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K-Drama Reviews

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Explore a featured selection of K-drama reviews below.

Mildly Bitter's Musings •

March 2024: Depressingly Bad at Consent

Maybe I was just on a road to be disappointed by all my shows this month. It's not unusual for a K-drama to start strong and then completely collapse. But some real bummers this month and some bad takes on consent and homosexuality.

Reuniting stars of fan fave The Heirs, this series about career setbacks, mental illness, and living a different path in Korea's competitive society should have been a slam dunk. And it was for about 10 episodes. But it could not deliver on its second half. Yeo Jeon
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

January 2024: Creatures from the Past

In January, New York City broke it's 700-day no-snow streak and I encountered some real stellar dramas.

Gyeongseong Creature sets an incredible stage for how the Japanese occupation, Japanese military violence, and the people of Korea survived such atrocities. It then kind of sells out its own nuanced and careful character development for a "second season." I'm reserving some judgment on this until I see this future second season, but I didn't love the way the final episodes wrap-up. On the who
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

December 2023: Korean Sojourn

I spent three weeks in Korea this December. While it was cold and we got snow (a white Christmas!), I was glad to see the country at this time of year. Winter light festivals brightened the frigid nights. There were an incredible number of concerts to attend. And I went to see some theater (which I wrote about here). Some places I went had few tourists (which I love) and I got to drink my favorite Korean warm beverage, Omija tea.

I went to Gwangju for a few days to see some of the historic site
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

November 2023: Destiny

I'm deep in Korea travel planning but here are some interesting shows from November.

In Destined With You, Rowoon plays a rude, standoffish lawyer, Jang Shin-yu, who is haunted by a hand covered in blood. Totes normal. In a new job at city hall, he encounters and immediately dislikes civil servant, Lee Hong-jo (Jo Bo-ah). Meanwhile, Hong-jo has a crush on Kwon Jae-kyung (Ha Jun) another lawyer who works at city hall. Jae-kyung rejects her confession which sets the stage for her casting a love s
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

July 2023: Life is Hard

I didn't finish as many series as I would have liked in July. But I did go see Jungkook sing on Good Morning America and start my long-awaited bathroom renovation. So it was a productive month (haha) and here are two worthwhile shows I saw.

This is a well-known series that I had put off because the first 10 minutes of the first episode were confusing and off-putting. But once I got over that hump (it's a wholly out of context flashback), this first episode might among the most emotionally harro
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

May-June 2023: Liberation, Grief and Divorce

Summer Strike is focused on a young woman, Lee Yeo-reum (Kim Seol-hyun) whose career and love life have not been going to plan. When her mother dies and leaves her some funds, she decides to quit working and live as frugally as possible until she figures out her life. In the non-stop achievement race in Korea, this is a radical departure. She finds herself in a small town with a library and decides this is the spot. She moves into a former pool hall where someone died (why it's been empty for so

January 2023: Boys, Revenge, and Violence

Viciously striking out at the thing that has hurt you is a human response but in two K-dramas I watched this month, revenge plays out differently for teenage boys and grown men.

Suddenly, he finds himself reborn as Jin Do-jun, the youngest grandson of the Soonyang family back in the 1980s. He knows all the inner-workings of the organization and the personalities of all the family members from either working with them or from reading Jin Yang-chu's autobiography (Lee Sung-min), the founder of So
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

September 2022: Death, Psychiatry, and Webtoons

In September, I finalized my plans to go to Korea. It's my first international trip since December 2019. After two years of Korean lessons, I am hoping I can handle some basic interactions. But really just excited to get out of town and be AWAY.

On Ma-eum (Kim Sejeong) is a top-tier national judo athlete who ends up quitting the sport and trying to get a job working in webtoons. She's taken on as a contract worker with the rag-tag crew at Neon who are fighting to keep their company alive. She s
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

April 2022: A Forecast of Business and Snowdrops

Disney+ has broken into the business of K-dramas and whoa was it a mess. But Netflix offered some new shows that work well for their formulas.

I ended up with a free subscription to Disney+ so I thought I would check out Snowdrop, their politically controversial K-drama. While there was an uproar about what the show might say about Korean democracy activists and their association with North Korean spies, in the end the show was such an absolute mess politically and artistically that the only re
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

March 2022: Teen to Noona Romance

The Heirs is a classic teen K-drama from 2013. I had avoided it because I did not have a great first impression of Lee Min-ho from the eternal stiffness that was Eternal Monarch. But after seeing this, I get his appeal.


The Heirs is both amazing and bad. It is full of terrible messaging and some truly shitty men. But it’s also so delightfully soapy that you cannot help but fall for it immediately, especially if you were raised on similar overwrought teen movies from the 80s.


Kim Tan (Lee
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

February 2022: Quiet Pain, Secret Joy, Idols in Luv

The great pleasure with some K-dramas is the hidden depths that you’re not expecting.

With Our Beloved Summer, it is structured around high school sweethearts who once filmed a reality TV together when they were young. They fell in love afterwards but had a crushing break-up and have not spoken for five years. Now Kook Yeon-soo (Kim Da-mi) works in PR and Choi Ung (Choi Woo-shik) is an artist. They are reunited for a follow-up documentary by a mutual high school friend, Ji-ung (Kim Sung-cheol)
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

January 2022: Happiness, Revenge, Answering Machines

While the pandemic is not over, with the new year, I no longer feel the need to call this a Pandemic Diary.

I’m just going to review the dramas I am watching or share my thoughts about them informally. And anything else that pops into my head.

If the premise of a zombie-esque epidemic, makes you want to run away after two years of your own exhausting pandemic experiences I hear you. But Happiness is actually a show that acknowledges our present moment and wants to have that conversation with t
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

Pandemic Diary December 2021: Dramas to Recommend

Back on my drama bullshit and feeling good. I have had a really good month of dramas I've enjoyed and I feel a bit renewed in my enthusiasm.

It’s been a while since I came across a romance I could heartily recommend to others. But The King’s Affection is worth the time.

It involves a complicated and dangerous scheme, where a court maid Da-mi (Choi Myung-bin as a child, Park Eun-bin as an adult) turns out to be a secret twin to the crown prince. She ends up taking his place as prince when he is
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

Pandemic Diary September-October 2021: BTS Distracted

As I mentioned before, I have been really focused on my BTS education lately. Remarkably, I am headed to their concerts in Los Angeles in November and December and I feel weirdly behind on my BTS "homework" since these concerts have come up so suddenly. I am almost done with the BTS variety show series Run BTS (episode 152of 153!) which has brought me a lot of joy. It's apparently going on hiatus for a long time and I'm a little sad I am finally catching up...only for it to be ending. Also their
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