Celebrity (Review)
Netflix did it again: after a string of great K-Dramas they’ve released this year so far (The Glory, Queenmaker, and Love to Hate You) they’ve just premiered Celebrity, another great original show. Celebrity is a thriller which presents a realistic and disturbing insight into the lives of online influencers. They couldn’t release it at a more opportune time. Just a few days after its release Meta’s Instagram released its new app, Threads, reigniting the war between social media platforms. Instagram itself features prominently in the show, as the main app the characters of the show use. Normally I would consider that a product placement, so typical for Korean shows, but the creators of Celebrity did not shy away from showing its dark side.
An online celebrity (or e-celebrity) Seo Ah-ri (Park Gyu-young) is the main character of the show and its narrator. Thanks to a coincidence she becomes involved with a group of female influencers known as “Gabin Society.” She uses that to launch her own online career. Little did she know it would result in personal tragedies of people she knew, as well as her own.
The show starts from her livestream launched a couple of months after her supposed death. This sets the stage and stakes for the entire show, right away sparking interest of the viewers. In the course of the show we get to know the members of the “Gabin Society,” the most important of whom are Oh Min-hye (Jun Hyo-seong), who introduces Ah-ri to the society, but ends up being her rival, and Yoon Shi-hyeon (Lee Chung-ah), a wealthy daughter of an influential politician, who will end up being Ah-ri’s ally.
The show introduces here an interesting dynamic, since the main antagonist of the show is Shi-hyeon’s husband, Jin Tae-jeon (Lee Dong-gun), self-confident and influential CEO of Taekang law firm, involved, as we would learn, in many schemes and conspiracies (as usual in K-Dramas).
Another chaebol heir, Han Jun-kyung (Kang Min-hyuk) becomes infatuated with Ah-ri. We get to know him through Ah-ri’s eyes as a spoiled man used to the extreme luxuries, but also somewhat honorable, if not chivalrous. Viewers knowing K-Dramas would understand right away that he is set to become Ah-ri’s romantic interest, but this is far from a typical K-Drama romance, not to spoil it too much.
The show realistically portrays Ah-ri’s rise to fame, from humble beginnings to celebrity status. Thanks to her we get to learn all the ins and outs of the community of Instagram celebrities, how they operate, how they acquire money and benefits, what is the hierarchy and status among them. But also, we learn about the dark side of the life they lead: to acquire extreme luxury and influence they often end up breaking the law. They become expensive call girls, sell counterfeit products, or otherwise scam their viewers, to name a few examples. To gain more followers and break their rivals those influencers will stop at nothing. Slowly, Ah-ri becomes like them and then she realizes that she became a person she would despise not that long ago. An accident which results with a man dying because of drug overdose serves as a wake-up call for her.
One of the main mysteries of the show is an anonymous hater, “bbbfamous,” whose identity remains hidden until the very end of the show. Bbbfamous was responsible for destroying online influencers they hate, as well as using their extensive knowledge of that world to help other e-celebrities. Ah-ri becomes their target at some point. This serves as a way of showing how toxic the online community can be and how much harm it can cause.
Park Gyu-young as Seo Ah-ri delivers a fantastic performance in the show. The episodes are built around her narration, jumping between the present, that is to her livestream, and her past which she reveals to her followers. That works very well for the show, and thanks to that we get to observe Ah-ri’s character development and personal journey through the treacherous world of online influencers. Through Ah-ri we learn about the toll that online fame and hate can take on somebody. Not only she but also her friends, family, and coworkers ended up being hurt or worse as a result of her online career. The show does a very good job keeping viewers interested in Ah-ri’s story, slowly revealing everybody’s secrets, and ending with a sort of a twist in the last two episodes.
Obviously, the show has a highly moralistic message. While the events in the series are somewhat exaggerated, it still serves as a warning about the pitfalls of the modern Internet. To my knowledge, though, the portrayal of the world of celebrities is quite realistic and believable. In addition, similarly to other Netflix shows, Celebrity also deals with issues of social inequality, contrasting the lives of celebrities and chaebol families with often miserable lives of their followers and fans. While the show focuses on South Korean circumstances, I would still recommend it to anyone interested in the social media and online celebrities, as a fictionalized but still realistic insight into this world.
Celebrity on Wikipedia and MyDramaList
