A general thread about Korean dramas

[jian]

Now on to what might be my favourite Korean drama we've watched in the last year or so, and it's all very slice of life but also quite sharp.

Because This is My First Life (2017; Netflix, Tubi)

Because This Is My First Life - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I'm surprised this drama is almost a decade old because it feels very up to date in many ways, especially about how modern relationships work, about cost of living, about how realistic expectations for modern young people in Korea are very, very different than for earlier generations.

Yoon Ji-ho (Jung So-min, you might have seen her in Alchemy of Souls) is a broke young writer from a poor rural family who is basically made homeless when she breaks up with her feckless boyfriend. In sheer desperation (after a couple of very realistic scenes where she visits some really terrible apartments for rent, and sleeps over at her studio and is nearly sexually assaulted) she agrees to become a roommate with Nam Se-hee, a pleasant (if clearly on the spectrum) IT guy who owns his own place but needs some extra rent and really values a roommate who keeps to themselves and tidies up.

However, Se-hee's mum (their family is rich and posh, but not chaebol or anything by any means) is scandalised when she discovers that her son is sharing with a girl. After a certain amount of fairly awkward discussion, Se-hee proposes a typically wacky but practical solution - Ji-ho should marry him in name only so his mum won't mind, also signing what amounts to a formal roommate contract, agreeing to divorce after a set time or when wished.

Ji-ho is a little more romantic than Se-hee but her practicality overcomes her sentiment and she agrees. And so begins a very odd friendship which turns into a courtship, where the two are married before they get together (as they eventually do, but my word, do they take the long way round).

There are two parallel couples.

• First, there's Su-ji (Ji-ho's friend who is a driven career woman who faces a metric ton of sexism and sexual harassment at work and really wants to run her own company) and her boyfriend/booty call/whatever Sang-goo (Se-hee's best friend and boss at his IT company, who's romantic but frustrated about Korean sexism and customs, and really tries his best to be a good guy).
• And then there's Ho-rang (Ji-ho and Su-ji's friend who works as a waitress and really wants to get married and have kids) and her boyfriend Won-seok (a nerdy coder who's trying to get his startup off the ground and is unhappy that he can't offer Ho-rang anything resembling financial stability).

All the characters are very likeable and sympathetic, in their various different ways, and they all do eventually get a happy ending. But life is against them all every step of the way, but it's the only life they get, so what choice do they have? Highly recommended.

 

[jian]

I realise I’ve missed one out from our recent viewing!

The Best Hit (2017, Viki)

The title is well translated - the Korean title means The Best Punch but that can also mean the best musical hit. So that's a good translation and also a reference to the main talent agency in the show, Star Punch. Weirdly, the official translation is Hit the Top, which makes less sense.

Hit the Top - Wikipedia​

Ji-Hoon and Woo-Seung are both 23 and best friends since childhood. They're also both stuck in typically Korean ruts. Ji-Hoon is trying to succeed as an idol trainee, working every day at Star Punch (the aforementioned talent agency) and desperately hoping to debut (probably as a member of a new boy band), but it's been several years now and he's not getting anywhere. His dad thinks he's actually going to a hagwon (see previous posts) to study to retake his university exams, since his dad hopes he'll get into college and get a good government job or similar. Ji-Hoon is actually subletting his hagwon position to Woo-Seung, who actually is trying to get into college etc, but she's having no luck either; given her age she's presumably failed her college exams several times.

(Yes, Woo-Seung is what Japanese and now Koreans call a ronin, someone who's failed their entrance exams a lot but is still trying.)

That's enough to be getting on with, but there's an extra twist in Ji-Hoon's past - he's the son of two pop stars from the 1990s, Hyeon-Jae (the main man in a duo called J2, who disappeared mysteriously in 1994) and Bo-Hee (once called the Pure Fairy, whose reputation and career were wrecked when she got pregnant without marrying the father). And now we go to Hyeon-Jae in 1993 just as he's swept up by a time-travel typhoon and dumped unceremoniously in 2017.

No, there's never any explanation for how that works.

Hyeon-Jae is profoundly confused and upset to find himself in the future and sensibly doesn't tell anyone who he is, ending up staying with Ji-Hoon and Woo-Seung in Ji-Hoon's flat above his parents' house. The guy I referred to as his dad above is actually Gwang-Jae, Hyeon-Jae's oldest friend and manager, who has nursed a crush on Bo-Hee (who chastely lives with him and runs the Paris Baguette* next door) for over two decades. He's the first to recognise Hyeon-Jae despite the passage of time and is his only confidant as he works stuff out.

