With Eyes East

My first daily drama! Covering episodes 1-10

Original Broadcast: April 28, 2025 – Present
Written by Kim Min-joo, Directed by Hong Seok-ku, Hong Eun-mi
Starring Hahm Eun-jung, Seo Jun-young, Park Yoon-jae

As is mentioned just about anytime we talk about K-dramas here, the taxonomy of Korean television is complicated, inconsistent, infuriating. I’ve seen some people call Squid Game a K-drama, but to my mind, K-dramas are the romance shows – to which there is no further sufficient term. We’ve seen how these are not like the American soap operas of quantity over quality, all weird frame rates and embarrassing storytelling, were anyone paying attention. No, K-dramas sport high production values and command A-list talent. Like IU! Sure, even the best of them can be emotionally manipulative and turn on plot contrivance, but they’re not trash. They’re not disposable, and how dare you insinuate otherwise? Believe me, if they were, I’d be honest about that. Honesty? It’s the only thing I have left.

Enter the “daily drama,” which is exactly an American soap opera, down to the weird frame rate. The sets appear to be assembled like Lego pieces, and the acting is unconvincing. But this is where I’d like to recant my earlier statements. Which doesn’t make them lies. Over on The Battle Beyond Planet X, I made a post on recent release 28 Years Later, which may or may not be seeing a divide between “critics” and “audience,” with their respective Rotten Tomatoes icons. I was suspicious, only because I’d heard critics anticipate this divide – as I did, sitting there in the theater. “This isn’t gonna go over well [with the hoi polloi].” Instinctively, I say it’s a very British movie, and this is true, and then anthropological with respect (or disrespect) to the American moviegoer. I described the issue as “literalism,” that generally, we want things to be realistic. Photorealistic visual effects, tonal consistency, characters who talk like us. Stray from that any and you’re an arthouse director or you’ve got world-building. The problem, of course, is that this entertainment is singular. Scenes that run two to four script pages, a fearful obsession with engagement (or noise), and with all this corporate conglomeration, increasingly alien moralizing.

So much to say, when our entertainment isn’t that, it can be kind of shocking. Now, you can dislike 28 Years Later for any number of reasons – I’m actually not a fan of Days myself – but the popular reception surely coincides with its unexpected, bold strokes. This is not a real problem, especially since it performed slightly better than box office predictions. I can turn the temperature down: entertainment can be so many things. Long understood academically, this was put into practice watching Queen’s House. I realized that this unconvincing soap opera acting, being so projected outward, wasn’t dissimilar from stage acting, where the purpose isn’t to necessarily convince in the same way as in film and television. Or at least, not literally. It’s the transmission of an emotional reality, not a literal one, when I’ve just seen the set assembled in the darkness five minutes ago.

I’m coming to Queen’s House late, as it began airing in April. It wasn’t on my radar; I’d kind of given up on K-dramas for the year after looking ahead at the offerings. I mean, where the hell is Kwon Do-eun’s follow-up to Twenty-Five Twenty-One? But I’d learned about Queen’s House star Hahm Eun-jung beforehand, through Gyuri’s YouTube channel.* Perhaps jealous of Youngji’s ‘94 Line, the Kara leader assembled her own ‘88 Line, including Han Seung-yeon (who couldn’t attend), Yubin from Wonder Girls, and T-ara’s Eunjung. From there, I learned this Eunjung is a prolific actress, having even done horror movies years ago. Lately, it’s daily dramas, like last year’s award-winning role in Suji & Uri and this year’s Queen’s House. Amazingly, she did a show called Dream High in 2011, alongside hallyu final bosses IU and Bae Suzy. What?! How did I know about that last?

As Queen’s House is still airing, nearly halfway through a 100-episode run, I figured to start there and then go back to Suji & Uri (or wherever else). And, you know, I didn’t take “100 episodes” seriously. “I’ll watch what I can,” I said, much like my lax approach to the 100-hour video game Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, which also backfired. I’m now addicted to two things at once, which is extremely inconvenient. Infinite Wealth was only the most recent sequel in a long line of games I hadn’t played (I picked it up for its virtual recreation of Hawaii), so I wasn’t expecting to be sucked into the story. Similarly, Queen’s House is a soap opera. I was there for Eunjung – wishing she’d be in something more serious – and the laughs.

