Tag: Korean Drama

K-Drama Report: Love Next Door, Part III

October 19, 2024

Here at the end of Love Next Door, I’m revisiting a question from early on. These Reports frequently reference back to the small clutch of K-dramas I’ve seen, and a few get more attention than others: Twenty-Five Twenty-One, of course, while I almost never mention Madam Antoine, despite really liking it. Both Doona! and Love is for Suckers come up because they had obvious or interesting flaws to measure against. Now I’m wondering how often I’ll cite Love Next Door in the future, because it bears almost no distinguishing hallmarks. I think it’s a great show, ultimately, but it’s the K-drama you’d get from the K-drama wishing well. Appealing leads? Check. Beautiful setting? Check. Cozy atmosphere? Romance? Happy ending? Check, check, check. Then you’re standing there, looking at your cup of vanilla ice cream, full of grave self-doubt. … More K-Drama Report: Love Next Door, Part III

K-Drama Report: Love Next Door, Part II

October 10, 2024

Love Next Door kicks off its second half by hitting the Big Red Button. In my experience, a good K-drama will take its time to develop the characters and their conflicts, nurturing these story fundamentals like a gentle gardener, while other K-dramas will decide at some point to lob a grenade in there and blow up all the flowers. Someone will die, or end up in the hospital, or get hit by a fucking car, or a bus. Love is for Suckers kept introducing extreme situations for the characters to suddenly deal with as the climax to existing, unrelated issues. In retrospect, was this a commentary on the sensationalism of reality TV? In Love Next Door, we know that something happened in Seok-ryu’s past; she took a year off from work and broke things off with her fiancé, and perhaps these two things are related. During a taste test of her cooking attended by both Seung-hyo and ex-fiancé Song Hyeon-jun, she collapses, clutching her stomach, and elects for Hyeon-jun to take her to the hospital. … More K-Drama Report: Love Next Door, Part II

K-Drama Report: Love Next Door (2024)

October 6, 2024

“You can never go home again,” according to so many movies and TV shows. Within its first half at least, the K-drama Love Next Door asks the other, rarer question: “But what if you could?” Our heroine is Bae Seok-ryu, a Korean who’s been living and working in the U.S. for the last ten years, homebound after leaving her big tech job and even a fiancé. Her mother Na Mi-sook has a habit of bragging to her friends about Seok-ryu’s grand successes overseas, if only to match her frenemy Seo Hye-sook’s equally aggressive bragging about her son Choi Seung-hyo, an award-winning architect and co-CEO of a new firm. This is the world waiting for our heroine when she lands in Korea, and it’s a world of hurt – literally. Finally breaking the news to her mother, Seok-ryu is beaten, though she expected nothing less. … More K-Drama Report: Love Next Door (2024)

K-Drama Report: Love is for Suckers, Part III

April 17, 2024

I cannot imagine that, upon finishing the finale of Love is for Suckers, one doesn’t immediately go back and rewatch the very first scene. Not because it’s a twist-movie “now it all makes sense,” but because the show opens with a flash-forward tease that doesn’t come back in the end. For those who didn’t be-kind-rewind, the first episode opens with our heroine Goo Yeo-reum taking a van to the Kingdom of Love house. She scrolls through articles on her phone about a wedding between contestants after a controversial season. On the set, she first speaks with Sang-woo, who says it’s been a long time. The contestants are gathered nearby, dressed up like brides and grooms. Han Ji-yeon excitedly calls out to Yeo-reum – which, like, whoa. This makes Jae-hoon turn, and the lovebirds lock eyes. Sang-woo corrals everyone for pictures, and then Jae-hoon and Yeo-reum make eyes again. The clock winds backwards, taking us into the show… … More K-Drama Report: Love is for Suckers, Part III