*A very prevalent Korean chain of French-style bakeries, mostly selling cakes and various pastries. I have fond memories of heading in there in the evening and buying a bagful of day-old croissants and sausage buns for the next day, back in 2011-2. So much spon-con.

The Best Hit is a lovely warm-hearted comedy with a lot to recommend it, and is pretty interesting about how the entertainment industry works in Korea, especially around TV variety shows and music. It's also not at all afraid to go hard about how incredibly difficult life is for Generation Z in Korea - both Ji-Hoon and Woo-Seung have wonderfully genuine and heartfelt speeches about how they feel they're getting nowhere but must carry on because there's nothing else they can do. Some of the comedy comes from the clash between Hyeon-Jae's Gen X assumptions about life and how they're bluntly burst by the other two.

 

[jian]

A slightly different drama, still quite slice of life.

The Killer's Shopping List (2022, Amazon Video)

The Killer's Shopping List - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

20 years ago, Ahn Dae-sung was something of a child celebrity. A clever boy who saved his mother from a criminal (trying to launder counterfeit cash at their corner store) and made the papers. But he hasn't entirely lived up to his potential, and has now failed the civil service exams three times. In frustration, Dae-sung comes home to his mother, Han Myeong-sook, and her now very successful store, MS Mart, to work there while he figures out what to do with his life. At least his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, a police officer called Do Ah-hee, seems reasonably stable.

But then someone is murdered in their neighbourhood, and as Ah-hee investigates, she realises that it might have something to do with MS Mart and Dae-sung. And we see why Dae-sung has failed his exams - he has long-term PTSD from his childhood heroism (in which he locked his mother and the criminal together in the shop, not realising that she might be killed) and subsequent events. And of course it turns out that the original criminal is back in town, but is he the killer?

It's a pleasant little drama, not too long and clever enough to keep you guessing, and with interesting subplots about the various side characters. Not brilliant, but worth your time.

 

[Kobold Stew]

This is a fun and useful thread. Since the pandemic, I've enjoyed many K-dramas, and really appreciate how easily accessible they are now on Netflix. It's clear to me what I'm looking for in the genre -- for a long time, the keyword "swoonworthy" was almost always a good sign of a series I would enjoy. I'm not interested in horror, or dark undercurrents, or whatever. If I want romantic fluff, I can go to swoonworthy K-dramas.

Recurrent themes are key, and the variation between the series (on things like work/life balance; class and economic divisions in South Korea; intergenerational and parental tensions; the struggles of being a single woman aged 29; etc.) magnify how the same tensions can be manipulated to tell similar stories.

A quick starter handlist:
a. Her Private Life. My personal favorite, but that's partially due to where I was when I watched it. Top marks for swooning silliness of an up-and-coming museum curator who stalks a K-pop idol in her spare time. There's a minor spoiler I'll avoid about the object of her affections, but the lion-roar that plays everytime someone mentons her boss, Ryan Gold (because Ryan and lion sound alike) is worth it for itself.

b. Crash Landing on You. Everyone should see this one, and it hits all the right buttons. The North Korean soldier has the decency and RCMP-earnestness of Benton Frasier from Due South, and it's really interesting to see how North Korea gets presented in a South Korean show.

c. Reply 1988. This one's outside the pure romantic fluff that I enjoy, but it's excellent: five families with kids growing up on the same street in the 80s, it triggers nostaligia for a world I have never lived in. Little bit of a Wonder Years vibe, in the way it captures the awkwardness of coming of age, which (it turns out) transcends cultural divisions.

d. King the Land and Business Proposal. Both of these are Cinderella stories, with a wide-eyed woman falling for her ultra-rich boss. They're both fun, and carry me through the 16 episodes (or whatever), with no real falling off. I see these sort of as the baseline for this kind of series: solid, entertaining, and worth my time. King the Land is about a woman in the hotel industry, who is an excellent Front-desk Concierge. Business Proposal has a woman going on a blind date in place of her friend and the date ends up being her boss. (Sometimes the Cinderella theme is explicit, as in Cinderella with Four Knights, which I didn't enjoy nearly as much.)

e. Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha. Already mentioned, this one brings a big-city dentist to a small seaside town as she rebuilds her life and falls for the local handyman.

I could keep going, talking about individual actors, or whatever, but it's really fun to discover these tings on one's own, or to see how different workplace situations get presented in the context of a Rom-com (Love is a Bonus Book has publishing; Start-up for computer programming; etc.). This short list doesn't include the historical ones, or the time-travel ones, which can be fun too. Anyways, there's some more recommendations for anyone interested.

