Pachinko, Apple TV Plus' hit show with 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, gets new season 2 trailer that teases more time-shifting, heart-wrenching drama

Apple TV Plus' epic tale of love and survival returns to break your heart all over again

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If you’d told us earlier today that we’d be getting all emotional over a Coldplay cover we wouldn’t have believed you. But that was before we saw the trailer for season two ofPachinko,AppleTV Plus' award-winning historical drama. The trailer for thereturning second seasonfeatures a gorgeous version ofViva La Vidaperformed by BLACKPINK’s Rosé, and it does a great job of setting the tone: with stories set in 1945 and 1989, the new season promises to be even more epic than the first.

Pachinko’sfirst season was “so good it makes the competition look unworthy,” theLA Timessaid. At its best, which is most of the time, it “is a lesson in how to do melodrama right.” It’s a very expensive show featuring beautiful people in beautiful but dramatic situations that tells the story of four generations of the same family in Korea and in Japan. This new season of thebest Apple TV Plus showcontinues the time traveling stories, this time moving between the final days of World War II and the greed-is-good late 1980s.

Why Pachinko is worth playing

The show, which is one ofthree highly-rated Apple TV Plus seriesthat we can’t get enough of, is based on the best selling book by Min Jin Lee and is unusual in that it’s trilingual: the characters speak in Korean and in Japanese with English as the third language.

As the LAT explains, it’s “a story of racism, sexism, classism, submission, resistance, assimilation and the quest for self-knowledge in a society that tells you who you are, where you belong and what you can do. If you are not prepared to weep copiously, you probably have no business watching it.” According toCNN, “from the first frame to the last, [it] earns your attention – and occasionally, your tears.”

Season two continues the story of the matriarch Sunja, this time in Osaka in 1945 where she has to make dangerous decisions in order to secure her family’s survival. And the more modern storyline follows Solomon, Sunja’s grandchild, who has to explore new and considerably more humble beginnings in Tokyo in 1989.

Apple clearly has high hopes for the show: it bagged 11 international awards for season one and currently has an impressive 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not all the reviews are glowing – some reviewers have identified problems with the depiction of Korean families – but most are effusive:Empire Magazinesaid it was among “the most satisfying TV of the year so far.”

Season two ofPachinkowill premiere on Apple TV Plus on August 23, 2024.

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Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir,Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock bandUnquiet Mind.

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