Little Women on Netflix spoilers follow.
If, like us, you're trying to stay current amid the torrent of streaming content releasing every month, there's a good chance that what you're watching looks familiar.
Whether it's a spin-off of a Star Wars spin-off, a new Game of Thrones, new Lord of the Rings, the end of another Breaking Bad series, or the glut of Star Trek and Marvel content. We're all, in a sense, watching something we've seen before.
We've been long prepared for this. A cycle of remakes, remasters and franchising has been in full swing for more than a decade. But it feels more intense today than it ever has before. Now, nothing's safe from the grasping claws of streaming services trying to pack their platforms with new content every week.
You could be forgiven, then, for thinking that TvN and Netflix's Little Women is more of the same. Especially so soon after Greta Gerwig's staid 2019 film – itself not so far removed from the 1994 classic in a timeline that stretches back to 1917.
This new adaptation, directed by Kim Hee-won (Vincenzo) and written by Jung Seo-kyoung (The Handmaiden), isn't the Little Women you know, however.
Gone is the veneer of self-righteous poverty that marked Louisa May Alcott's novel. Replaced instead with a cynical world of corporate greed and political ambition as Jung transplants the story from 19th century Massachusetts to a contemporary Seoul. No longer a coming-of-age narrative, Netflix's Little Women is a tight, dark thriller about money and murder.
Jung replaces the March sisters with the Ohs. Three women abandoned by their parents and stuck in a poverty not of their own making, and decidedly not okay with it. The bones of Alcott's novel are here, but made relatable to modern audiences with a central plot driven by political machinations, corruption, and greed.
It's about as far removed from the provincial, joyous tale of the original as it can be while still being justified in using the title, Little Women.
South Korea isn't shy about borrowing other countries' media. Since 2018, we've had Korean remakes of popular western shows like Life on Mars, The Good Wife and Designated Survivor (to name only a few). Even one of Korea's most popular exports, Squid Game, owes a huge debt to Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale.
Much of which pales in the originality of many Korean shows that have travelled west. But Little Women manages a balance between originality and adaptation, bringing a western literary staple to Korean audiences while making something that feels fresh in its new context.
Does it make for a good adaptation? Absolutely not. Rather, Little Women is a rare series that shows you don't have to be a faithful adaptation to be a good show.
Not that we should be surprised. The west has spent decades bringing classical stories to screen ad nauseum with middling results. A prime example being Hollywood's faltering attempts to bring Shakespeare to film. Despite all its effort – and all that Kenneth Branagh – the best Shakespearian adaptations remain non-traditional adaptations like 10 Things I Hate About You and Maqbool.
Perhaps, then, Little Women isn't rare. Rather, what's rare is making an original adaptation and doing it well.
This is helped by prescient changes to the March sisters' characterisations, all of which feel in keeping with the move to a modern era.
No longer is Jo an aimless writer, her stand-in, Oh In-kyung, is a hard-drinking investigative journalist intent on bringing down a corrupt politician. While Meg happily married, Oh In-joo is a divorcee who just wants to make as much money as possible for her sisters. Artistic Amy is replaced by Oh In-hye, for whom art is both a passion and a vehicle from poverty.
It all feels appropriate. As if, were Little Women to be written today, these may well be the roles the sisters fulfil.
So, too, does it feel right that where poverty brought the March family together, here it drives the Oh sisters apart. It is only, in the finest traditions of Korean thrillers, a string of murders that brings their now disparate stories together.
It's a devilishly smart use of the source material. Where a straight adaptation might have felt jaded and samey, even to Korean audiences, Netflix's Little Women takes every viewer expectations and diverts them with murder. So many murders.
One hopes it's part of a growing trend. After all, Korea is king of original takes on well-worn concepts. After years of being subjected to tiresome zombie content in the west, Korean produced properties like Train to Busan, All of Us Are Dead and Kingdom have felt remarkably fresh.
Little Women, however, takes this further, taking a specific property and tearing it to pieces to form a jigsaw that, when assembled, resembles Little Women but feels much closer to existing programming with which we're all more familiar. And we want more.
Give us more adaptations that spit on their source material in order to create something inventive and new. Little Women makes it clear you don’t have to make bland copies to invoke previous success, so let's run with that.
Little Women's great strength is that it doesn’t try to force Korean elements into a completed, very American framework of Alcott's novel. Rather, it subtly inserts aspects of the novel into a Korean context where they may rest neatly – discarding the West in a tantalising adaptive sleight-of-hand.
Much like how 10 Things I Hate About You eschewed Shakespearian mores that felt outdated in the late '90s, Little Women takes the aspirational poverty, the self-satisfied benefactors, the traditional relationships, and recognises they're all terrible things in 2022. That none of the lessons of the novel apply in an age of punitive economics and political corruption, in which wealth and its applications should always be treated with suspicion.
Then it murders people.
Which it all makes look so easy. And it isn't, else we wouldn’t be lumbered with reams of terrible adaptations.
But Little Women shows it's possible, in a world in which we keep retelling the same stories, that there are ways to communicate these narratives thoughtfully, and in a non-cynical way. Which, given the world Little Women portrays and the platform it lands on in the west, is just the kind of irony that makes the show so gripping.
Little Women is streaming two episodes a week on Netflix every weekend.
Netflix/Left Bank Pictures The Crown season 3 with Amazon exclusive box artwork
House of Cards - Season 6
