives on streaming platforms.
Why This Multigenerational Epic Demands Your Attention
If you love family sagas that explore how history shapes individual destinies, Pachinko is the perfect series to binge on Apple TV+. This isn’t just entertainment; it’s a profound meditation on identity, sacrifice, and the invisible connections that bind generations together across time and geography, creating television that expands our understanding of what it means to belong.
Why This Series Redefines Family Television
Pachinko succeeds because it understands that the most powerful stories are ultimately about how love persists across impossible circumstances. By showing how individual choices create family legacies that span generations, the series creates television that’s both intimate and epic. It’s beautiful, heartbreaking, and absolutely essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand how history lives within families and how courage can take many different forms.
Series Details
Number of Episodes: 16 episodes across 2 seasons (8 episodes each)
Platform: Apple TV+
Release Year: 2022-2024 (ongoing)
Current IMDb Rating: 8.4/10
Genre: Historical Family Drama/Epic Saga
Status: Currently airing, renewed for additional seasons
Protagonists: Youn Yuh-jung/Minha Kim (Sunja), Lee Min-ho (Hansu)
Antagonist: Historical forces of colonialism, war, and discrimination