Mr. Queen

Mr. Queen, which is available on Netflix, is a television show with the premise that a modern-day Korean male chef is magically transported to a Queen's body in the Joseon era (19th century). Were it an American show with that premise I would never watch it, anticipating that it would be awash with endless humorless gender lessons. 

However, it is a Korean show, so the Western gender studies stuff is nonexistent and instead they just mine the absurd situation for laughs. The result is a very funny and entertaining show that I highly recommend. In most of this post, which mainly covers the first episode, I'll try to avoid spoilers about events later in the show.

The cook, Jang Bong-Hwan, is the head chef at Blue House (Korea's White House). He's an arrogant, skirt-chasing, alpha male who thinks very highly of himself. He gets framed for corruption in the Presidential kitchen, and while being chased by the police, he falls off his balcony into a swimming pool and bonks his head on the bottom. When he wakes a beautiful woman in flowing robes swims up and kisses him. He passes out once more.

When he awakes again, he's in an old-fashioned room. He's disoriented, and when he finds a mirror, he is horrified to discover that he is now a pretty woman. He decides that he must be dreaming, although he's miffed that he's dreaming he is the girl instead of being with the girl. Eventually, he figures out things are too vivid for this to be a dream which throws him into a panic. 

He goes into the hallway to find it lined with maids bowing down to him calling him 'your Royal Highness' which only increases his hysteria. He blindly runs around with a tail of maids and eunuchs chasing after him until, as shown in the clip above, he decides that some twisted human trafficking outfit kidnapped him and gave him a sex change operation. It isn't until the implication of them all wearing old-timey clothes sinks in that he realizes he traveled through time as well as ending up in a different body. 

He calms down enough to start questioning his maids as to what happened to the woman whose body he's in. They're puzzled by the fact that he refers to the Queen as someone other than himself, but by this point they're dialing into the fact that their Queen appears to be a bit bonkers since she woke up from her near drowning. He discovers he is in the body of Kim So-yong, the Queen Bi (the King's fiancé). He also connects the water she almost drowned in to the water in the swimming pool he fell into, and decides water is the key to returning to his body. 

First Mr Queen runs around dunking his head in every bit of water he can find: mop buckets, horse troughs, and the like, but that doesn't work. It only convinces the maids that their Queen has a few more screws loose than they originally thought. He decides the lake the Queen nearly drowned in is the key, so he cons his maids into showing him where it is. As soon as he sees a sign pointing to it he sprints off to do a swan dive into it, only to land in the mud at the lake's bottom because it had been drained to prevent any more drownings. 

Mr Queen then remembers he's the Queen, so he orders his flunkies to refill the lake. They tell him they can't, because the orders came from higher up. So, covered in mud, he sets out to find the King to get water back into the lake.

When we meet King Cheoljong, he's in a pavilion reading a Korean version of the Kama Sutra. His eunuch tells the King he has been studying the book for too long. The King replies that he needs to properly prepare for his most important duty -- producing an heir. Oh-oh, Bong-Hwan (a.k.a. Mr Queen) may have another problem besides returning to his body.   

The King then sees Mr Queen and calls him over. Mr Queen lifts his skirts and runs over. Mr Queen barely greets the King, instead he immediately launches into asking/demanding that the lake be refilled. The King tells Mr Queen that he can't fill the lake because the draining was ordered by the Grand Queen Dowager and that he won't, or can't, rescind the order. 

As soon as the King first saw the mud-caked Mr Queen he had started holding his nose from the stench. This only annoys Mr Queen even more, and he ends up slapping the King to knock his hand off his nose. The palace staff is horrified. Also, as is the habit of middle school boys worldwide, the King has disguised his racy book with a fake cover.  Mr Queen gets interested in it and grabs it to look at it. The King grabs it back, and soon Mr Queen and the King are in a ridiculous pissing match over the book while the increasingly aghast palace staff looks on. Eventually, after their fight manages to demolish the book, Mr Queen leaves to sow chaos elsewhere.

