Apple TV has announced an official air date for the second season of Pachinko. The TV drama, based on Min Jin Lee’s beloved 2017 novel, will premiere globally on Aug. 23.
The multinational cast for season 2 includes Lee Minho, Minha Kim, Ana Sawai, Yuh-jung Youn, Jin Ha, Eunchae Jung, Soji Arai, Junwoo Han and Sungkyu Kim. The first installment of Pachinko, which aired in 2022, won multiple awards, including a Peabody Award, an American Film Institute Award, an Independent Spirit Award, a Critics Choicwe Award and a Gotham Award.
The novel Pachinko tells the story of Sunja, a resilient young woman who helps her mother run a boarding house during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Young Sunja, played by Kim Min-ha, lives an uneventful life until she meets the new fish broker, Koh Hansu, played by Lee Minho. He’s Korean but works for the Japanese, which means he wields power in her occupied village. Their relationship ultimately sends her destiny in an unexpected direction, to Osaka, Japan, where she encounters the discrimination faced by many of the 700,000 Koreans who moved to Japan during the occupation.
Although she eventually marries someone else, her relationship with Koh Hansu becomes a thread that is fated to run through her life. The first season contrasts her story with that of her successful grandson, a financial power broker, played by Jin Ha.
Rather than tell the story in a linear way, executive producer and showrunner Soo Hugh, chose to tell the story in segments, each emphasizing elements of the complex storyline. When describing how she framed the first installment of the series and what elements she chose to focus on, Hugh noted that with adaptations you have to “make hard decisions.” Hugh, who produced The Terror and The Whispers, worked on Pachinko with an international writer’s room.
She also insisted on telling the story in three languages.
“I can’t imagine why you would want to do a show like this all in English,” said Hugh in a press conference before the first series aired. “You lose so much of the nuance of what it means to code switch between two cultures, the two worlds. You can’t get any of it. Even within the languages there’s subtle nuances.”
The second season will delve into the lives of Sunja’s sons Mozasu and Noa, as well as follow up on the fate of Koh Hansu and Solomon, Sunja’s husband. While nothing definitive is known the trailer offers a peek at some of the settings and new characters that will be included.
Kogonada and Justin Chon directed four episodes each of the original season, with Kogonada directing the pilot. One episode of the eight-episode second season will air every Friday night through Oct. 11.
