“When I run, I disappear. But, that actually feels like my real self.”

Originally written on Jul 14, 2021

A couple days ago I wasn’t sure if I should rewatch Twin Peaks for the tenth time or if I should give My Mister a shot. I’m glad I decided to go with the latter. After not having cried in over two years, the final episode of My Mister managed to bring me to tears twice. Both times it was just a single tear, but I’ll take it.

There’s just something so wholesome and heartfelt about Ji-an and Dong-hoon’s relationship. It’s such a pure depiction of friendship. The kind you don’t see that often in film, or real life even. I was already a fan of IU’s music, but on top of being a great singer she’s also an amazing actress and she did an incredible job as Lee Ji-an. I’ve only seen Lee Sun-kyun before in 2019’s Parasite, but I have to say I liked him more in My Mister.

At first I wasn’t too sold on the other characters and their stories. I just wanted to see more of Ji-an and Dong-hoon. But the more I kept watching, the more I grew to like them and by the end I really loved how their stories all came together in one big, wholesome tale of friendship and family. I binged the whole thing in three days, but I wish this would go on forever. It’s that good.

After more than two years My Mister broke me. Or fixed me, depending on how you look at it.

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Originally written on Nov 13, 2022

I didn’t take any notes while watching this, so no long ass review this time, but this was just okay.

The premise of a secretary who’s quitting her job and slowly falling in love with her boss over the course of her last month at the company is interesting, but the whole thing is dragged down by a forced mystery side-plot about childhood trauma.

Vice-president Lee is a narcissistic clown, and while the show explains why that is, it doesn’t make him a very likeable person. Hearing him talk about himself like he’s the most perfect person in the world is incredibly off-putting. Secretary Kim is a saint, as she’s been putting up with this shit for 9 years, and seeing her reward this behaviour with her love doesn’t sit right with me. It doesn’t feel earned. It feels bought.

It’s fun enough, and around the mid-season point there are a couple episodes which are really funny, but there are better, similar K-Dramas out there. Business Proposal, for example.

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Originally written on Mar 18, 2022

My Name is very predictable. What you think will happen after episode 1 will most likely actually happen. That doesn’t make the show any less entertaining, though. It still managed to surprise me once or twice, and even though it lost me a little towards the end, I still enjoyed the show for what it is: a very fulfilling revenge story.

Han So-hee acts her ass off, and the anger and sadness in her portrayal of Yoon Ji-woo feels very convincing. The show also has a great, memorable soundtrack that really adds a lot to the experience, but gets a tiny bit repetitive towards the end. At only 8 episodes, each around 50 minutes long, My Name is on the shorter side as far as K-Dramas go, but for this story, that’s a good thing. It’s just as long as it should be. Any longer would’ve just made it feel like a drag.

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“Can a person become a miracle for another?”

Originally written on Nov 06, 2022

One of my biggest gripes with K-Dramas is how the story often gets dragged out because people aren’t talking about their feelings. It’s always something like having to choose between a career and a person, and instead of trying to make it work, they just give up on one of the two, even when it’s not what they really want. When the Camellia Blooms is the exact opposite, with Hwang Yong-sik declaring his love for Dongbaek in the very first episode, leading to her thinking he’s a big weirdo, which immediately sets the tone for the rest of the show.

At first, I was quite happy with this, until I started to notice that it’s literally the same thing, but instead of the story being dragged out because people aren’t honest to each other, it’s being dragged out because they are too honest. This results in When the Camellia Blooms being a ~12-episode story spread out over 20 hour-long episodes. The pacing, especially towards the middle, is really bad, and it feels like characters are just running in circles to meet the network’s 20-episode quota.

The plot revolves around Yong-sik, a police officer who falls head over heels in love with Dongbaek, a single mother who runs a café at the outskirts of town. While this is happening, a serial killer is on the loose and starts to threaten Dongbaek. It’s super obvious near the start of the show who this murderer is, making it incredibly frustrating to see a team of cops needing an additional 10+ episodes to figure it all out. What could’ve been one big, fantastic, interconnected story turns out to be two separate storylines that only intertwine when the love story starts to stagnate. The number of times the same thing happens multiple times throughout the story is insane. It’s like I’m watching Dragon Ball Z. There’s no character development at all, except for in the first and last couple of episodes. I really wish this was done better.

