Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hierarchy’ On Netflix, Where A Scholarship Student Exposes A Scandal At An Exclusive High School

People just love, love, love soapy stories that take place at elite high schools. Rich kids in preppy uniforms being terrible to each other, infiltrated by one or more scholarship students that don’t have their money but have a lot of street smarts. It seems we’ve seen one from almost every country that creates scripted television. Now it’s South Korea’s turn.

HIERARCHY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man runs around the hallways of a school yelling how crazy everyone is. As soon as he says into the phone that he’s going to expose everything that happened there, he’s hit by a car and killed.

The Gist: As a new school year starts at the exclusive Jooshin High School, the students gather for a first day assembly. The school’s motto is “Noblesse Oblige”, and following that motto, a new scholarship student, Kang Ha (Lee Chae-min), is introduced. He starts to talk to the students, but is cut off when Kim Ri-an (Kim Jae-won) enters the auditorium with his friend Lee Woo-jin (Lee Won-jung). Ri-an is the most important student at the school, given that he’s in line to take over the Jooshin Group, the corporation that owns the school.

Ha has no idea about the protocols that surround Ri-an and the other high-status students there; he’s admonished when he gets up to leave the assembly before Ri-an does, and is excoriated when he wanders into the “Special” English classroom by mistake.

In the meantime, there’s a bit of a rift in Ri-an’s circle; his girlfriend, Jung Jae-i (Roh Jeong-eui), a scion of a rival of the Jooshin Group, had been distant with him in the time leading up to her spending the summer in California. During her three months in the U.S., she didn’t contact him at all. Yoon He-ra (Ji Hye-won) senses the rift and takes a pass at Ri-an that gets rejected. She then goes to the airport to pick up her friend Jae-i.

Jae-i tells He-ra that she wants the four of them to gather at the local racetrack, which He-ra finds mysterious. Before that meeting, she’s at a formal lunch with her parents, who are entertaining some bigwigs. A piano plays softly in the background. Jae-i’s father takes her aside and tells her that the dress she picked wasn’t appropriate and her lipstick is “trashy,” just like the woman who gave birth to her (the woman who raised her is her stepmother).

Jae-i sees the piano player, who flirts with her; she asks him if she can borrow his shirt. When she meets Ri-an, Woo-jin and He-ra at the track, she challenges Ri-an to a race in their respective sports cars. She wins, and tells Ri-an that they need to break up.

Despite Ha being told by other scholarship students not to “annoy” the elite students, and warned that Ri-an was responsible for the death of the scholarship student he replaced, Ha boldly introduces himself to Ri-an.

He-ra takes the opportunity to invite him to a “welcome party.” Ostensibly, he’s there to be ridiculed, and people are even shocked that he showed up. But, despite He-ra’s attempts to humiliate him via some altered booze, Ha makes waves right as Ri-an tries to reconcile with Jae-i.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Hierarchy is pretty similar to other shows in the “rich teens being terrible in an elite school” genre: Elite, Young Royals, Maxton Hall, Boarders, Class, etc.

Our Take: Hierarchy isn’t a direct remake of Elite, but it might as well be. It’s Elite without the sex and nudity; aside from the connections the elite students have to South Korea’s family-run conglomerates, not much else is different.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that Hierarchy isn’t worth watching. Fans of this genre can’t get enough of shows like these, and there’s just enough soapy stuff going on to attract people who love watching students in preppy uniforms being terrible to each other.

However, none of the characters we’ve seen in this series particularly stand out. The scion of a prominent family that has a secret? Check. The dominant “king” of the school that may or may not have violence in his past? Check. The scholarship student that infiltrates the elite crowd despite warnings not to? Check, check, check.

It’s pretty obvious that Ha and Jae-i are going to become an unlikely couple, which may shield him from some of the vitriol the scholarship students usually get. But Ha’s purpose for being at the school is revealed at the end of the episode, which might make things a little more interesting than we’re led to believe.

It really does feel like every country that produces TV series needs to have one of these kinds of shows, if only to show how class differences play out in their part of the world. But, they all end up looking alike after awhile, so your mileage may vary on this one, depending on if you’re a fan of the genre or not.

Sex and Skin: Not really. Ha is ensnared in a game of Truth or Dare during the party, again done in an attempt to embarrass him, but he acquits himself well.

Parting Shot: Ha takes a challenge to French kiss a girl at the party and chooses Jae-i, which she seems to be very receptive to.

Sleeper Star: We’ll take Ji Hye-won as He-ra here because that character has something up her sleeve, and we wonder what she’ll do with Ri-an suddenly available.

Most Pilot-y Line: The impromptu race between Jae-i and Ri-an was confusing as hell; for almost the entire extended sequence, we had the drivers of the cars switched.

Our Call: SKIP IT. While Hierarchy may be catnip for people who love elite school dramas, it really doesn’t bring anything new to the genre.

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.