[REVIEW] SBS TV series "Midas" - Final Episode

Official poster for SBS TV series "Midas" [SBS]

SBS TV series "Midas" exited the competition for Monday and Tuesday primetime dramas with results which left more to be desired for. According to AGB Nielson Media Research, "Midas" posted a viewership rating of 16 percent for its finale episode yesterday, up slightly from the previous day's 15.4 percent. But it still failed to push past MBC's "The Duo" whose ratings rose 0.5 percentage points from Monday to 16.1 percent. And new KBS show "Youthful Beauty" too saw its ratings rise by 0.2 percentage points to 6.3 percent so with the scores for all three shows rising, "Midas" failed to reclaim the No. 1 spot on yesterday's TV chart despite it being its final episode. On April 26, "Midas" had breached its own record to lodge a rating of 16.4 percent, easily surpassing "The Duo" which lodged a figure of 15.7 percent.

One of the reasons that the show lost steam was its decision to extend the show by an additional episode which lowered the density of the story. "Midas" had practically ended on Monday -- Yoo In-hye (Kim Hee-ae) was summoned by prosecutors which meant she lost everything and Yoo Sung-joon (Yoon Je-moon) saw his greed reach a dead end with the world finding out about his family's slush fund amounting to one billion dollars. With such having happened, the final episode of the show was bound to lose force.

The way in which the story to the final developed lacked in some aspects as well. We do not know why James's assistant Jae-beom suddenly turned his gun toward James in the pressing situation where Jung-yeon (Lee Min-jung) was held hostage. And it is hard to brush aside the feeling that Kim Do-hyun (Jang Hyuk) and Yoo In-hye's sudden alliance was awkwardly set up in an attempt to make the show see a happy ending. But this awkwardness had been predicted even before the last episode -- Choi Gook-hwan's (Chun Ho-jin') long-kept secret emerged too easily. "Midas" told its story on a wide spectrum by telling of people's greed surrounding a tremendous amount of money but it was not smooth in how it unraveled the problems. If it wanted to maintain the tension, it should have moved at a faster pace than have the show extended, and if it wanted to make the story more probable, an additional episode was not enough time.

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Reporter : Kim Myung-hyun
Editor : Jessica Kim jesskim@