This drama series started with a bang! You're already roped in, you can't get out now. With a murder displayed with all its red-blood gory right in the first part, how can a viewer not watch further? Penthouse is a very good example of a makjang done right in recent years. With capable young and adult cast (except for the girl playing Ha Eun Byul, it took her quite a while to understand how to not overeact in an overdramatic scene) and a fabulous backdrop, Penthouse delivers a web of intrigue and plants numerous questions to be answered in the next season.

However, it doesn't just end there, we were also given a glimpse into the frailty of the human mind, something older popular soap operas failed to prioritize. After all, we are already in 2021, mental health discussions should be normalized. Though Penthouse injected it in during various moments throughout the drama, it only heightened the sense of normalcy despite it being in the makjang genre.

Like for example, you can enjoy at Joo Dan Tae's pure evilness because it's a caricature, he will never exist in real life. Then boom! Childhood trauma, physical reactions to repressed memory! He becomes someone real suddenly, we withheld total judgement, he's never 100% innocent of course, but we found ourselves waiting for the whole story first.

Then there's Cheon Seo Jin, another of our over-the-top ladies, very ambitious but obsessed at the same time. Then boom! Her world while growing up revolved around meeting the expectations set by her own family and by society. Now viewers don't lay total blame on her, we sympathize, we know why this monster was born.

It's all so fun. So much emotional investment, so much confusion, so much subversion of tropes in what is supposedly a trope-dependent genre. This is an incredible ride, I recommend it.