K-Drama Report: Love is for Suckers, Part II

April 14, 2024

Something I’ve long found interesting in media studies is why people decide to watch what they watch. What goes into the decision, if a decision ever comes from the endless browsing across multiple platforms? In this most academic pursuit, I’ve been privileged with a curious, compelling subject – myself – and every now and again, he baffles me. At the moment, I’ve got at least two shows running: Love is for Suckers, and season two of The Shield. That follows. It’s season two because I watched the first way back in college, during the great mania around prestige television. Unfortunately, it vanished off streaming, and I’ve only returned to it ten years later. It’s good. It’s probably the best police procedural I’ve ever seen (if The Wire and Mindhunter are just stage-left of procedural), in part because it’s honest and seems to have a mission. In its exploration of police corruption, we see the grisly effects but we also understand the very logical cause. The bad guy’s gonna get away with it, so we want Vic Mackey to step in with his extrajudicial methods. Why wouldn’t that impulse exist in the real world, and is the system strong enough to resist it? … More K-Drama Report: Love is for Suckers, Part II

K-Drama Report: Love is for Suckers

April 8, 2024

Another K-drama, another shock — to me and my imagination so constrained by the conventions of story. In countless instances before, I’ve shrieked, “You can’t do that!” upon narrative shortcuts like coincidence or melodrama. Here, Love is for Suckers plays out for four episodes and only begins on the fifth — and it’s brilliant. Clued in by a flash-forward cold open, we know that this will be about a romance between the producer of a Bachelor-style reality show and one of the contestants. But before that reality show even begins filming, we watch entire relationships come together and fall apart. Jobs are lost. There are medical emergencies. We learn about pasts enough for people from those pasts to reemerge. It may just be table-setting, but it feels like an entire show — with the commensurate emotional weight. … More K-Drama Report: Love is for Suckers

K-Drama Report: Doona! (2023)

October 29, 2023

Beautifully directed and powerfully acted, in a roundabout way, this ultimately inconclusive series proves to me that K-drama storytelling is storytelling. Now, a phrase like that is always gonna sound defensive, but I’ve had reason to doubt the form ever since annyeong. I mean, we all sort of agree that “K-dramas” are a single thing, which is the opposite of how we talk about anime. There is no “Belladonna of Sadness to Clannad” range to the K-drama, and its assessment requires a different language. It isn’t “That first kiss was so formulaic,” but “How good was The First Kiss?” However, The First Kiss isn’t just two people kissing, nor is a K-drama just a series of sympathetic faces and crying and swooning. … More K-Drama Report: Doona! (2023)

K-Drama Report: Hello, My Twenties! Part II

August 25, 2023

I’d also recommend Hello, My Twenties! but I can’t yet because we have the rare second season to contend with. So to cap off the first, I want to start with something a little bit different, which is to review the show’s character dynamics. It’s an assertion on my part that they’re the heart of the series, but that may or may not be true. In the meantime, they at least set parameters for my expectations going forward. (Because I love them so much!) … More K-Drama Report: Hello, My Twenties! Part II

K-Drama Report: Hello, My Twenties! (2016)

August 19, 2023

A couple of years ago, I started seeing clips online for a K-drama entitled Work Later, Drink Now, starring Eunji from Apink, and I was frustrated because it never showed up on any legal streaming platforms. I really liked the idea of a show that centered on a group of women, in a more casual setting than the workplaces of, say, Search: WWW. And somehow this led me to Hello, My Twenties!, but I think it was probably just that clip of Ryu Hwa-young planting one on Han Seung-yeon, and I’ve got both shows mixed up in my head. But when it came time to choose which one to watch first, the occasion of my 30th birthday made the decision easy: I will start watching the show called Hello, My Twenties! … More K-Drama Report: Hello, My Twenties! (2016)

Casual vs. Stressful Viewing

March 10, 2023

Today is The Glory Day, everyone, which I’ve been excited about for at least a month. I watched the first new episode this morning, and wow, was it scary. I’ve been meaning to write something more substantive about Lim Ji-yeon, because she was so impressive in Part 1, but now having seen her play a kind-hearted character — a doofus, even — in Welcome 2 Life, her transformation here is astonishing. She’s so evil, I just want to sing her praises all day. … More Casual vs. Stressful Viewing