The WONDERfools
** A group of ordinary misfits accidentally gain superpowers after a disastrous incident and must use their flawed abilities to protect their town. Their powers are often inconvenient or hard to control, adding a comedic twist to the superhero story.
Metrics
The Signal
The critical conversation around *The WONDERfools* has the shape of a Venn diagram where enthusiasm and exasperation share a surprisingly large middle. Korean press arrived first and arrived warm: Baek Seung-hoon's three-star review argues the show's superpower is actually its tenderness — that it "warmly embraces" its characters' deficiencies rather than playing them for cheap laughs, using Y2K apocalypse anxiety as a lens for something more human. MHN Sports goes further, crediting the production's 1990s "millennial visuals" and sound design with genuinely reinterpreting what a superhero show can look like on Korean television. That's the ceiling the show's advocates are pointing to. English-language press lands with more friction. The *South China Morning Post* calls it "fun but flawed," and Leisurebyte is blunter still — "mammoth runtime," "uneven pacing," subplots "left half-baked." Moviesr.net swings the other direction entirely, declaring it "one of the best shows of the year," which tells you less about the show than about how wide the taste gap is. Meanwhile, Zapzee's review is structured entirely around whether Cha Eun-woo's off-screen controversy "ruined" the series — a framing that suggests at least some of the show's reception will be refracted through tabloid noise rather than the text itself. The Korea JoongAng Daily's detail that Radiohead's "Creep" sets the nostalgic tone is, somehow, the most evocative single data point in the entire coverage pile. If you're a Park Eun-bin completist, the consensus is clear: she's the load-bearing wall of this thing regardless of what's wobbling around her. If you need tight plotting and efficient pacing, the warning signs are consistent enough to take seriously. But if the phrase "misfit superheroes soundtracked by Radiohead in 1999 Korea" already has you reaching for the remote, *The WONDERfools* is almost certainly built for you.