ReviewK-drama review: The Witch’s Diner – supernatural drama starring Song Ji-hyo falls apart after a promising start

Look beyond its colourful sets and rich costumes and The Witch’s Diner offers little – the show’s internal logic is off and the characters are sadly underwritten

Song Ji-hyo does her best with what she’s given but there’s precious little for her to play with – the rest of the cast are even less effective

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Song Ji-hyo in a still from The Witch’s Diner. After a lengthy intro, her character fades somewhat into the background for the rest of the series.

Pierce Conran

Published: 10:48am, 24 Aug 2021Updated: 10:12am, 25 Aug 2021

Corrected [10:11am, 25 Aug, 2021]

[10:11am, 25 Aug, 2021]
Tom Kim hosted a birthday party for his daughter, not his son.

This article contains spoilers.

1.5/5 stars

With their repetitive storylines and sometimes drawn-out dialogue delivery, K-dramas can be long-winded, but thankfully television is a flexible medium, with formats being altered all the time to fit different stories and mediums.

Streaming services are the most elastic platform yet to emerge for small-screen content, and what we’ve seen in South Korea are some shows pitched to online audiences with more ambitious but tighter storylines, such as Kingdom.

The Witch’s Diner, just the second original programme from the fledgling Korean streaming service Tving, is brief by Korean drama standards. With eight episodes averaging 40 minutes, it’s less than a third the length of a typical series with 16 70-minute episodes, yet it still follows a classic K-drama narrative template.