I enjoyed this drama very much. For me it was flawed but heartwarming ... up to a point.
This is obviously based o a 2 hour American film, and they make it cover 16 episodes - not always successfully.
The premis is OK. our jaded middle aged dad has a chance to re-evaluate his life, and learns he has been doing nearly everything wrong, but learns this without bitterness, and in fact with gratitude.
Most of the plot and sub-plots are engaging and heart-warming, with problems being resolved and wrings righted, sometimes in unexpected ways. Very engaging.
Characters grow and develop sometimes quite subtly, and this is usually handled extremely well. The acting is nearly always outstanding.
I loved many of the characters, often abrasive at the start, but latterly more confident in themselves and their position and aims. The interactions between the generations were a delight, the exposition of friendships were beautiful and full of laughter as well as many very moving moments. Moments when the real nature of a character's care was revealed were deeply emotional and pretty overpowering.
There were two main weaknesses for me.
The role of Jung Da Jung began very strongly: here was an incredibly strong woman who has come through fierce difficulties, and is now brave enough to shoot for her dream career, and can take all the blows offered her and turn them into success. She knows she is facing ridiculous prejudice, but she sweeps all of it away. But somehow part way through the drama she becomes wishy washy, and, just as she is supposedly blossoming as a woman in the gaze of a new man, she becomes the c;iched Korean "mum" who is sexless and strangely clueless. Kim Ha Neul is a beautiful woman, but she fades and fades exponentially, for some reason. Perhaps the complete lack of chemistry between her and Lee Do Hyun in the role of the teenage boy was the source of this - maybe a conservative public was thought unable to accept a middle-aged woman really being turned on by a teenager, so it may have been played down until it was completely absent. It ruined the relationship for me, and made her (and the relationship) quite unbelievable.
And perhaps partly as a result of that, the later episodes were undeniably tedious - with too much dithering and soupy plot-filling with "thoughtful" gazes and repeated flashbacks to the same events, and the two final episodes were really an exercise in extended I-dotting and T-crossing. Sadly the conventional message of "stay together through everything, no matter what" is ladled on heavily, without any real reflection on why the couple are able to come together again ... namely, they have both changed, re-evaluated themselves and their family, and reset their priorities, and they are no longer the same tired and jaded people they were. The end of the marriage was necessary to allow them to grow and come together again