Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tomorrow’ On Netflix, About A Half-Dead Human Joining A Team Of Grim Reapers Trying To Save People From Suicide

The idea of the afterlife as a workplace has been a concept of a few shows over the years. The first season of Miracle Workers and the Netflix Brazilian comedy Nobody’s Looking come to mind, as does The Good Place. But a new Korean series treats those working in the afterlife a touch more seriously, with higher stakes and nobler intentions. 

TOMORROW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Under a few highway overpasses, a woman enters an abandoned lot.

The Gist: Goo-ryeon (Kim Hee-sun) is there to keep a group of people who made a suicide pact online from going through with it. With help from her Spirit Risk Management Team colleague Lim Rung-gu (Yoon Ji-on), she manages to find them before they die, and takes them on a wild ride that leaves them praying to live.

Elsewhere, Choi Joon-woong (Rowoon) is up for a job, after a number of rejections. He thinks he’s nailed it and even calls his mom to say he thinks he got it, but he soon gets a text with another rejection. As he broods about it, he sees a man about to jump off a bridge. As he tries to wrestle the man down, Goo-ryeon and Rung-gu show up out of nowhere. She tries to inform the suicidal man that he’ll be in for even more of a world of hurt if he goes through with it. But as Joon-woong argues with them, the man goes to jump; Joon-woong grabs them and they both fall into the river. Rung-gu’s alarm goes off, meaning he’s off the clock, so it’s up to Goo-ryeon to save both men.

Joon-woong wakes up in the hospital, but finds out he’s outside of his own body. Goo-reyon appears to tell him that he’s not quite dead, but he’s in a coma. Because their mistake led him here, the Director wants to talk to him.

Director of what? Zumadung, an organization that manages people’s deaths. They’re essentially grim reapers, but they have different tasks. She takes him to the Director, Jade Hwang (Kim Hae-sook), who at first comes off as a kindly old lady giving people vitamins.

In the meantime, Goo-reyon is in a meeting with all the division heads, including Park Joong-gil (Lee Soo-hyuk), leader of the Escort Team, that escorts souls into the afterlife. He tells Goo-reyon that the Risk Management Team is on notice because of screw-ups like this. Goo-reyon, who was recruited from Hell to lead this team, thinks they can do better with more personnel. But more screw-ups will mean that her team will be dissolved and she goes back down.

The Director offers Joon-woong a deal: He works for them, he can wake up in six months and get any job he wants. If not, he’ll wake up in 3 years. At first he feels he’s being pranked, but when he lands back in his comatose body, he knows it’s no joke. He takes the job, and the Director assigns him to Goo-reyon’s team, over her objections.

Their first task as a trio is to help a despondent television writer, who seems to have a popular webtoon writer as a rival. Goo-reyon feels that they need to enter her dreams to figure out what’s going on, but Rung-gu’s alarm goes off. That means that it’s just Goo-reyon and the “half-and-half”, as she calls Joon-woong, to go in there. And it’s a pretty dangerous and horrific place.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Tomorrow is a much friendlier take on Lucifer, or even Reaper. Why friendlier? Because the team that’s featured is trying to keep people from committing suicide. Its case-of-the-week format also gives it the feel of Evil, where the overarching story and weekly stories play together well. Then there’s the “Heaven as a workplace” motif, which reminds us of the first season of Miracle Workers.

Our Take: What separates Tomorrow from most of the K-dramas we’ve seen on Netflix, especially ones they license from Korean networks, is that it does a good job of integrating a human story with a little sci fi, a little fantasy, and a little bit of humor. We can already see writers Park Ran-i, Park Ja-kyung and Kim Yu-jin going deeper on not only the three members of the Risk Management Team, with childhood flashbacks and other deep dives into how they got to where they are.

For instance, are the employees of Zumadung former humans or have they always been spirits of some point? If it’s the former, how did they get into these positions? And what was Goo-reyon’s time in Hell like?

There are machinations going on in the background that we hope we’re subject to during the series run, like why Goo-reyon’s “young” charge Rung-gu (he’s only 140 years old) insists on going home on time, and why he and Goo-reyon agreed to it. Where is his home, after all?

Joon-woong is, of course, the audience representative here, floating between the real world and the spiritual one. It does feel like once they get into a case, his poor pretending skills will come to the fore, and there will likely be constant tension between him and Goo-reyon. But that tension happens to make us smile, as she uses her powers to make him shut up or some other subtly funny way to keep him in line.

Then as we explore the other teams, most notably Park Joon-gil’s Escort Team, we’ll see just how this place runs. It’s not the first time we’ve seen the “Afterlife as a workplace” trope, but it certainly is the most slickly-presented idea of it, with Goo-reyon’s noble goal of keeping people from suicide being what drives this particular series.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After seeing Goo-reyon and Joon-woong trapped in a dissolving subway car in the TV writer’s memories, we get an epilogue of Goo-reyon getting some revenge on an unscrupulous online seller who sold her what she thought was a Gucci hoodie. Don’t worry; she put the fake to good use.

Sleeper Star: Kim Hae-sook is pretty fun as Jade Hwang, the Director. Her ability to transform from kindly old lady to ruthless god-like figure is something we hope we see in other episodes.

Most Pilot-y Line: Let’s insert the usual criticism we have of most East Asian shows that have an element of comedy; they use too many cartoon sound effects and goofy music cues that put a neon sign on the comedic moments instead of letting them just happen.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Tomorrow takes the “afterlife as a workplace” trope and spins it into something new.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.