Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Kim Sung-youl’s “Agent Kim,” Agent Kim Reactivated’s opening title theme.

Based on a Korean webtoon about a middle-aged salaryman who reverts to his past life as a lethal spy to rescue his kidnapped daughter, Agent Kim Reactivated is the first terrestrial K-drama I watched (subtitled, of course, because I always avoid English dubs) as it was being aired weekly in South Korea—twice a week, to be exact. During several of its nail-biting episodes, I kept thinking, “So this is what it must have been like to watch Batman twice a week on ABC in the ’60s, man.”

So Ji-sub is immensely likable as the titular ex-spy—his confrontations with any gangster who gets in his way or any of the culprits who captured Min-ji, his teen daughter, bring to mind the brutal and rousing fight scenes from The Man from Nowhere, a 2010 Korean action classic that’s a far better revenge movie than Taken—while the much less serious half of the show is highlighted by the grumpy ajusshi (a.k.a. middle-aged man) energy of Choi Dae-hoon and Yoon Kyung-ho. They play spies from Agent Kim’s old black-ops days who remain loyal to him and help him rescue Min-ji. Choi and Yoon’s scenes together remind me of the verbal sparring between Bruce Campbell and Gabrielle Anwar in the earlier seasons of Burn Notice, except it’s two ajusshis who disagree about how to take down thugs instead of a middle-aged ex-Navy SEAL and a hot Irish woman from the IRA disagreeing about how to take down thugs.

Agent Kim Reactivated was billed as a limited series, and it wrapped up its 10-episode run last week, but it was such a surprise hit when it aired on SBS that a second season is currently under consideration. K-drama fans were won over by the show’s tender moments and Agent Kim’s season-long arc—which saw him go from being a timid single parent who doesn’t stick up for his daughter when she needs his support the most to becoming an emotional and caring dad who will do whatever it takes to keep her safe—but the show also ran into some controversy.

The K-drama news site KbizoOm reported that social media threads and message boards about Agent Kim Reactivated have been flooded with comments like “I’m too scared to watch I can only listen to the sound” and “It’s shocking that a terrestrial TV drama is showing violence at this level.” Agent Kim Reactivated is an example of a recent K-drama from a terrestrial network that intensified the violence to compete with more violent K-dramas that were released by streamers like Netflix (the streamer that released Agent Kim Reactivated here in America). The show’s most graphic moments include a scalping, a (thankfully) mostly off-screen torture scene where the lead villain punishes a rival gangster by extracting one of his gold teeth without, of course, giving him an anesthetic, and Agent Kim’s reliance on wire traps to hobble his adversaries.

There are a few folks in the Couch Avocados comments section who have said they can’t stomach horror-level violence. Meanwhile, horror-level violence in spy or gangster dramas doesn’t bother me. However, I can’t stomach body horror. Despite that, I always loved how David Cronenberg brought his fondness for body horror to a gritty gangster flick when he made a movie out of John Wagner and Vince Locke’s A History of Violence graphic novel. That’s kind of why my favorite Agent Kim wire trap scene is the visually creepy sixth-episode cliffhanger where he cleverly uses a wire trap to both control his hostage, the corrupt vice minister of South Korea’s National Security Office, and intimidate his old agency’s current director, who hates Agent Kim’s guts, into leaving Min-ji alone. It’s straight out of a horror movie.

Another complaint from Agent Kim Reactivated viewers revolves around the massive amount of product placements—referred to among K-drama fans as “PPL” for short—in the season finale. I wasn’t aware that product placements—which helped save Chuck, the NBC spy-fi show, from cancellation here in America and were also an essential part of Mad Men—were a common thing on terrestrial K-dramas that air on channels that don’t rely heavily on commercial breaks.

Throughout the season, Yoon Kyung-ho’s character—Park Jin-cheol, a Marine who worships guns, which are illegal in South Korea, and loves to blast heavy metal on the radio—snacks on pieces of Kopiko, a real-life Indonesian brand of coffee-flavored caffeine candy, to keep his energy from waning. (Jin-cheol is basically Nick Frost’s character from Spaced, except he actually has seen battle and is happily married to a woman who’s a brigadier general.)

I also wasn’t aware that packs of Kopiko frequently show up in the hands of characters on K-dramas. Agent Kim Reactivated is the first Kopiko-heavy K-drama I ever watched.

In South Korea, caffeine tablets are a source of humor regarding a pugnacious Marine whose inability to lower either the volume of his voice or the volume of his favorite heavy metal songs continually irritates Choi Dae-hoon’s character, a kids’ taekwondo instructor. That’s better than how caffeine tablets were most famously depicted on American TV, which turned the subject of caffeine tablets into a goddamn ABC Afterschool Special (on NBC).

Agent Kim Reactivated’s season finale doubled down on the PPL, so in addition to another scene where Jin-cheol pulls out a pack of Kopiko, a sushi dinner scene is one long ad for a conveyor belt sushi restaurant. The dashboard of Agent Kim’s new car, especially its satellite radio, which plays the latest K-pop hits, is at the center of a father/daughter bonding scene that’s really just an ad for the car.

“Following the broadcast, online communities and social media were flooded with reactions such as, ‘The last 20 minutes felt like one giant PPL festival,’ ” noted KbizoOm in an article about viewers’ frustrations with the Agent Kim Reactivated finale’s PPL. “The controversy has also sparked renewed discussion about the production environment for Korean terrestrial dramas. Broadcasters rely heavily on advertising revenue and product placement to cover production costs, making a certain level of indirect advertising almost unavoidable. In contrast, OTT originals on platforms such as Netflix typically receive a larger share of their production budget directly from the platform itself, resulting in fewer obvious product placements that are often integrated more naturally into the story.”

Despite how gratuitous the PPL was, it didn’t bother me as much as the eight or nine endings the finale closed out with—I felt like I was watching The Return of the King—or the underreported fact that the three-minute action sequence that kicked off Agent Kim Reactivated’s second episode was created entirely with AI. I believe we have a clip of my reaction to finding out about that use of AI after I finished the season:

Today’s prompt is: Are product placements such a huge turnoff for you that you quit a series that was full of them?