Laughs were to come, but not in the first episode. My God. It took a day for me to get through the first episode, where the day after, I watched the next four or five in a row. Whoa! So, online sources will tell you that the story is about a woman named Jae-in (Eunjung), a chaebol princess who loses everything and swears revenge. That hasn’t been my experience, barring the very first scene, where Jae-in is standing outside of an upscale house and clenching her fist like the Arthur meme. Then we roll back to happier times, and I’ve watched twelve episodes so far and still haven’t caught up to that moment. Kang Jae-in is married to a former prosecutor named Hwang Ki-chan who now works for The Company, YL Group, overseen by the aging chairman and Jae-in’s father Gyu-cheol. I feel like I’m gonna need a flowchart…

So, Ki-chan turns out to be a big jerk. He’s not just cheating on Jae-in; during a traipse in America, he straight-up married a woman named Kang Se-ri (actual name Kang Jae-in), who just so happens to be Jae-in’s friend from college! Stop. Ki-chan is also doing something untoward at the company, ever jockeying for position. Having married into a wealthy family, he (and his wild mother) feel second-class, but Gyu-cheol doesn’t have other options for successors. Jae-in isn’t interested in the business, and son Seung-woo is directionless. A loser, but not the loser, as we’ll find. The first episode is about Jae-in and Ki-chan’s young son Eun-ho being kidnapped. Spend, I don’t know, twenty minutes of Jae-in and Ki-chan’s mother Sook-ja wailing and screaming “Euh-ho!” over and over and over again. I mean, how else do you get to 100 episodes, right?

With the help of a kindly surgeon, Kim Do-yoon, Eun-ho is rescued and the two kidnappers are brought to justice, though not before implicating Jae-in’s brother-in-law Ki-man. This is the loser, by the way, and he’s Ki-chan’s older brother, giving him a Fredo Corleone aspect. All this guy does is whine and pester his mom about money, leading to this Fargo – or perhaps Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance – scheme. Sook-ja finds out about his involvement in the crime, and decides to bury it. She may resent the Kang family, but can’t live without their largess. Unfortunately, the secret gets out. First, the adulterous Ki-chan learns the truth, and also decides to bury it. Eun-ho wasn’t harmed after all, the little bastard. Then Sook-ja’s daughter Na-ra finds out, and she’s the one who accidentally tells Jae-in. Ooh, ooh!

In an adrenaline rush of a sequence, Ki-chan calls Sook-ja to warn her that Jae-in is coming over, but Sook-ja picks up too late. She’s already buzzed in Jae-in, and then hears, “Don’t open the door!” LOL. The phone slips out of her hand and she goes white as Jae-in enters and demands the truth. Sook-ja kneels and commands Ki-man to do the same. Then a third relation comes in – Yu-kyung, Ki-man’s long-suffering wife who’s friends with Jae-in (and – and this is the bullshit – just happens to work with the kindly surgeon at the hospital). She’s also ordered to her knees by Sook-ja. But before any actual confession, Ki-chan enters and sees this horrendous tableau: his family kneeling before his wife. “What the hell are you doing?!” he snaps at her.

In the confusion – during which Jae-in is too shocked to speak – Sook-ja manages to take control of the narrative. We all know that Na-ra goes around spouting nonsense! She then says that the Kangs look down on the Hwangs, and Jae-in jumped to a conclusion before forcing them to kneel in apology. So instead of ever saying, “I didn’t make them kneel,” Jae-in, like, leaves. And where the hell is Yu-kyung in all this? She’s just there, not saying anything! She’s the worst friend ever. Later, Jae-in will apologize to Sook-ja and a very uncomfortable Ki-man, for correctly assuming that Ki-man kidnapped her son and for basically just asking if that was the case. It’s so frustrating – and there I am, in the palm of writer Kim Min-joo’s hand.

Does it matter if it’s unsubtle? Does it matter if the poor bastard who gets hit by a car didn’t really have a character arc? And that it was extremely funny when they got hit by a car? The experience of watching Queen’s House isn’t served by a beat-for-beat plot summary like the above. Mostly, it’s a series of outrageous things; it’s played so broadly. Almost every conflict is spurred on and exacerbated by miscommunication, which I’d like to believe is a bugaboo for everyone. And yet, it’s riveting. Not in the sense that I’m shaken to my core, but I am desperate to see what happens next. I wish I could stop writing this and keep watching, but I also have to play Infinite Wealth. Big Seonhee fan, if you can believe that.

I’m also aware that this is not a particularly beloved show. By the standards of K-dramas or maybe even daily dramas, it hasn’t gone over well with viewers. One comment I saw early on was that Jae-in is super dumb, and I’ll broker no disagreement; it’s part of the central contrivance that she’s not especially perceptive nor a critical thinker. But to me, it kind of works as tension, that she’s this happy-go-lucky nice person with the radiant face of Eunjung from T-ara, and she’s surrounded by sociopaths all scheming against each other. Nevertheless, she occupies a position of power. There’s this incredible scene where her mother Ja-young confronts Ki-chan about his infidelity, but neither character names it. Ja-young doesn’t know for sure that Ki-chan is cheating, and making a mistake could cost her Jae-in. More pressingly, a divorce would be bad for business. She basically tells him to stop and pretend like it never happened. There’s no profit in exposing him. Honestly, for a show where we’ll randomly hear characters’ thoughts because there wasn’t time for more subtle storytelling, that’s pretty clever.

*Eunjung’s YouTube channel was wiped of old content this year, but what still remains is her 2020 channel with Gyuri, Beauty & View. Apparently, they’ve been friends for years, and they make a great pairing.