Korean drama series ‘Pachinko’ is a triumph among streaming shows (Datebook)

The sprawling yet specific family saga “Pachinko” is the kind of triumph streaming platforms were built to deliver.

Apple TV+’s eight-episode adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s bestselling novel combines serial bingeability with strong cinematic presentation. It’s patient, insightful and a modulated emotional powerhouse that examines maddening history and multiple cultural intricacies — ethnic, political, business, food, faith — with keen eyes. Yet “Pachinko’s” focus always remains on the trials and triumphs of mostly Japan-based Korean families making it through a good chunk of the tumultuous 20th century.

Dialogue floats fluidly among Korean, Japanese and English. So do eras in poetically edited, thematically mirroring ways. “Pachinko” creates lost worlds with deceptive ease, awash in a palpable longing for past homes, even as it recognizes that they were anything but hospitable.

Sunja is the constant figure throughout “Pachinko’s” key time frames, 1915 to 1938 and 1989. Born five years after Japan brutally annexed Korea, she’s played as a clever child from a fishing village near Busan by the adorable and spunky Yu-na Jeon, as a teen and young mother in Osaka by soulful newcomer Minha Kim, and as a 74-year-old matriarch by “Minari” Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung. Each actress has a distinctive personality and works different sets of issues and emotions. They’re all so attentive, though — as is the writing by showrunner Soo Hugh (“The Terror”) and her team — that the character feels consistent through all her diverse stages.

The show’s other primary point of view belongs to Sunja’s grandson Solomon (Jin Ha of “Devs”). He was sent to American business schools as a teen and is an aspiring master of the universe at a Wall Street bank by 1989. Dispatched to Tokyo to close a billion-yen real estate deal, Solomon discovers Japanese prejudice has many mutations — and he has a lot to learn about his family and himself.

South Korean media idol Lee Min-ho gets high billing among the vast cast for what seems to be a supporting role as Sunja’s first love, mobbed-up, Japan-raised Korean Koh Hansu. Prominent in early episodes, he fades into afterthought scenes once Sunja marries. But then comes Chapter 7, an out-of-continuity flashback in which Lee plays a naive, teenage Hansu in 1923 Yokohama. He’s in every scene and convincingly traumatized in every conceivable way, which adds fascinating angles to his older, caddish Hansu.

That episode is a masterfully rendered hellscape, “Pachinko’s” answer to “Gone With the Wind’s” burning of Atlanta. It’s directed by the brilliant Korean American filmmaker Kogonada (“Columbus,” the just-released “After Yang”). He helmed three other chapters, and the remaining four were directed by that acute chronicler of Korean American dislocation, Justin Chon (“Gook,” “Blue Bayou”).

Kogonada also makes educated documentaries about film artists. He applies revered auteur Kenji Mizoguchi’s Japanese scroll-tracking technique and sensitivity for “fallen women” to this material, along with his own striking, architectural formality. Chon has a looser, contemporary style, with sunlight flooding enclosed spaces like a scrutinizing oppressor and Dutch Masters illumination that lends a sense of isolation to crowded slums.

Together, the directors bring artful resonance to what, in other hands, could be a collection of soapy conventions.

“Pachinko” has everything: judgmental relations, generational conflicts, beloved parents who die too soon, teenage pregnancies, missing girls, stubborn seniors, AIDS, yakuzas, awful imperialists and their ever-resentful, colonized victims. Yet the show finds boundless human complexity and different kinds of love beneath melodramatic cliches (Sunja’s relationship with her husband of convenience, Steve Sanghyun Noh’s sickly Christian pastor Isak, is a thing of growing tenderness and respect). Where streaming shows often just pad and repeat, this one takes every opportunity to dig deeper into the human condition.

And season one doesn’t even get to World War II! “Pachinko” leaves us with many dangling threads, yet still richly satisfies with testimony to history’s impact on people — and people’s determination to be themselves.

“Pachinko”: Drama series. Starring Youn Yuh-jung, Jin Ha, Lee Min-ho and Minha Kim. Directed by Justin Chon and Kogonada. (TV-MA. Eight one-hour episodes.) In Korean, Japanese and English. First three chapters premiere on Apple TV+ Friday, March 25. Subsequent episodes released Fridays through April 29.

Originally posted on "Datebook" by Bob Strauss.