What I liked was the lead characters' groundedness. Yong-sik is a goofball who tries to cheer up Dongbaek every chance he gets, whereas Dongbaek is a very insecure but pure-hearted soul who just wants to be a good mom for her kid and keeps getting thrown into awful situations. They balance each other out almost perfectly. I just wish the writers made better use of this. The supporting cast was nice as well, although they felt a bit too much like caricatures for me to really like them. There’s the biological father who wants to get the mother of his son back even though they’ve been out of each other's lives for years and he’s married. There’s the mother who doesn’t want her son to be happy with the female lead for no reason at all, which goes on for like 18 episodes. There’s the shitty kid who doesn’t like his mom’s boyfriend one scene, while they’re best buds in the next, etcetera. You know exactly where this is going a couple episodes in, but it’s still fun to watch.

And that’s the strength of When the Camellia Blooms. It’s not that well written, and it drags out way too much, but it’s incredibly wholesome and heartfelt when it needs to be, which makes this show a great comfort watch. My last couple of nights have been spent hanging out with my homies at the Camellia café, watching them try to catch a serial killer. And even though I didn’t love it, I’m sad that it’s over. It was a fun time.

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“I’ve missed you. But I saw you because you showed yourself to me.”

Originally written on Oct 31, 2022

Twenty-Five Twenty-One is a traditional, sappy K-Drama combined with a live-action sports anime. While I know that sounds weird, it’ll make sense once you’ve seen it. I won’t dive too deep into the story, because Twenty-Five Twenty-One is at its best when you go in as blind as possible, but what I thought to be a lighthearted romcom quickly turned me into a broken mess. I’ve seen enough K-Dramas by this point to know what to expect, yet they still get me.

I’ve liked Kim Tae-ri ever since I saw her in Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, so I went into Twenty-Five Twenty-One thinking her Na Hee-do would be my favourite character of the show, but I have to say I really enjoyed WJSN’s Bona as Ko Yu-rim as well. Seeing her character grow and finding out what blocked her from doing so for the longest time really resonated with me and turned her from someone I actively disliked at the start into a standout character. The rest of the cast, consisting of many great characters and friends to Hee-do, is very likeable as well.

Something I liked less, however, was how slowly the romances developed. Twenty-Five Twenty-One falls into the same trap as many other K-Dramas in that characters rarely say what they really want to say to each other, thereby dragging out character development and the beginning of their relationship(s) for as long as possible. Which, in the case of Twenty-Five Twenty-One, results in people getting into a relationship at the worst possible moments, resulting in frustration and more heartache than I could have imagined at the start of the show. It’s very effective, but it could’ve been paced a little better.

If the shoelace scene doesn’t wreck you after spending so many in-story years with these characters, I’m convinced you don’t have a heart. It is without a doubt one of the most precious moments I’ve seen so far in a K-Drama.

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The fact that I love Hikaru Utada’s music is no secret. So when I heard of this show that was inspired by two of her songs, released 20 years apart, I knew I had to watch it. Sadly, I wasn’t really in the mood for a story like this when it came out, so I decided to save it for when I felt better, and I’m glad I did.

I don’t think I could’ve appreciated First Love for what it is if I wasn’t in the right mindset. On the surface, it appears to be a pretty typical boy-meets-girl tale about two high school sweethearts whose romance comes to a screeching halt before they rekindle it 20 years later. But what really sets it apart from similar shows and films is the way it’s told. First Love’s nine episodes are straight killer, no filler, which helps a lot with its pacing. Even though this is a slow burn, it never gets boring or uninteresting, and the non-chronological order of the story that’s being told here is a big help.

I won’t go into detail about the plot since you’re better off discovering things on your own, but I’m so glad this is a series rather than a movie. It’s crucial for these characters to have a lot of depth because the plot spans 20 years and the female lead has amnesia. This is made possible by the runtime, and while a love story like that certainly works in film (see The Notebook for example), I think it works better here. I’m also really glad they used the Hikaru Utada songs this show is based on really sparingly and didn’t force them into every touching scene. This makes the moments when the songs do show up feel even more special.

There’s just so much to love here. For starters, all the actors are excellent, but the young ones are particularly fantastic. And not just the young actors who portray the leads throughout their early days, but also the B-plot actors, which involve an extrovert dancer and an introvert producer who makes Nujabes-type beats. It also looks fantastic, with some of the best cinematography of any 2022 show I’ve seen, and the gorgeous score by Taisei Iwasaki really puts the finishing touches on the cozy vibe this show exudes. I would almost call it flawless.

