No one’s life is entirely their own in Pachinko , the multigenerational, decades-spanning Apple TV+ series that is both sharply intimate and slightly unwieldy in its second season. There’s some irony here, given that pachinko itself is a mechanical gambling game, the kind of thing where all one can really control is the decision of whether to play or not. But in Pachinko ’s larger worldview, there are so many factors getting in the way of its characters’ true independence — family, history, war, culture, capitalism, nationalism, debt, love, faith — that the only way to endure is to understand how small we might be in the face of all that largeness.
Winning, losing — who cares? What, Pachinko asks delicately but insistently in a season that is at its best when comparing individual identities to kaleidoscopic refractions of myriad pressures, does that have to do with living? Creator and showrunner Soo Hugh’s adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel is a television show that revels — luxuriates, even — in conveying the passage of time , and takes the care to craft, through cinematography and production design, illuminating details that help us understand how the world changes around us. Pachinko has never settled for being just the story of a Korean family living in Japan, and the generational and ideological gaps between steely matriarch Kim Sunja (played by Yuh-jung Youn in the 1989 story line and Minha Kim in the 1930s and now 1940s) and her Yale-educated .