Busted! (2018) — Season 1 Review

Reality TV shows where celebrities play games, take on escape-room style challenges, and/or try to get to the bottom of mysterious events have become quite popular in Asian television, and Korea is sort of ground zero for these concepts. With Busted!, Netflix hired Yu Jae-Seok[[1]], one of the titans of the comedic variety-show circuit as the lynchpin of their first foray into the "Detective Game Show" space.

It's an interesting effort—frequently cheesy, frequently funny, sometimes exciting, and sometimes vexing. It is a "semi-scripted" experience: there are scripted "interlude" scenes—what we video gamers might call "cutscenes"—around the game-play, which is unscripted as the cast attempts to accomplish some objective. There are in general a few main "modes" of gameplay for these shows: the mystery investigation[[2]], the party game challenge[[3]], and the escape room challenge[[4]]. Busted! tries to bake a cake made from all of these parts, and hold it all together with a loose overarching storyline and cheesy cutscenes. And, amazingly, it kind of works?

As I watched it, I found myself repeatedly thinking that it (inadvertently, I suspect) had the organizational logic of a tabletop roleplaying game—hear me out! It begins with brief "cutscenes" introducing the celebrity cast, who are playing versions of themselves with some nascent "sleuthing" abilities. They are brought together under the aegis of a mysterious patron running a secretive organization. Apparently, this organization has implanted the essences of famous detectives into these characters, and intends to turn them loose on the hardest and most unsolvable cases now that their powers are activating. That's the first session of a roleplaying game if I've ever heard one!

The cases range all over the place in tone and theme from the classic Christie-style murder to goofy treasure hunts, and some even include gothic horror elements, delivered with scenery-chewing enthusiasm. They're more pastiche than they are innovative, more comedy than serious drama, and usually land in that adventure-slapstick range, all of which feels like a cozy little roleplaying game.

Solving the cases involves some mixture of adventure travel, mildly-embarrassing minigames to extract information from reluctant witnesses, clues to find and work into theories, mildly challenging deductions to make, and the team is frequently required to race a (not too stressful) timer, corner a suspect, or solve an escape room sequence. One gets the sense that the showrunner—like a GM who is trying to keep their players on-track—sometimes puts their finger on the scale. Not to the extent of trivializing the challenges, but sometimes I think they realized something wasn't working and tilted the playing field a little. The crew does fail or partially fail on a couple of occasions, so it was never a free pass.

Naturally, we come to find out that there is a nefarious organization of evildoers out there that they are destined to tangle with. Of course! There are predictable and overwrought twists a-plenty. Again, this is all just like a tabletop RPG: there are the adventures-of-the-week that first introduce the party's formula and then work to mix it up; they're introduced by scripted scenes and peppered with semi-improvised dialogue; inevitably the crew finds connections back to the overarching storyline and the villains that seemingly shadow their moves, and so on and so forth. The overarching plot hangs together more by enthusiasm and not-thinking-about-it-too-hard in that way that TTRPG plots so frequently do.

Also like a tabletop RPG: seven is also a tough number for the cast to all really have good spotlight-time—and with only two of them being women it sort of felt like there were a couple too many guys. But the cast chemistry is reasonably good. Jongmin (of The Great Escape) is here and remains a most delightfully affable "himbo". Minyoung and Jae-wook provide the reasoning smarts. Sejeong and Sehun, our two kpoppers, provide the heart and glue for the team. Jae-seok chivvies the guys mercilessly and remains committed to the bit, no matter how cheesy the situation gets.

So... is it good? For me, it's a qualified yes. None of the deductive mysteries rise to the excellent level of a Crime Scene and none of the escape room challenges get as good as The Great Escape, the scripted bits are frequently just a little too cheesy, the finger-on-the-scale-sometimes feeling is a bit disappointing, but there isn't really anything else that has tried to combine things this way. There are two more seasons of this and I'd like to see slightly fewer cutscenes, slightly less aggressively produced editing, and more attention to engaging mystery and puzzle solves. But I did find it enjoyable as-is, once I adapted myself to not taking the scripted bits seriously. By contrast, the scripted parts of Netflix's Zombieverse really put a dent in my enjoyment of that show; this isn't nearly as bad as that.

A solid B from me. Anything I've mentioned here is a recommendation for further viewing.

[[1]]: Who appears to be something of a national treasure of Korean television. Seems like a delightful person!

[[2]]: Crime Scene is the very model of the more deductive / sleuthy game show. Highly recommended.

[[3]]: Village Survival, to name but one of so many other shows, often starring Jae-seok.

[[4]]: The Great Escape is sort of the paradigmatic escape-room show. Highly recommended.