 

[jian]

This is a fun and useful thread. Since the pandemic, I've enjoyed many K-dramas, and really appreciate how easily accessible they are now on Netflix. It's clear to me what I'm looking for in the genre -- for a long time, the keyword "swoonworthy" was almost always a good sign of a series I would enjoy. I'm not interested in horror, or dark undercurrents, or whatever. If I want romantic fluff, I can go to swoonworthy K-dramas.

Recurrent themes are key, and the variation between the series (on things like work/life balance; class and economic divisions in South Korea; intergenerational and parental tensions; the struggles of being a single woman aged 29; etc.) magnify how the same tensions can be manipulated to tell similar stories.

A quick starter handlist:
a. Her Private Life. My personal favorite, but that's partially due to where I was when I watched it. Top marks for swooning silliness of an up-and-coming museum curator who stalks a K-pop idol in her spare time. There's a minor spoiler I'll avoid about the object of her affections, but the lion-roar that plays everytime someone mentons her boss, Ryan Gold (because Ryan and lion sound alike) is worth it for itself.

b. Crash Landing on You. Everyone should see this one, and it hits all the right buttons. The North Korean soldier has the decency and RCMP-earnestness of Benton Frasier from Due South, and it's really interesting to see how North Korea gets presented in a South Korean show.

c. Reply 1988. This one's outside the pure romantic fluff that I enjoy, but it's excellent: five families with kids growing up on the same street in the 80s, it triggers nostaligia for a world I have never lived in. Little bit of a Wonder Years vibe, in the way it captures the awkwardness of coming of age, which (it turns out) transcends cultural divisions.

d. King the Land and Business Proposal. Both of these are Cinderella stories, with a wide-eyed woman falling for her ultra-rich boss. They're both fun, and carry me through the 16 episodes (or whatever), with no real falling off. I see these sort of as the baseline for this kind of series: solid, entertaining, and worth my time. King the Land is about a woman in the hotel industry, who is an excellent Front-desk Concierge. Business Proposal has a woman going on a blind date in place of her friend and the date ends up being her boss. (Sometimes the Cinderella theme is explicit, as in Cinderella with Four Knights, which I didn't enjoy nearly as much.)

e. Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha. Already mentioned, this one brings a big-city dentist to a small seaside town as she rebuilds her life and falls for the local handyman.

I could keep going, talking about individual actors, or whatever, but it's really fun to discover these tings on one's own, or to see how different workplace situations get presented in the context of a Rom-com (Love is a Bonus Book has publishing; Start-up for computer programming; etc.). This short list doesn't include the historical ones, or the time-travel ones, which can be fun too. Anyways, there's some more recommendations for anyone interested.

I totally agree (see my own review earlier in the thread) that CLOY is pretty much the Platonic ideal for swoon-worthy.

We didn’t get on brilliantly with Business Proposal and never finished it, mostly because we thought there was some unnecessary extra plot nonsense at the end to stretch it over the remaining commissioned episodes (often a problem in Korean dramas, but less with Netflix usually, as noted).

Older but still great romantic Kdramas I would recommend are Prosecutor Princess (chaebol heiress makes a decent fist of trying to work as a public prosecutor) and My Princess (actress turns out to be the lost heir to the Korean throne as there’s a public move to restore the monarchy*).

*This was a common trend in Korean dramas over a decade ago, since it was topical - should the Koreans get their monarchy back, mostly for tourism? The heir isn’t lost, BTW - everyone knows who he is. The public generally decided no, and the country moved on.

(Historical note: Korea had a monarchy for centuries, with the last lot being the Joseon dynasty*. The Joseon dynasty was co-opted and removed by the Japanese invasion and occupation in 1908-10, with the Japanese assassination of the last queen (Queen Min) being a common matter for plays and other writing in Korea. Thus, the restoration of the monarchy is a matter for some nationalist concern, but is associated also with all the bad things about the monarchy, such as the feckless nobility (yangban) and a caste-based society in general.

*Joseon/Chosun ("morning calm") is still a common name for Korea, and is used by North Korea as their name for themselves, calling South Korea Namjoseon ("South Joseon"); South Korea calls itself Hanguk ("Han country") and refers to North Korea as Bukhan ("North Han"), make of that what you will.)

Another great drama with similar themes was The King 2 Hearts, which is basically “What if Korea already had a monarchy and Korean Prince Harry married a North Korean officer?” The leads are charming and the story generally excellent.

