If you like superheroes, fight scenes and dealing with school bullies, then the K-drama Study Group is a series you should watch, because it's just as fun and improbable as any superhero flick but it has a wonderful difference: it's not about superpowers or weird costumes, but what it means to be a true hero.
Yoon Ga-min (amazingly portrayed by Hwang Min-hyun) wans to study and go to college, but his only real talent is fighting. He's deceptively mild looking but incredibly strong and highly skilled at martial arts. While trying to study hard to achieve his goal of going to university, he starts a study group of misfits in the notoriously violent Yusung Technical High School. King of the school and instigator of the violence, Pi Han-wool (well played by Cha Woo-min), manipulates others to achieve his goals so he can get rid of Ga-min, but finds for once things don't go his way.
Problems: just one, the murder mystery involving a teacher, which was kept very much in the background, and one of the characters suffered as a result. I'd like to see this resolve in a second season. On the upside, there was a lot to like in the series. I was often bullied in high school for being very poor but also one of the more successful students, so I sympathized with all the misfits as well as Ga-min. While there is rather a lot of violence in this series, at times over the top and unrealistic, it is appropriate to the fantasy storyline. I'm glad that not all the adults were portrayed as disinterested idiots.
Study Group was a suprisingly feel-good series, and I hope they will give it a second season so we can see what happens when the kids graduate and if/when they go to college. Available on Viki.com.
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