[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Police University" Episode 1

The opening of "Police University" paints a fairly straightforward picture of this being a youth drama, where everything is driving toward an exciting career as a police officer. The teenage Seon-ho (played by Jin Young) is a genius hacker, but lacks any greater purpose than assisting his brother Seung-beom (played by Choi Woo-sung) with ill-advised romantic schemes. Seon-ho runs afoul of judo athlete Kang-hee (played by Jung Soo-jung) as a part of one of these schemes.

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These moments of "Police University" are genuinely adorable, as is Seon-ho's subsequent scheme of applying to the police academy mostly out of an obvious silly crush on Kang-hee. But there's nowhere as much emphasis on the youth aspects of the story as I was hoping or expecting. We are instead given some pretty horribly mixed metaphors in the form of police detective Dong-man (played by Cha Tae-hyun), whose entire character completely wrecks the premise.

The first, most obvious problem is that Dong-man is not terribly competent. After his case against an illegal casino owner falls apart, Dong-man is party to an accident that indirectly forces Seon-ho to take a hard tilt toward a life of crime. Well, whether this hard tilt was actually necessary is kind of ambiguous. We're explicitly told that Seon-ho's dad Taek-il (played by Oh Man-seok-I) was actually recovering on his own and may not have needed the fancy robot surgery.

All of these details demand elaboration, yet in terms of the story, none of them is particularly relevant. "Police University" whiffs a lot of its propagandistic premise just by all these unfortunate implications. So cops aren't good at their jobs, they don't need to compensate the people they hurt during their line of work, and they also freely recruit from admitted criminals? Was all of this supposed to make being a police officer sound like a noble profession?

All we really needed to set up the cliffhanger was a contrived situation where Dong-man has it in for Seon-ho over a situation not really worth legal prosecution- and all the goofiness at the judo tournmanent already serves that purpose. As cute as "Police University" may be when it focuses on the younger characters, none of this poorly thought through backstory bodes well for the script. I'm likewise ambivalent about how Jung Soo-jung has surprisingly little screentime for a female lead, and Choi Woo-sung has a surprisingly high amount of it given that he's listed as minor cast.

Review by William Schwartz

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"Police University" is directed by Yoo Kwan-mo, written by Moon Min-jung, and features Jin Young, Cha Tae-hyun, Jung Soo-jung, Choo Young-woo, Lee Dal, Yoo Young-jae. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2021/08/09~Now airing, Mon, Tue 21:30 on KBS.