Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Bear McCreary’s “The New Champion” from “Corner Man,” Human Target’s Grace Park episode, a.k.a. the Belgian boxing episode.

Boxing plays a major role in Netflix’s Bloodhounds, a K-drama I just started getting into so that I could catch up to its newly released second season (the first one was released three years ago). Bloodhounds is only the fifth K-drama I’ve watched. (My first K-drama was Squid Game—not Squid Games, which is what a few people at this site have erroneously called it. They ought to remember that it’s called Squid Game, as if it was hosted by Gene Rayburn and his skinny mic.) I’m halfway through Bloodhounds’s eight-episode first season, and it’s fantastic.

In the first season, Kim Gun-woo and Hong Woo-jin are young Seoul boxers from the Marine Corps who get drawn into a longtime feud between Kim Myeong-gil, a wealthy and sadistic loan shark, and Choi Tae-ho, a much more kindly money lender and Myeong-gil’s former business mentor (played by Huh Joon-ho, my favorite cast member on Mercy for None)—after Smile Capital, Myeong-gil’s loan company, tricks Gun-woo’s cafe owner mom into debt.

Though Choi intervenes and saves Gun-woo’s mom from debt, Gun-woo, Woo-jin, and Hyeon-joo, Choi’s martial arts-trained foster granddaughter, want to go a step further than Choi, who’s tired of fighting Myeong-gil. Gun-woo, Woo-jin, and Hyeon-joo want to destroy Myeong-gil, the unethical finance bros he surrounds himself with, and Smile Capital’s armies of thugs. It’s an effort that’s going to require more than just Gun-woo and Woo-jin’s boxing skills, although those skills frequently come in handy, no pun intended.

The first season’s fourth episode is one of the most relentlessly tense episodes of an action drama I’ve ever seen—even though nobody fires a gun (they’re illegal in South Korea) or dies. The body count on Bloodhounds is astonishingly low for an action drama that comes from a country whose best action thriller movies—for instance, I’m a fan of director Kim Seong-hun’s 2014 dark comedy A Hard Day—and most internationally popular dystopian drama shows are really visceral and gnarly.

I’m also a fan of director Lee Jeong-boom’s The Man from Nowhere, the brutal 2010 revenge thriller that landed the late Kim Sae-ron a Best New Actress trophy at the final Korean Film Awards for her performance as a little kid in peril. She played Hyeon-joo (before she was fired from Bloodhounds’s first season for DUI) and also happened to portray in 2019 the Parker counterpart on the Korean version of Leverage, whose original American version has a couple of things in common with Bloodhounds.

One of those things is an anger over ordinary working folks and small business owners being fucked over by wealthy bullies in real life. Nate—the founder of Leverage Consulting & Associates and the angriest member of the titular team (he medicated his anger with alcohol)—and the much less angry Sophie, Eliot, Hardison, and Parker succeeded every week in taking down some evil bastard who wronged their client.

Gun-woo, Woo-jin, and Hyeon-joo have a much tougher time taking down the employees of Smile Capital because these antagonists, led by Park Sung-woong as Myeong-gil, are nastier and more violent than the villains from the original Leverage. Despite those violent moments, Bloodhounds’s first season isn’t a downer like Squid Game’s first season often was (I haven’t watched its second and third seasons yet, and I’m not even sure if I want to dive into those seasons), thanks to the buddy movie chemistry between Woo Do-hwan and Lee Sang-yi, who star as, respectively, Gun-woo and Woo-jin.

The two boxers start out as rivals in their first couple of scenes together in the first episode—in addition to that, they have opposite personalities (the humble Gun-woo idolizes Manny Pacquiao, while the cocky Woo-jin prefers Floyd Mayweather over Pac-Man)—but they quickly bond over a fondness for their days as Marines (however, they served in different units and didn’t know each other back then), as well as an obsession with the intricacies of Korean barbecue.

In Bloodhounds’s first four episodes, there are more scenes of Gun-woo and Woo-jin wolfing down Korean barbecue (or discussing it) than there are of them boxing. (That’s also because the first season, which takes place in COVID-ravaged 2020, depicts COVID’s shutdown of the Seoul boxing world.) The one time I went to a Korean barbecue joint was amazing—it blew my Pinoy mind—even though my jacket smelled like bulgogi for the rest of the night. I loved being able to grill beef at the dinner table.

Bloodhounds makes me want to go to a Korean barbecue joint again. Don’t watch this show on an empty bae.

Next week: Every week for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, I’ll be spotlighting one of my favorite episodes of Warrior. It’s the beginning of You Get May?! at the Couch Avocados column.