What a view | Netflix K-drama series The Good Bad Mother starring Lee Do-hyun mixes pig farming with murder and corruption

Asia’s sometimes somnolent animal rights activists seem to have struck a blow for porcine appreciation at the start of The Good Bad Mother (Netflix, continuing).

A poignant drama (with ironic comedy) at least minimally about the ethical and commercial pressures of pig farming in the South Korea of the 1980s and later, the series, now building to its conclusion, is expertly launched by Ra Mi-ran as Jin Young-soon.

Mother to Choi Kang-ho (Lee Do-hyun), Young-soon is a widow, her pig-farmer husband having been murdered by thugs who destroyed their first property – and were then protected by a corrupt prosecutor. Young-soon, manic in her determination to see Kang-ho enjoy a better life than hers, forces him to study obsessively – thereby turning her son against her while becoming a prototype “tiger mother”.

Fast-forward through high school, and a fledgling romance that goes about as far as anything else in the boy’s existence that isn’t an academic slog, and Kang-ho has blitzed every law exam on his way to becoming a prosecutor.

And here comes the first slap in the face (not counting his pitiless rejection of his admittedly overbearing mother) for viewers who sympathise with him: Kang-ho is now in the pay of the same venal prosecutor who shielded his father’s killers. Perhaps worse, he is also dating the prosecutor’s shallow, arrogant daughter (portrayed suitably sneeringly by Hong Bi-ra).

Naturally, a comeuppance awaits Kang-ho for his cold-hearted, calculating behaviour (if that’s really what it is) and it isn’t long in arriving. Consequently, he finds himself back in the care of his mother; and the way that their joltingly altered relationship works out is the key to the resolution of a story with far deeper plot roots than first appear.