Review: Apple's stunning 'Pachinko' is so good it makes the competition look unworthy

When at its best, which is the case through nearly all its eight-episode first season, "Pachinko" is a lesson in how to do melodrama right. In its acting, production, respect for character over machination (though there is plenty of machination) and for stillness over action (there is some action), in its interest in domestic details and the limitless depths of the human face, it transforms the most well-worn narrative gambits into something that feels real and alive and lived. That is a sort of trick, of course — this is a TV series, after all, expensively mounted, with good-looking people in Dramatic Situations. Yet it makes the competition look obvious, overwrought, unworthy.

Adapted by Soo Hugh ("The Terror"), with significant additions and rearrangements, from the 2017 novel by Min Jin Lee, and directed variously by Kogonada ("After Yang") and