(TV SERIES) Crash Season 1 - A Delightful and Entertaining Police Procedural Series with Some Well Executed Action and Pretty Awesome Story

While looking for something new on Disney+ a couple of months back, I noticed about this South Korean series that I felt had an interesting premise. As usual, I waited till all the episodes were released which was around two weeks ago. But since I was in the middle of something, I only started to watch last Sunday and finished it last night. OK, here's more on the series. 

Brief Story Line

The series focused on a team called Traffic Crime Investigation (TCI) that consisted of their leader Captain Jung (Heo Sung-tae - The Silent Sea TV series, Stellar etc), the very smart Detective Min So-hee (Kwak Sun-young - Moving TV series, Brain Works TV series etc), the automobile specialist Donggi (Lee Ho-chul - Earth Chronicles TV series etc) and the youngest Hyeon-geong (Choi Moon-hee - Duty After School TV series etc). In one of their cases, they encountered insurance investigator Cha Yeon-ho (Lee Min-ki - Decibel, The Lies Within TV series etc) who was investigating a fraud and later became the newest member of TCI.

During the investigations of various incidents on the road, they would find that some of them were related to larger crime and had to cooperate with other department. Few of the cases also involved personal life of the TCI members with the main issue related to the past of one of them and could affect their future.

So what would happen to TCI as they go through these cases? You could find out in this series.

End of Brief Story Line

Just as I expected, this series provided some interesting case-solving done by an unfamiliar unit in a Police Department. I do not think I have seen such cases being investigated thoroughly before, so it was fun for me. And what I liked the most was how intelligent the writing was as they could somehow linked the seemingly small incident/accident to a larger crime. The investigations were also smartly shown from the angle of the team's expertise such as the insurance side, the cars model and most importantly their brilliant mind combined with experience of the Captain. Best of it all, there was a rather shocking twist that I did not see coming!

From the beginning when we were introduced to the members of TCI team, we could see that the unit was looked down by other departments which made them kind of underdogs and obviously made us symphatized more. So it was really pleasing everytime they managed to solve the case and prove all their doubters wrong.  And this was kind of the theme throughout the whole season. Yes I think this was just the beginning and likely there is a plan to have second season (although even if they do not renew it, the ending was still pretty conclusive to me). Let's see if there really are subsequent seasons in the future.

The cast in general did a decent job. Lee Min-ki in particular was convincing as a socially awkward character and Kwak Sun-young the exact opposite. I also liked the casting of Lee Ho-chul as he played a likable character who provided a bit of humor. Aside from the main cast, there were a lot of other people who appeared either in guest roles or recurring capacities. Some of the important ones were Baek Hyun-jin (Highway Family etc) as Namgang police chief Gu Gyeong-mo, Oh Eui-shik (Crash Course in Romance TV series etc) as Major Crime's division head Lee Taeju, Heo Jung-do (My Demon TV series etc) as future Police Commissioner Pyo Myung-hak, Kang Ki-doong (First Responders TV series etc) as his son Jong-uk, Yoo Seung-mok (Spiritwalker etc) as So-hee's father and many more. I am very sure that when my wife watch this series (she is quite interested and wanted to give a try), she would have been familiar with most of them.

In addition to the intriguing story and unique investigations, the series surprisingly had some good enough action scenes like hand to hand fights and high speed car chase. It would seem that the producers did not hesitate to spend some fund on the various effects. To me the series started off quite light with a lot of humor but as it progressed, the story became darker and more serious. I could see based on the audience viewership that it grew by each episode. Of all the 12 episodes, my most favorite would be Episode 10 which I think was the culmination of the build up from the beginning. But I also like the finale as it was different kind of case and provide a nice conclusion.

Overall this is an entertaining series that would delight fans of police procedural investigation, focusing on unusual cases on the road and has a large story arc which made us eager to see how it would end. There was also distinct difference on the characters where the good guys were really likable but the bad guys were totally detestable. It has some humor but not pure comedy that made me laughed out loud while the action scenes were pretty well executed for a TV series. For me personally though, there was not a lot of emotional scene which I felt was uncommon for a South Korean series. So if all the attributes I mentioned were something that you look for, then you could give this series a try. 

Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars