Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Blood Free’ On Hulu, A Thriller Where People Have Beef With The CEO Of A Company Making Cultured Meat

Can a show that takes place one year into the future be considered science fiction? A new thriller from South Korea takes place in December of 2025, but there are aspects of the show that are definitely sci fi. Read on to find out what we’re talking about.

BLOOD FREE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A pastoral shot of cows grazing in a meadow. Suddenly, the cows start to stampede, and we see that they become holograms in the middle of a corporate presentation. Then we see these same cows get shot and slaughtered, their carcasses hanging in a meat locker.

The Gist: The shocking presentation is set up to demonstrate just how revolutionary the company BF Group — “BF” standing for “Blood Free” — has been. It’s Christmas Eve 2025, and the company’s founder and CEO Yun Ja-yu (Han Hyo-joo) is making the presentation to boast about the success of her company, which has revolutionized meat consumption around the world with their artificially-cultured meat products. They have also begun to create vegan clothing, and she serves her attendees fish that has been cultured in her company’s labs.

Woo Chae-woon (Ju Ji-hoon) shows his VIP invite to the presentation and enters in the back of the ballroom. When Champagne corks pop, he gets a flashback to a battle he was involved with as a soldier. He trails her as she leaves the presentation, her car stalled in a thicket of protestors against what BF is doing. He’s also there when, in a traffic jam, a man’s body falls on the roof of Yun’s car, injuring her and essentially killing the man who landed on the car.

The man is identified as a sharefarmer, and it’s not clear whether he jumped or was pushed. But the timing of his landing on Yun’s car likely was no accident, as Yun finds out when she’s recovering in the hospital. BF execs Jeong Hae-deun (Park Ji-yeon) and On San (Lee Moo-saeng) suggest that they should hire a bodyguard for Yun, but they’re not quite sure who would fit her needs.

When Kim Sin-gu (Kim Sang-ho), the soon-to-retire bioengineer who created the formula to create the cultured meat, goes into his lab and turns on his computer, he sees a message on the screen. Apparently, BF has been the victim of a ransomware attack, by a group who has never been known to unencrypt the files of victim organizations, even after they pay the ransom.

Yun leaves the hospital to help her team investigate the hack. At the same time, reports are coming out online that the liquid that the company uses to create their cultured meat is contaminated. Yun, trying to take a different angle on just who might be launching the coordinated attack, finds out that the Naval Intelligence Command was hacked by the same group in 2022; Woo, the man whom she saw at the scene of the jumper landing on her car, worked there at the time.

Woo is called to the home of the former president; he wants Woo to infiltrate himself in Yun’s company in order to investigate her. He is convinced she is responsible for an explosion when he took her and other CEOs to visit displaced troops in 2024, due to his refusal to appeal the law banning cultured meat. He wants Woo, who was also injured in the explosion, to find out what she is doing and bring her and BF down from the inside.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Blood Free is more or less the corporate-intrigue portion of Succession without the parts where the founders’ adult children are fighting to take over.

Our Take: It’s interesting that Lee Soo-yeon, who wrote Blood Free, sets the show a mere 18 months in the future. While there’s an aspect of the show that feels like it’s science fiction, what BF produces is something that’s currently in development. The fictional part is that by the end of 2025, cultured meat is mass manufactured and consumed enough to make both governmental officials like prime minister Seonu Jae (Lee Hee-joon) are in Yun’s pocket, and the agricultural industry feels threatened.

But is cultured meat a really, urm, meaty topic to build a corporate intrigue story around? We’re not sure. What we want to find out during the rest of the first season is just how Yun started BF, how she connected with the scientist who created the formula for the cultured meat product, and how he’s been able to wield power.

As Woo becomes Yun’s trusted bodyguard, the mystery of who was responsible for that explosion will come to light. It doesn’t seem like Yun is capable of such murderous activity, but as Lee pulls back the layers of the story, we may see that she is capable of such evil acts.

What we hope is that as the corporate intrigue ramps up, we get to see more of Yun’s personality, and that the whole real meat/fake meat topic fades into the background. Corporate intrigue is corporate intrigue, no matter what the corporation being targeted makes. The less the show concentrates on the product and the more it concentrates on who is doing what to whom, the better it will be.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As Senou, the prime minister, asks the former president if Woo will believe what he is saying about Yun, Woo thinks back to seeing the numerous caskets after the explosion, thinking he’ll get whoever caused it.

Sleeper Star: Lee Moo-saeng as On Sa, BF Group’s co-founder. There may be something romantic afoot between him and Yun, but that may also be speculation from the former president that he uses to spur Woo to action.

Most Pilot-y Line: Yun tells her phone’s version of Siri to “just get lost,” and the AI voice tells her to use kinder words.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Blood Free has the potential to be a good corporate intrigue thriller, but if it gets hung up with the whole cultured meat thing, it’s probably going to lose viewers.

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.