Stream It Or Skip It: ‘My Demon’ On Netflix, Where A Demon Falls For A CEO As He Tries To Get His Powers Back

We can tell when a show hasn’t engaged us; we start to look at our phones, or pause to get a snack, or watch TikTok videos texted to us even though we are still watching the show. It usually happens to us when a show’s first episode has too many tonal shifts or a plot that’s so complex it’s hard to keep track of what everyone is doing. A new K-drama on Netflix committed both of those sins.

MY DEMON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A shot of a carving that has both angels and demons on it. A description of the term “demon” talks about how they used to be human and they served to be guardians of humans as they lived their lives.

The Gist: In Joseon 200 years ago, we see one demon, Jeong Goo-won (Song Kang) at work, terrorizing a church full of people, then making a deal with a starving fisherman. The deal: The fisherman will never starve, but in ten years he will die and Goo-won will take his soul to where he lives, which is hell.

Cut to 2023: Do Do-he (Kim Yoo-jung) is the CEO of the food and beverage division of the Mirae Group. The chairwoman of the group, Joo Cheon-sook (Kim Hae-sook), who adopted Do-he when her parents died 20 years prior. She’s rocketed to the top of her field at a young age, and is definitely in line to ascend to the chairmanship when Cheon-sook dies. But she has a lot of competition from various members of Cheon-sook’s family, whom the chairwoman generally treats with disdain.

Do-he is being sent on a blind date by Cheon-sook, but doesn’t want to go; Cheon-sook tells her that she won’t get the medical exam she’s in the middle of if Do-he doesn’t go through with it.

In the meantime, we see Goo-won in modern clothes, collecting the soul of a crime boss whom he made rich and powerful.

Dreading this date, Do-he goes to the restaurant to see that it was rented out by the man she assumes is her date. It’s Goo-won, who’s completely dismissive and rude, and Do-he, never the dating type, gives that dismissiveness and rudeness right back. She stays for 30 minutes to be polite, then gets up to leave. That’s when the henchmen of the man whose soul Goo-won just collected come after him; Goo-won blocks Do-he from a flying birthday cake, and while she starts to rethink her date, Goo-won dispatches the thugs.

What Do-he doesn’t realize until later, as she visits Cheon-sook in the hospital, is that she was sent to the wrong restaurant. But the two of them will meet again, under extreme circumstances. And what will end up happening after that meeting is that Goo-won will learn what it’s like once again to be human… literally.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Take the series Good Omens and Lucifer and give them a Korean romantic dramedy spin, and you’ve got My Demon.

Our Take: Our description above doesn’t even go over half of the ground the 68-minute first episode of My Demon covers. Do-he gets a call from a company accountant who has information that could lead to her becoming chairman. Goo-won has two humans — Park Bok-gyu (Heo Jeong-do) and Jin Ga-young (Jo Hye-joo) — working for him at a cultural institute he uses as a front for his demonic operation.

Then you get the circumstances that bring the two of them together after their accidental first date, paired with what happens as Do-he’s life is threatened. Goo-won sees it as another opportunity to draft a contract, but things take so much of a turn that Goo-won loses his demonic powers and has to work with Do-he to get them back. That’s where the romance blossoms.

It’s a lot to take in during those 68 minutes. And while all of this is going on, the show gives us mild violence, family drama, Succession-style family rivalries and some goofball moments that are punctuated with music and sound cues that tell the audience that the moment is supposed to be funny.

The tonal shifts are hard to deal with, and what it ends up doing is padding out a story that could be more easily disseminated without all of the superfluous in formation. It’s not that we don’t want to see the backgrounds of Do-he and Goo-won, but it feels like those backgrounds are unnecessarily front-loaded in this episode, leading to a bit of a contrived, somewhat rushed way into the complicated scenario the main characters will find themselves in by the end of the episode.

Sure, romantic k-dramedies tend to be like this. But My Demon seemed to have more tonal shifts and convoluted storytelling than what we’ve seen from other shows. And the more complex things got, the less engaged with the story we were.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Do-he and Goo-won find themselves ashore after falling in the water. The cross tattoo on Goo-won’s wrist is gone, and he’s shocked when he finds it on Do-he’s wrist.

Sleeper Star: Jo Hye-joo as Jin Ga-young, simply because her character says “I’m the Beyonce of traditional Korean dance.”

Most Pilot-y Line: Cheon-sook pretends she’s dying to get Do-he to come see her in the hospital. When Do-he gets there, Cheon-sook is not responding to her. But all she was was asleep. She is also somehow working on a hard candy; how that hard candy didn’t choke her in her sleep is beyond us.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The leads of My Demon are charming, but the story is so sprawling and convoluted, and the tone so all over the place, that we just could not engage with the story or characters at all.

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.