Sadly, there are a couple of things that keep me from giving this a perfect score. The first thing is my age old complaint about characters not talking about their feelings. I get that they’re struggling with them, but talking about their feelings would be way more helpful than walking away from them. While I understand that this is a story about fate, I found some of the revelations in the last episode a bit far-fetched and some of the fateful encounters throughout the show a little difficult to believe.

Luckily, those things are no reason to skip the show. This is an impeccable watch and definitely one of the top 10 shows of last year. I can already see this becoming one of my comfort watches that I watch every few years.

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Hotel Del Luna took me a long time to finish. Not because it’s bad or anything, but I put it on hold late last year after a couple episodes because all the dead people just bummed me out.

In ways of a monster-of-the-week-type show, every episode of Hotel Del Luna presents us with one or more ghosts of people who have unfinished business on earth and, therefore, aren’t ready to pass on just yet. In the meantime, they get to stay at the titular hotel to find out what’s keeping them here. It’s a fun angle, where most stories have a bit of a comedic undertone, but what kept me coming back was the overarching story about Man-wol, the hotel owner, going back hundreds of years, which kept things interesting.

Near the end, some of the episodes got really, really long. While I did enjoy them, especially the last couple of episodes, it’s hard for me to recommend this show, unless you’re already accustomed to shows with episodes that can exceed 90 minutes or if you’re a fan of IU, as she delivers another great performance here.

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Originally written on Nov 09, 2022

I knew I was going to enjoy Business Proposal as soon as the female leads began singing Into the New World, objectively the best Girls' Generation song, in the first episode.

Despite everything going against it, this is such a fun show. The entire thing is a rom-com cliché, but because of how it's executed, it's actually quite unique. Shin Ha-ri goes on a blind date in place of her friend, Jin Young-seo, because she's had enough of her father's treatment of her love life. Throughout the show, both girls begin to find true love in the most unexpected places, while their blind dates continue to haunt them. As I previously stated, it is nothing new, but it is presented in such a fun way, with funny jokes and clever editing that surprised me right up until the final episode. To illustrate, during a date in a certain episode, the bokeh in the background is heart-shaped. It’s a very subtle detail that some people won’t even notice, but it adds a lot to the vibe of the show.

While the love grows, the humor fades into the background, but that doesn't really matter because both male and female leads form a great cast of interesting characters with deeper backstories than one might expect at first. That's also why, for the first time, and I can't believe I'm saying this, I wished a K-Drama was longer. Because at only 12 hour-long episodes, I haven’t spent enough time with these characters yet to say goodbye to them. Kim Se-jeong, who plays Shin Ha-ri, has such big Chuu energy during many scenes… I just couldn’t get enough of her character.

Sadly, this also leads to a pretty rushed ending. The whole thing gets wrapped up in half an episode, and while we do get a beautiful final scene under some gorgeous cherry blossom trees, it’s only about a minute long. It’s such a shame. Some of the music is also pretty bad. The intro song, in particular, sounds like some royalty-free music you hear on a YouTube unboxing video.

Even though it isn't the best K-Drama I've ever seen, it is by far the funniest, and I highly recommend it. It's loaded with romance clichés and dating tropes, but if you can stomach that, you're in for a really fun ride.

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"Talk about finding love in the mundane”

Originally written on Nov 08, 2022

One Spring Night has to be one of the most realistic depictions of a relationship in a show that I've ever seen. It's fantastic. Yu Ji-ho, a single father and pharmacist, falls in love with Lee Jeong-in, a librarian who is about to leave her boyfriend. The two begin as friends, but as their feelings for each other grow, it quickly becomes clear this won’t be enough.

The show is the slowest of slow burns, but that’s what makes it so wonderful. We’re seeing a beautiful relationship unfold right before our eyes in the span of 16 hour-long episodes. We see them grow from strangers to friends, from friends to lovers, and from lovers to Jeong-in trying to be a mother to Ji-ho’s son. We see them struggle with Jeong-in’s ex-boyfriend, who’s an entitled dickhead who refuses to leave them alone, not because of his love for Jeong-in, but because he can’t stand the fact that someone else is better for her. We see them fight against a world that isn’t accepting of their relationship for various reasons. But true love always prevails, and it’s a beautiful sight to behold.

While we don’t get to see a much of it, I think my favorite aspect of the show is the relationship between Jeong-in and Eun-u, Ji-ho’s son. The way she embraces him, and in turn showing Ji-ho she’s serious about them, is so heartfelt and warm. It is so well done that I felt like I was watching real people. The ending of episode 13 made water pour down my tear ducts. It healed my soul. So, so good.

