Any time a book is adapted for the screen, debates and discussions are aplenty. Does the show or the film manage to recreate the magic of the book? Are the characters how you imagined them to be, as you fervently turned the pages of your copy? And most importantly, does the adaptation stay faithful to its source material and choose not to deviate from plotlines, set in ink? For a book as celebrated and revered as Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko , these questions have always loomed large over the TV series adaptation, which is now back for a second season. Creative liberties were aplenty in season one, the biggest being the show choosing to do away with the linear narrative structure of the book and instead simultaneously focussing on its central protagonist Sunja in the past and her grandson Solomon Baek in the present.
Jin Ha as Solomon Baek in Pachinko| Photo Credit:Apple TV+ It seems rather befitting that we get to interview Soo Hugh, the showrunner, along with actor Jin Ha, who plays Solomon. “What was most interesting in the writers room for this season was Jin Ha’s Solomon,” Soo Hugh smiles and points to his star. “We went through most of Solomon’s storyline from the book in season one, and worked on taking this forward for season two.
For the past however, focussed on Sunja, we still had a strong foundation with the book,” she explains. Hugh has previously worked on shows The Terror, The Whispers, and The Killing, to name a few. For Pachinko , which debuted in 202.