 

[Kobold Stew]

We didn’t get on brilliantly with Business Proposal and never finished it, mostly because we thought there was some unnecessary extra plot nonsense at the end to stretch it over the remaining commissioned episodes (often a problem in Korean dramas, but less with Netflix usually, as noted).

I think the secondary plot in Business Proposal is stronger than most. Often, the B-story can be painful to watch, either through ick or intimations of sexual violence, that serve as a counterpoint to the A-plot. In Business Proposal, though, the friend's relationship is presented in a way that appears to recognize the realities of (modern Korean) sex life with a frank explicitness I hadn't seen elsewhere.

 

[jian]

I think the secondary plot in Business Proposal is stronger than most. Often, the B-story can be painful to watch, either through ick or intimations of sexual violence, that serve as a counterpoint to the A-plot. In Business Proposal, though, the friend's relationship is presented in a way that appears to recognize the realities of (modern Korean) sex life with a frank explicitness I hadn't seen elsewhere.

Yeah, the B-plot was fine, great even. It was mostly the back and forth between Tae-moo and his grandpa about whether he's allowed to marry Ha-ri and so on which felt artificial and annoying. It wasn't a long series (12 episodes) but still, we couldn't maintain our interest.

 

[jian]

A cultural note for reference: We Have To Talk About Samsung

I've already talked about what chaebol (enormous family-run conglomerates) are and how important they are in Korea - they basically concentrate all the billionaires in a few families. The reason there are so many chaebol Cinderella stories is because that's probably the only realistic fantasy for young women (or men, it goes both ways) to ever achieve anything resembling financial independence or home ownership.

Anyway, chaebol turn up in K-dramas a lot, as we know. And often the big bad chaebol is a very, very clear reference to the largest chaebol of them all: Samsung Group. It's very obvious that the chaebol in many dramas I've mentioned (Vincenzo, Mine, Queenmaker, High Class etc.) are directly based on Samsung.

The Samsung Group currently accounts for 25% of the Korean economy and was founded by Lee Byung-chul, who died in 1987. He had 10 children, of whom only two really matter for this story - Lee Kun-hee (his successor as CEO of Samsung Group; died in 2020) and Lee Myung-hee (current chair of Shinsegae Group, a subsidiary of Samsung which owns the Shinsegae department stores and Starbucks Korea, which we'll come on to later). Myung-hee in particular is very prominent in Korean culture; if you ever see an archetypal distant powerful chaebol matriarch, she's the reference model.

Kun-hee's son Jae-yong is the current CEO of Samsung and briefly went to prison for corruption in 2017. His cousin, Myung-hee's son Chung Yong-jin, managed to get into hot water in a quite different way very recently.

Chung Yong-jin has always been a feckless loser (albeit a billionaire like every descendant of Lee Byung-chul) and he's currently chair of Shinsegae and thus runs Starbucks Korea. Under his direction, Starbucks Korea launched a so-called Tank Day deal on the 18th of May, commemorating the Gwangju Massacre on 18/5/80, a day of national mourning when the dictator Chun Doo-hwan ordered the army to attack thousands of pro-democracy protesters, probably killing up to 2000 people. The Tank Day campaign contained many, many edgelord references to right-wing conspiracy theories about that day.

The public backlash was immediate and powerful, as was the government response (widespread condemnation and cancellation of contracts with Shinsegae). The CEO of Starbucks Korea was fired (he's an employee and probably wasn't responsible for the campaign). Starbucks US is apparently looking into buying back the company at a 35% discount (as is possible from the original contract). The police have apparently opened an investigation into Chung Yong-jin for wilful breach of the peace and public disturbance.

Beleaguered Shinsegae chairman apologizes for Starbucks crisis - The Korea Times

Shinsegae Group Chairman Chung Yong-jin apologized to the public in person on Tuesday for the controversial "Tank Day" marketing event by Starbucks...

www.koreatimes.co.kr

I don't think a half-hearted apology is going to cut it, in other words. It's a chaebol drama unfolding in front of our eyes in real time.

(Secondary notes on Starbucks: Koreans drink a hell of a lot of coffee, and Starbucks Korea is responsible for something like 30% of all Starbucks profits globally. In Korea (mainly Seoul), Starbucks is a study and social cafe - people go there to study on their laptops and meet up, as opposed to drink coffee or take pics for Instagram, and it was one of the most popular settings for doing so. But there are plenty of alternatives, all of which have been doing very well in the last week or so.)