One Spring Night falls short of perfection in a couple of ways. The first is the soundtrack. The music in this show is fantastic and perfectly compliments the scenes it’s used in. However, they appear to have only licensed a handful of songs for the entire show, which means you frequently end up hearing the exact same song multiple times throughout an episode, which already gets a little annoying pretty early on in the show. Licensing about 15 minutes of music for 16 hours of television is baffling to me. Then there are the side plots, most of which are fine, but the one between the two fathers is simply boring, and they spend far too much time on it.

What shocked me the most is the storyline about Jeong-in’s father, who knowingly keeps pushing one of Jeong-in’s sisters into the arms of a man who has physically assaulted her multiple times. He’s by far my least favorite character in the show, and I really don’t understand why he’s written this way. It’s pathetic. Yes, your son-in-law is a dentist. He also repeatedly beat up and threatened your daughter. Fuck off. Parents who don’t want happiness for their kids are the worst.

While these flaws keep One Spring Night from being the masterpiece I hoped it would be, I would still wholeheartedly recommend this to anyone looking for an accurate depiction of an adult relationship in a drama show for once. The first spoken sentence in the show is "talk about finding love in the mundane”, and that perfectly encapsulates One Spring Night. This is a story about two normal people who are just trying to love each other against all odds, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

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Our year hasn’t ended yet.

Originally written on Apr 02, 2022

K-Dramas are so dumb, in a good way. Our Beloved Summer is the perfect example. After the first episode, it is incredibly predictable how the story is going to develop. You know right away that they’re getting back together. It’s obvious some people are going to try to come between them. Things from their past are coming back to haunt them. It’s all so... by the numbers. Yet, it’s still so much fun to watch and find out if you’re right or if the show has some surprises in store for you.

Our Beloved Summer is such a good comfort watch. Its premise is very interesting, following two people, Kook Yeon-su and Choi Ung, who met each other while shooting a documentary many years ago. Things turned sour, which led to them losing touch. It’s a lot of fun to see how they change throughout the years, growing up while growing more and more apart. When faith leads them to each other again, their adventure starts anew, and it’s very sweet to see them try to figure out their past and try to salvage whatever’s left of their broken relationship.

As with a lot of K-Dramas, Our Beloved Summer is a couple of episodes too long. When it seems that the story is nearing its end, a wrench gets thrown into the works to stretch it out considerably. This should’ve been 12, maybe 13 episodes tops, which would’ve helped a lot with the pacing. Yet, by the time the credits rolled, I wish I could spend more time with these people, because they are just so much fun.

"Everyone has unforgettable memories from a certain year of their life. They cherish those memories so much that it lasts a lifetime. And our year hasn’t ended yet."

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Originally written on Nov 6, 2022

Hmm... I couldn’t really get into Reply 1997. It took until after the timeskip to really get invested in some of these characters, and by that point I was already 2/3rds of the way through the show. It’s not a bad show, just very unremarkable. Hopefully, the other Reply shows, 1994 and 1988, will be more interesting.

Oh, and I absolutely hated the dumb sheep noises. It’s like the creators didn’t trust their audience enough to understand when something is funny, so here’s a bunch of baa’s to get them to laugh.

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Originally written on Feb 24, 2022

I have always found comfort in things like Animal Crossing. The feeling of moving to a new town, getting to know the people who live there, and slowly settling in always makes me feel warm and cozy. Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha perfectly replicates this feeling with its main character, Hye-jin, who moves to the coastal town of Gongjin to open her own business.

After a couple of episodes, I wasn’t too sure if I’d finish the show. I remember telling my friend Koen that it was a fun, but pretty generic watch, riddled with clichés, and while this stays true for pretty much the whole series, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha is so much more than that. It’s fun, wholesome, and heartwarming, but it also knows really well how to tug on your heartstrings. They should’ve just called it Hometown Cry-Cry-Cry, because even though most of the time this is a very wholesome show, this shit will absolutely wreck you.

These K-dramas are usually very long, with episodes more often than not being over 75 minutes, which often keeps me from investing my time in them. But after watching a couple of them over the last couple of years, I also realize that a runtime like this makes you really feel invested in the lives of the main characters, as well as all the supporting characters a show like this throws at you. While the show sometimes drags a little just to fill the runtime of an episode, more often than not, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha makes great use of these precious minutes to really make you feel like you’re there in the fictional town of Gongjin, getting an iced Americano at Oh Yoon’s café, sitting front row at the DOS concert, or eating squid with the elderly. Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha is a big investment, but it’s well worth your time.

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