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Inkoo Kang

Inkoo Kang is a regular film contributor at Voice Media Group. VMG publications include Denver Westword, Miami New Times, Phoenix New Times, Dallas Observer, Houston Press and New Times Broward-Palm Beach.

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Frank Spotnitz Lays Out His Version of a Nazi America in The Man in the High Castle

By Inkoo Kang
Nov 20, 2015

The Nazis lost World War II, but they've conquered the American imagination. Seventy years after his suicide, Hitler is still everywhere: in the movies, on YouTube, in political headlines and on the History Channel. The latest manifestation of our Third Reich fixation is The Man in the High Castle, Amazon's...
Mike O’Malley’s Brilliant Family Sitcom 'Survivor’s Remorse' Asks New Questions About the American Dream

By Inkoo Kang
Sep 11, 2015

The American Dream killed Jay Gatsby and Willy Loman, but their TV counterparts have mostly fared better. Sure, Walter White ends up in a metaphorical ditch and Tony Soprano may too. But the serialization of TV storytelling largely means that characters on shows like Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,...
Netflix’s 'Narcos' Tries to Be 'The Wire' for Colombia’s Drug War

By Inkoo Kang
Aug 28, 2015

Narcos, Netflix’s new drug-war docudrama, is nearly as ambitious as its central character, Pablo Escobar. Over the course of 10 dense, sprawling episodes, the series tells the 20-year history of the narcotrafficker's rise and fall in relation to Colombia’s blood-soaked history and the U.S.’s escalating drug war, from Richard Nixon...
In HBO's 'Show Me a Hero,' David Simon Takes Sides in a Desegregation War

By Inkoo Kang
Aug 13, 2015

Less than a generation ago, Yonkers, New York became the face of segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation in my backyard. A federal court order to construct 200 units of low-income residences east of the Saw Mill Parkway, i.e., in the white part of town, led to riots and bombings, death...
'Another Period' Is Comedy Central’s Hilarious Distillation of 99-Percenter Rage

By Inkoo Kang
Jul 16, 2015

Few networks are as willing to bet on new voices as Comedy Central. The network’s hustling approach to original programming has yielded such breakout hits as Broad City, Inside Amy Schumer, and Key & Peele — some of the freshest and most distinctive shows of the last few years. Just three...
Gonna Miss Jon Stewart? Don’t Worry, Larry Wilmore’s Hitting His Stride

By Inkoo Kang
Jul 2, 2015

After 12years on the air, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart became required viewing during the Dubya years, when much of the nation was desperate to look to almost anyone else for political leadership. The Comedy Central series offered nightly catharsis in five- or eight-minute bursts, voicing the anger and frustration...
Five Reasons iZombie Is Summer's Most Underrated Show

By Inkoo Kang
Jun 4, 2015

iZombie is about as sunny and optimistic as the zombie genre gets, which of course isn't all that much. Even by supernatural standards, it's a bloodthirsty canon, demanding regular sacrifices of innocents and grisly feats of skull splitting and cerebellum cannibalizing. The CW's Seattle neo-noir boasts plenty of both to...
How Amy Schumer Became This Generation's Latest Truth-Teller

By Inkoo Kang
May 21, 2015

During "Compliments," a first-season sketch on Inside Amy Schumer, a group of female friends respond to every bit of praise with a verbal self-maiming: "I tried to look like Kate Hudson but ended up looking like a golden retriever's dingleberry," says one. Sighs another, "Of course I see everyone when...
J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy Makes a Successful Leap to the Small Screen

By Inkoo Kang
Apr 29, 2015

Author J.K. Rowling's rags-to-riches biography is arguably better known than her most famous creation, Harry Potter. As the oft-repeated origin story goes, Rowling was a single mother making ends meet, aided by government assistance while she was scribbling the first installment of her phenomenally successful fantasy series in a café...
FX's Hillbilly Noir Justified Was the Forgotten Prestige TV Show

By Inkoo Kang
Apr 15, 2015

No show wears its love for language and land more proudly than FX's Justified, which ended its six-year run on April 14. Based on a novella by Elmore Leonard and starring squinty-eyed sex symbol Timothy Olyphant, the hillbilly noir never received the critical adulation or the audience one might expect...
Game of Thrones Season 5 Preview: Women Warriors Take Over Westeros

By Inkoo Kang
Apr 8, 2015

It may be hard to remember now, but there once was a time when Daenerys was the most exciting character on Game of Thrones. Played by Emilia Clarke, the exiled royal best embodied the HBO drama's paradoxical appeal: its mix of historical authenticity and rousing fantasy. Reduced to currency by...
Mad Men: What's Left After Achieving Everything?