The series is a type of Korean historical show called a sageuk, which frequently feature a lot of palace intrigue and this show is no different. We soon meet the Grand Queen Dowager, the real power in the palace, and her slimy brother, who are the main villains. The Royal marriage is for political purposes, and they're worried that the news of the Mr Queen's current bout of bizarre behavior will leak out and ruin their plans. So, they move the wedding up to the next day. 

Needless to say, Mr Queen is repulsed and horrified when he hears that news. To his priority of making it back to his body in the future, he now has to add not getting noodled by the King in the meanwhile. First Mr Queen tries to tell the King that he actually isn't the Queen, that he's really a man from the future. All that accomplishes is Mr Queen getting dragged off to see if the Court Physician can treat his case of sudden-onset insanity. 

The day of the wedding arrives. Mr Queen, who is buried in layers of ceremonial garb, doesn't know, nor does he care to know, the procedures and etiquette of a Royal wedding so he just sort of plows through it making a hash of things in the process. The palace denizens keep getting more bewildered and alarmed by his strange behavior. 

However, he makes it though the wedding and the night of matrimonial bliss is on the horizon...

Mr Queen's two principal maids preforming their hopeless task
of trying to keep their Queen prim and proper

Would I recommend it? Absolutely. It has good production values, music, sets, costumes, sword fights, and is one of the funniest shows I've seen in a long time. The character Mr Queen is a supremely self-confident fish out of water who careens through whatever situation he finds himself in and imagines he is handling it perfectly. He also, when speaking, mixes in modern Korean expressions and English loan words so the locals often times have no idea what he is even talking about. Plus, he tries to flirt with every pretty female he encounters, although they are always mystified by what he is going on about. His loony decisions and unhinged behavior are hugely entertaining. The people around him are always baffled by what he's saying and doing, and their hopelessly confused reactions are spot on.  

I have to give a special hat tip to Shin Hae Sun, the actress who plays Mr Queen/Kim So Yong. She captures the mannerism of men, the way they walk, sit, talk and their expressions. Added to her excellent acting is a male voice expressing her inner thoughts, so the viewer quickly accepts that it is a man inside the Queen's body. Shin Hae Sun creates a memorably silly character in the process. I doubt the comedy would work as well with another actress cast in the role. She carries the film and steals nearly every scene she is in.

Another fine performance is Kim Jung Hyun as King Cheoljong. When first introduced the King comes across as a pompous dimwit. We'll soon discover that there is more to him than meets the eye; he's only a puppet King, but like everybody else in the palace he is engaged in endless scheming. He also always tries to maintain what he supposes is the proper level of dignity for a King. Since he is usually Mr Queen's straight man, his blustering over Mr Queen's nonsensical antics works well. 

Court Lady Choi, played by Cha Chung Hwa, deserves mention. She's Mr Queen's principal attendant and she's tasked with maintaining the decorum of the Queen's office. Needless to say, with Mr Queen that's an impossible task and poor Court Lady Choi has a slow-motion nervous breakdown as the show progresses.

Jo Hwa Jin, played by Seol In Ah, is the Royal Concubine and the King's girlfriend. In the clip below she is the woman called Uibin (that's her title). She would rather be the Queen herself and is none too happy about the king's betrothal to Mr Queen. Since she's pretty, Mr Queen naturally tries to flirt with her. However, as is the case with all of his flirtees, she has no idea what he is doing. Instead, she thinks his odd behavior is just Mr Queen playing a 4-D chess version of palace politics and replies with veiled threats which pass well over Mr Queen's head.

Royal Chef Man Bok, played by Kim In Kwon, comes to rue that day he ever met Mr Queen, who takes over his kitchen and torments him endlessly: insulting his cooking, infesting the kitchen with his maids, and at one point reducing the Royal Chef to doing nothing more than tending to the fire.

Finally, here's another scene of Mr Queen in action. It shows him at his macho best.