The WONDERfools on Netflix gives Y2K-era Korea superpowers it never asked for

A coastal Korean city named Haeseong wakes up one morning to find that some of its most ordinary citizens can suddenly do things they were never asked to do. A short-tempered young woman who runs her grandmother’s restaurant can move objects she should not be able to move. A civil servant from Seoul has been hiding a telekinetic ability he never wanted. A pushover from City Hall and his most chronic complainer are about to become the city’s reluctant first line of defence against something none of them understands. The WONDERfools is a Korean superhero comedy in the way Extraordinary Attorney Woo was a courtroom procedural — that is, the genre is the delivery mechanism for something else.

That something else is the year. Yoo In-sik, returning to series television after Park Eun-bin’s breakout in his last show, has built The WONDERfools on a date that is not decorative. Haeseong’s strange morning happens in 1999 — eighteen months after the IMF bailout of November 1997, the most concrete national trauma of the decade. Korea had been told, in the most concrete possible way, that its systems could fail overnight. The bailout ended the country’s post-war assumption of guaranteed employment, dismantled the chaebol social contract that had structured everyone’s parents’ working lives, and produced the largest restructuring in modern Korean memory. A year and a half later, the public was being asked to take Y2K seriously — to consider that the computers running the banks, the airports, the hospitals and the grid might fail on a date certain. The WONDERfools picks that specific year because superpowers arriving inside that nervous system land very differently than superpowers arriving inside a stable society.

The show’s origin story matters here. Korean trade reporting has documented that the project began as an IP property developed in concert with POW! Entertainment — the company founded by Stan Lee — before being reimagined as an original Korean work during the writers’ room phase. That inheritance is visible in the basic premise. Misfits acquire powers they cannot control; the ensemble has to learn to operate together; an institutional antagonist organises against them. But the execution inverts the contract the American superhero genre has spent six decades writing. In the Stan Lee model, the misfit’s power eventually completes him: he was always meant for this, the gift reveals who he really is. In the version Kang Eun-kyung created and Heo Da-joong wrote, the power exposes what the city had already given up on its citizens for. Eun Chae-ni is described in the show’s materials as Haeseong’s biggest trainwreck before the powers arrive. The powers do not fix that. They make it visible to everyone who had been pretending not to notice.

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The performance choices reinforce that framing rather than fighting it. Park Eun-bin’s first leading role since Woo Young-woo is deliberately not another savant procedural. Where Woo Young-woo was orderly, systematic, and made meaning out of pattern, Chae-ni is reactive, messy, and at war with her own situation before any superpower complicates it. The decision to follow Extraordinary Attorney Woo with this character rather than with another version of the same template tells you what Yoo In-sik thinks the show is about — not the heroine’s competence, but the city’s. Cha Eun-woo, in his first lead since the tax-related controversy that paused his career, plays Lee Un-jeong, a specially appointed civil servant from Seoul who can move objects with his mind and who has built his life around hiding it. Casting an idol whose public visibility has just become a problem in a part defined by hidden ability reads, on the second viewing, as the show’s most pointed editorial decision. Kim Hae-sook, as Chae-ni’s grandmother Kim Jeon-bok, anchors the family melodrama Yoo In-sik films inevitably depend on. Son Hyun-joo, leading the antagonist axis as the doctor running the Wunderkinder Project, supplies the institutional menace that turns the ensemble’s comedy into something closer to Yeon Sang-ho’s Psychokinesis — superpowers as a thing the system tries to repossess.

The Korean superhero genre has already moved past American imitation, which is the only reason a project like this is possible now. Strong Girl Bong-soon in 2017 deployed superpower as a romantic-comedy device with a Western frame. Yeon Sang-ho’s Psychokinesis in 2018 used telekinesis as a parable for protest, eviction, and the question of who gets to occupy public space. Moving on Disney+ in 2023 reframed superpowers as inherited institutional secret — what the parents did during the dictatorship the children now have to carry. The Atypical Family used them as a family disability. Vigilante used them as class anger. The WONDERfools enters that conversation from an angle Korea’s superhero shows have not yet tried: the genre as a way of reading a specific historical moment back to itself. The Stan Lee credit is not a defect of that lineage; it is the proof. The Korean industry is now confident enough to digest American superhero IP, develop it inside its own writers’ room, and emerge with something so locally specific the IP credit had to be retired.

Yoo In-sik’s other technical decision is rhythm. Marvel-system superhero shows depend on the action set-piece to carry meaning; the fight choreography is where the show argues. The WONDERfools imports the procedural-comedy rhythm Yoo developed on Extraordinary Attorney Woo and applies it to genre material. Powers become paperwork. The bureaucratic obstacle replaces the obstacle course; the witness statement replaces the post-credits stinger; the City Hall corridor scene replaces the rooftop confrontation. This is the move that makes the show specifically Korean rather than locally-flavoured American. Korean television has always understood that the most consequential scenes are the ones between people who do not yet understand what just happened to them. The WONDERfools trusts that understanding.

What the show is asking — and what its structure cannot close, even when the eight-episode plot resolves — is what a city that has already learned its systems can collapse does with capacity it did not ask for. The IMF generation passed something down to the Y2K generation. The Y2K generation is being asked, in The WONDERfools, what it inherited and what it is going to do with it. Korea is still answering that question in 2026. Nobody else has finished either.

The WONDERfools premieres on Netflix on 15 May 2026. Eight episodes, releasing simultaneously. Directed by Yoo In-sik. Written by Heo Da-joong from a story by Kang Eun-kyung. Starring Park Eun-bin, Cha Eun-woo, Kim Hae-sook, Choi Dae-hoon, Im Seong-jae and Son Hyun-joo.

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