K-drama Happiness: Han Hyo-joo makes formidable return to TV in focused zombie series

Happiness is a relatively easy-going story with doses of drama and comedy in its first four episodes, while Han exudes grace and grit in the lead role

Gore hounds after a zombie fix will have to adjust their expectations – the series concentrates more on establishing social dynamics than shocking scenes

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Han Hyo-joo makes her return to the small screen after a five-year hiatus in K-drama Happiness.

Published: 3:15pm, 17 Nov 2021Updated: 3:50pm, 17 Nov 2021

High concepts come with high expectations and as each drama series strives to be the next big thing, storytellers in South Korea try to give us something we’ve never seen before. Occasionally this results in something truly fresh and exciting, but more often than not it leads to something big and brash that tries too hard to please.

Happiness, a new 12-part horror-thriller series marking the return of actress Han Hyo-joo, is neither of these things.

Instead, this zombie show set in an apartment block judiciously picks the right elements from recent shows and films and crafts them into an easy-to-digest and fun-to-watch series that seems more concerned with doing the simple things right than wowing us with big and aggressive swings.

Ever since Train to Busan five years ago, zombies, or creatures closely modelled after them, have run rampant across Korean media. They run, twitch and squirm in unusual ways, but they’ve seldom been particularly frightening.

Instead, the stories – many of them social parables – they find themselves in, and the characters within them they try to attack, are the things that have drawn our interest.