This post contains moderate spoilers for Netflix’s Behind Your Touch, episodes 1 and 2.

When I saw Netflix’s listing for Behind Your Touch, a Korean show, I put it right onto my list — a psychic vet teams up with a detective to solve crimes? Sounds like fun. Netflix put it under the “comedy” tag, and while there are funny parts, I’m not sure such an easy genre description is possible.

Before I put the show on, I told Partner 2 (who I’m watching it with) that “this is supposed to be cute.” So of course it starts with the main character’s mother drowning in her car, which has driven off a jetty. That… is not cute. I mean, it’s certainly a real thing that could happen, but it’s pretty serious for a comedy. Right after that, the main character (Ye-bun) moves to the town of Mujin to live with her aunt and grandfather, and that’s when the story kicks into high gear and attempts to get funny, showing us a very fast progression of Ye-bun’s high school, college, and post-collegiate career. But then it gets serious again when we see that Ye-bun’s grandfather refuses to speak to her. (The reason is explained later, but again… not really comedic.)

Ye-bun (I’m just now realizing that might be a pun), now a 35-year-old veterinarian, goes out one night to check on a cow who’s close to calving and just as she touches the cow’s haunches, a meteor hits and gives her psychic powers… but only if she touches a butt.

My inner 12-year-old found this quite amusing.

Ye-bun figures out her powers and then attempts them on a human — much to her chagrin when a police detective brings her in for groping — and she uses her powers to improve her fortunes at her veterinary office.

Meanwhile, the other main character, Jang-yeol, is a disgraced police detective transferred to Mujin from Seoul after screwing up a big narcotics bust. Pretty standard stuff for a cop show, and ripe for some fish-out-of-water comedy. He’s pushing to get transferred back to Seoul, but Mujin is a small farming-and-fishing town (though not too small) and there isn’t much major crime for him to bust.

Oh, and there’s also Ye-bun’s friend, Ok-hee, whose family name is Deok-hee. Yes, “okey-dokey”. That has to be on purpose. Deok-hee’s brother is a police officer as well who is partnered with Jang-yeol.

The show continues to defy genre conventions when Ye-bun is sold to a fish farmer (by her aunt) to do drudgery work — vaccinate 10,000 flatfish, with help from some other folks. This is treated as funny, when it really isn’t. I’m guessing the humor doesn’t translate from Korean in this case. But for American audiences, it’s a weird sidebar that does eventually lead to Jang-yeol making what he thinks is a big drug bust. And then, at the end of episode two, there’s a slightly-graphic scene of a local serial killer abducting a woman that is definitely not comedy.

The show has 16 episodes, and each one is long — over an hour. I’m not sure what’s going to happen. It’s a cute show at times, and it has lots of butts and dogs (including a very sad scene with an old man and his old dog near the end of episode one that had me tearing up a bit — and no, the dog doesn’t get euthanized), both of which are things I enjoy. I mean, if you had psychic powers that only worked when you touched someone’s butt, you’d have to laugh at the inherent humor in the situation. Either that or never use your powers.

By the way, it took me almost to the end of episode two to realize that Behind Your Touch is also a play on words (or perhaps a double-entendre). That was clever.