Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Moving’ On Hulu, About Teenagers With Superheroes And The Parents Who Protect Them

If the premise of Hulu‘s new Korean series Moving sounds familiar, it’s because something similar was a big hit for NBC back in 2006: A little series called Heroes. We all know what happened with that show, though, as it collapsed under the weight of high expectations. Will Moving do the same?

MOVING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A view of Earth from space. Arms and feet are reaching out, as if someone is floating above the earth. Then the person starts plummeting back down to the ground; right before he hits, the person wakes up from his dream.

The Gist: Kim Bong-seok (Lee Jung-ha) is the one having the flying dream. When he’s in bed, he’s tightly ensconced in a blanket that’s attached to his bed. But he smells his mom, Mi-hyeon (Han Hyo-joo) cooking — he can hear which ingredients she’s chopping — and dashes downstairs. She gives him heavy weights to take with him to his first day of his senior year’s second semester; she wants to give him more, but he thinks he can manage it.

Elsewhere, Jang Joo-won (Ryu Seung-ryong) is about to open his new chicken restaurant, but his daughter Hee-soo (Go Youn-jung) seems unimpressed; what she’s concerned about is that she’s spending her last high school semester at a new school, and doesn’t want to have to wear a new uniform.

As Hee-soo sprints to catch the bus, Bong-seok observes that she’s keeping up with the city bus he’s on. He gallantly pays for her ride when she doesn’t have enough money on her card, and she says, “thanks, dude;” her casual manner with him, given they don’t know each other, takes him by surprise. But then he feels his feet lifting off the ground, and he recites numbers to help him stay grounded.

Their homeroom teacher, Choi Il-hwa (Kim Hee-won), seems to have an inkling that Hee-soo has special abilities, as he tries to find her a college scholarship that will fit her athletic ability, and also gives her the key to the gymnasium so she can train.

In the meantime, a mysterious man named Frank (Ryoo Seung-bum) lands at the Seoul airport, gets into a package delivery van, and delivers something to a man he calls Jincheon (Baek Hyun-jin). No one knows that name, but Jincheon hears it and knows why Frank is there; it’s Frank’s job to delete him. A massive fight ensues, with each of them showing superior strength. Frank succeeds in deleting Jincheon by tossing him out the window.

Doo-shik sees an Instagram post about the incident with Jincheon, and sees the delivery van. We then see a woman named Yeo Woon-gyu (Kim Shin-rok) reporting Jincheon’s death to Min Yong-jun (Moon Sung-keun), a deputy director in the National Security Service. She says the social media evidence will take some time to delete.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Even though Moving is based on a webtoon of the same name, we couldn’t help but think of the ’00s series Heroes when we were watching the first episode of this show.

Our Take: Kang Full, who wrote the original Moving webtoon, writes the series, which is directed by Park In-jae; having the webtoon’s author write the series brings a sense of continuity that is sometimes missing in adaptations like these. He knows his characters well, and he’s pacing the series in a way that introduces us to the show’s large ensemble slowly, but not in a frustrating way.

We’re not 100 percent sure at first why Bong-seok’s mother is giving him weights to carry to school, or why it’s a bad thing that he’s losing weight. Is he getting bullied? But as he strains to control his ability to float in the air, the weights make more sense. It’s the same with Hee-soo; we do know that she seems to have superior athletic ability, and is able to spring long distances and only get slightly winded.

But we haven’t quite seen the extent of either teen’s abilities because we see their parents as mere mortals. They had to get those powers from somewhere, and it’ll be interesting to see how they manage their powers, and how they protect their offspring from the more serious and violent consequences of having those powers, namely the risk of getting “deleted” by Frank.

As we mention above, the plotline isn’t all that different than Heroes, which debuted (gulp!) 17 years ago and took off like Superman. But Heroes also got too bogged down in its mythology after its first season, sending viewers away with darker and darker storylines. We hope that Full heeds that lesson with Moving, because there’s more than enough material between the teens trying to figure out how to live with their powers, the parents that love them and want to protect them, and the agencies and powers that are coming after them, to make for a show that can be entertaining without forgetting why it’s entertaining in the first place.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As Bong-seok sleeps on his ceiling, we hear him in voice over say he has a secret. And as Doo-shik cleans and puts her gun back together, we hear her in voice over talk about the people who wanted the social media evidence of Jincheon’s death deleted.

Sleeper Star: Kim Do-hoon is Lee Kang-hoon, who is a class leader who makes sure everyone’s phones are collected before class. But he also knows that Hee-soo has powers like he does; will he be an ally or an enemy?

Most Pilot-y Line: There’s a disclaimer at the beginning of the episode that says the show is fictional and “not related in any way” to actual people or events. Um, we’re pretty sure that disclaimer wasn’t needed in this case.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Moving lets us get to know its character first before getting in too deep about their powers, backstories, and the threats they face. But it’s done in a way that gives the characters depth instead of making viewers frustrated, which is always a good thing.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.