For anyone that has not watched "Gangnam B-Side", enter the experience with the expectation that it is not traditional drama fare. Because of the characteristics that typically are associated with a drama, it is remarkably bereft of any of them.

Do not watch expecting some coherent story arc with humanlike characters with somewhat meaningfully fleshed out personalities and dialogue that contains the occasional complete sentence. This vehicle seems more interested in taking actors and asking them to do things to see if they work or not. Some of the things that the production team seemed interested in testing are:

Does anyone know who Jo Woo Jin is without having to look up his biography on MDL?

Would anyone believe it if the pre-release marketing said that Ji Chang Wook was cast as a true villain? Like not a bad guy that is still likable and sort of a good guy inside and immeasurably cool?

As a plot device, does it make sense to disappear the most compelling character from virtually the start to the end?

Might someone/anyone in the Eastern Hemisphere have a different take on how to portray a dirty cop or corrupt prosecutor?

Is there a noticeable difference in Bibi's approach to playing a drug lord's daughter/protege' and a street-wise call girl?

Can Ha Yoon Kyung sell a no-nonsense morally ambiguous prosecutor character after about a dozen consecutive roles as the painfully cute, syrupy sweet secondary love interest?

If Bibi and Oh Ye Ju's characters are put in almost identical predicaments, is there any entertainment value for the second time through the same subplot?

With respect, it's possible for some dedicated viewers or family members of Jo Woo Jin that the answer to the first query is "Yes" but otherwise, none of these emerge from the mess that is this production positively. Jo Woo Jin is not lead material. Ji Chang Wook is a bad guy, but not the villain. Bibi's Jae Hui is the most compelling character but is either missing or kidnapped or otherwise not around for almost the entire show. The bad cops and sleazy prosecutors are the same as any other drama. Bibi is great as this type of character but it's indistinguishable from her character in "Worst of Evil". Ha Yoon Kyung scores brownie points for trying, but she does not deliver the weight and intensity that this role needed. And this plot badly needed to go in a different direction for the second half.

Which is not to say that everything is bad here. Jung Ga Ram is surprisingly adept in his hyperbolic, bad boy night club denizen. Great? No, but much improved over the wooden, shallow type from his previous work. It's yet to be seen how much range Bibi has as an actor, but she has the desperate, lawbreaking, not-to-be-trifled-with, buttkicking maneater character SO DOWN. Jung Man Shik can play shady, slimy & icky like very few others can. And nobody shines as much as Ok Ja Yeon as a sort of den mother to the party girls (a better version of this production would have elevated this character to one of the leads with a full backstory).

The show has lots of blinking lights and bells and whistles. There's more collapsible batons than anywhere outside of the collapsible baton factory. And the martial arts coordinator has one of the few credits I've seen for that job on MDL so there's that little nugget.

And it's definitely got a lot of grit. There is no romance here. This is not a fairytale about nice people or nice places. With a capable group to write some actual dialogue instead of recycling profanity and generic threats of violence, choreograph a fight scene with a scintilla of connection to reality and just one character that an audience could hope emerges from all the trauma in one piece physically and emotionally, "Gangnam B-Side" could have been a taut, compelling thriller.

Even for ardent fans of Ji Chang Wook or any of the other actors, can not recommend.