“Extraordinary Attorney Woo”

Available on Netflix

K-drama seems to be everywhere these days, which is fortunate for its Hawaii fans, who even have a TV channel dedicated to it. But streaming platforms such as Netflix are also showing K-drama, and with the multitude of options to see these shows, it’s easy to miss a good one.

So you might have missed “Extraordinary Attorney Woo,” which last summer became Netflix’s most popular non-English drama. Even if you’re not into K-drama, it’s time to get on the bandwagon for this show, which somehow has gone unnoticed by mainstream critics yet has captured the hearts of viewers around the world.

As you might expect, it’s a legal drama, with the added twist that the titular character has autism spectrum disorder. You expect it to be quirky, dramatic and ultimately uplifting. But with fantastic acting and creative storytelling, it’s so much more.

We first meet Woo Young-woo as a little girl who doesn’t speak and barely acknowledges the world around her. She is fixated on tiny whale figurines hanging at the office of a doctor, who diagnoses her autism. Later in life, whales become her obsession; for viewers, they become a theme of the show.

The child witnesses a fight, and suddenly she begins to spout legal doctrine, chapter and verse. At age 5, she has memorized her father’s textbooks from law school, which he attended years earlier. He never became an attorney and now runs a diner, but at least he knows his daughter is a legal ­genius.

Flash forward to the present and Woo is starting work with a major law firm, Hanbada. She was hired under mysterious circumstances by its CEO, who knows that Woo was the top graduate at law school but has been unable to land a job due to her autism.

Woo is naive and socially awkward, prone to making rude remarks to anyone at anytime, from fellow attorneys and judges to clients. But she is also remarkably observant. In her first case, her client is a woman accused of trying to kill her husband in a fit of anger. When Woo visits the couple at the hospital where he is recovering, the woman is seen closing the shade to her husband’s room. To Woo, this simple act — making the room darker and thus more soothing — proves that the woman loves her husband and did not intend to kill him, a mitigating factor in an attempted murder case.

Park Eun-bin plays Woo in a delightfully engaging performance. According to a video about the show by The Swoon, a Netflix-­backed YouTube channel, she initially refused the role out of concern that it might lead to stereotyping or misunderstanding of people with autism. Fortunately, the show’s creators were insistent and waited a year for her to change her mind.

Fans are now calling this the role of a lifetime for Park, one of South Korea’s most acclaimed actors. Online commentators who have autism themselves have praised her performance, noting how well she portrays many of the known behaviors consistent with the disorder, such as an unusual gait and fidgety fingers. Her eyes alone seem to speak volumes, conveying emotions that run deep and wide. She does all this as she speed-talks her way through a script full of arcane references to civil and criminal law, and full of trivial whale factoids as well. (Locals might be interested to know that Park visited Hawaii in 2019 to shoot the K-drama “Stove League.”)

The supporting characters are uniformly excellent, from Woo’s saintly father (Jeon Bae-soo), who has sacrificed everything for her, to her longtime bestie (Joo Hyun-young) who brings an Awkwafina-like sass and energy to the show. She teaches Woo things like how to yell, “Objection!” in court and helps her explore romance with the charming, too-perfect Lee Jun-ho (Kang Tae-oh), a support staff worker at Hanbada. Her fellow attorneys are well-drawn characters, serving as friend and foe, mentor and manipulator.

There’s also an element of “magical realism” to the show, as we experience how Woo sifts through her bottomless memory to come up with her legal arguments. The show is full of cliffhangers and surprises, as well as levity and sentimentality, but it’s well-paced and not hectic. Only at the end of each ^­episode do we realize how much Woo has gone through, and how much we’ve gone through with her.

We’ve never seen another show quite like “Extraordinary Attorney Woo.”