By Inkoo Kang
Apr 1, 2015

Mad Men has always been, among many other things, about the exit of the old guard and the entrance of the new — and the acceleration of that transition by the mood and the movements of the Sixties. The pilot, set in 1960, finds the Sterling Cooper higher-ups scrambling to...
Two Generations, One Actress: Sutton Foster on Her Empowering Role in Younger

By Inkoo Kang
Mar 26, 2015

Doing everything right in one generation just makes you old-fashioned, even obsolete, in the next. That’s the harsh reality that confronts 40-year-old Liza — played with spirited, sarcastic élan by Tony-winning actress Sutton Foster — when she attempts to re-enter the workforce after a decade and a half of stay-at-home...
Tina Fey's Weird and Winsome Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Channels Liz Lemon and Leslie Knope

By Inkoo Kang
Mar 4, 2015

The world is a terrible place. That's the uncompromising truth with which Tina Fey and Robert Carlock begin Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix), their follow-up to the under-seen but culturally monumental 30 Rock. The very first scenes of Unbreakable's first season, which will be released in its binge-able entirety on March...
Archer Sags Into Middle Age in Its Sixth, "Unrebooted" Season

By Inkoo Kang
Feb 26, 2015

TV shows aren't too different from people in at least one respect: The longer they've been around, the less interest they tend to garner. But the sixth season of FX's beloved spy spoof Archer is like few others. It's an "unrebooting" of the previous year, in which creator Adam Reed,...
Five Reasons Why Fox's Empire Has Become a Breakout Hit

By Inkoo Kang
Feb 19, 2015

Empire most certainly wasn't built in a day, but its reputation as a breakout hit has been made in virtually no time at all. Since the series debuted six weeks ago, every episode has drawn more viewers than the one before it. Buoyed by positive reviews and especially word of...
The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore Asks the Right Questions, But Doesn't Have Any Answers

By Inkoo Kang
Jan 21, 2015

The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore's great misfortune isn't that it replaces The Colbert Report, but that it premieres after Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. The Colbert Report was sui generis, and will likely remain so, because such a series makes leviathan demands on its host: crackerjack comedic skills,...
Girls, Season 4: Lena Dunham Doesn't Let Hannah & Co. Grow Up

By Inkoo Kang
Jan 13, 2015

Among many other things, Girls has always been great satire, lampooning with scolding empathy the callowness, narcissism, and insufferableness of early-to-mid twentysomethings who are privileged enough to spend their post-grad years making mistake after mistake with no serious consequences. But the HBO dramedy's fourth season, in which Hannah (Lena Dunham)...
The 10 Best TV Shows of 2014

By Inkoo Kang
Dec 18, 2014

TV continued to unmoor from its origins and transform into something else this year. No longer tethered to a specific appliance, a particular kind of storytelling, or even commercial concerns, "television" now feels like an increasingly obsolete word...
HBO's Getting On Is the Brainiest (and Fartiest) Comedy You're Not Watching

By Inkoo Kang
Dec 12, 2014

Hospitals are depressing. Until recently, medical shows glossed over this basic fact of life by focusing on the most glamorous clique within them: doctors. For the past two decades, the upwardly mobile audience identification integral to most TV shows taught us to look away from the bedpans and sheaves of...
Netflix's Marco Polo Is Everything That's Wrong With Game of Thrones

By Inkoo Kang
Dec 12, 2014

Despite its sumptuous displays of feudal opulence -- cavalries, silk gowns, all the naked female extras money can buy -- Netflix's Marco Polo feels distinctly like scraps. Turgid, fatuous, and humorless, the streaming site's newest series is a grave miscalculation of what has made Game of Thrones, its obvious model,...

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Inkoo Kang