This wild A24 series on Netflix with Steven Yeun (‘The Walking Dead’) should be your Easter marathon

If you are looking for a series that surprises you this Holy Week, You are going to want to take a look at ‘Bronca’, the new A24 series for Netflix that could become one of the best series of 2023. The ingredients are there: this is the production company that has just swept the Oscars 2023 winners with ‘Everything at the same time everywhere’ (and, well, among the best A24 films there are some essential modern jewels), he says with the hilarious Ali Wong and Steven Yeun (‘The Walking Dead’) as protagonists and its story mixes the wildest black comedy with personal dramas and class anxieties. A perfect cocktail.

Created by Lee Sung Jin, the Netflix series shows us how a run-in with a stranger can unleash all of life’s anger and frustrations in no time. The ‘Bronca’ that crowns its title is the one starring Danny Cho (Yeun), the eldest son of a South Korean family in the United States who works hard and without much success to bring his parents back to the country after a financial disappointment, and Amy Liu (Wong), a successful businesswoman of Chinese-Vietnamese descent who doesn’t seem to be satisfied by her perfect life at all.

One day, Danny and Amy have an accident in a parking lot. Instead of resolving it as adults, mutual prejudices get the best of them and what follows is a chase through the city of Los Angeles and a delirious, vengeful and brutal open war that expands through the ten episodes that make up the miniseries.

In this battle we will see pranks of all kinds, from bombing businesses with bad reviews on Yelp to urinating on newly renovated areas of their houses, all in the name of revenge for a small incident in a parking lot. Exaggerated? A lot, but it is that the protagonists of ‘Bronca’ are not really angry with each other, but rather they are angry with the world, with their respective situations, with life. Their anger consumes them and this is the conflict they have found to channel it in the most creative ways possible. And it’s a delight to watch.

In the series they touch themes as universal as guilt, unhappiness in the modern world, family duties and differences in social class, but also as concrete as the Asian-American experience, which Lee Sung Jin manages to portray with many nuances and complexities. We are facing two characters on the verge of self-destruction, with an incipient mid-life crisis full of shame and frustration. They are totally willing to hate a stranger so they don’t have to think about how much they hate themselves.

Looking at each other from the windows of their respective cars, they find themselves in a mirror: someone so different, and at the same time as miserable and hopeless as themselves.

Despite having bad vibes in its DNA, ‘Bronca’ is a comedy in which you can enjoy the crazy extremes to which the characters will go to exercise their revenge. Steven Yeun and Ali Wong are in a state of grace, helped by a team full of great talent from the A24 house: the music is provided by Bobby Krlic (who also did the music for ‘Midsommar’); the creator of the incredible visual apparatus of ‘Everything At Once Everywhere’, Larkin Siple, is here the cinematographer; Grace Yun handles the production design with the same care that she did on ‘Hereditary’ and ‘First Reformed’; and finally the creator, Lee Sung Jin, strip of the comedy that has sucked as a writer on series such as HBO’s ‘Dave’ and the Emmy nominated ‘Silicon Valley’, as well as as a producer of the imaginative ‘Undone’ for Amazon Prime Video .

All the pieces fit together perfectly ‘Bronca’, the series that you will want to devour this Easter (or whenever) to discover one of the most amazing proposals of the season. Highly recommended!