January 2025: Parenting and Abandonment
A belated New Year's greeting as my December-January shows took a while to wrap-up. Praying the terrible drama drought of 2024 comes to an end soon!
K-Drama Reviews
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Explore a featured selection of K-drama reviews below.
December 2024: Found Family and Haunted Exes
Closing out a weak year of dramas...with dramas that started out promising or offer some good performances in less than stellar material.
Top 10 K-Dramas of 2024
I decided to do a Top 10 list based on what I saw this year (though they may have been released in another year). I really found it a rough year for dramas. A lot of these did not end up high in my lifetime rankings...which is really saying something about the shows that came out this year. But I feel like I can recommend them still.
October-November 2024: Love in the Big City et al
Love in the Big City really changes the landscape for gay representation in Korean drama. It is a true journey into gay culture as well as being a bittersweet story about looking for love.
September 2024: Meh Romance
I feel like my drama slump kind of continues. SIGH. There have a been a slew of recent romance dramas but they all started to blur together. Love Next DoorI could not help but see some parallels between Love Next Door and the recent series, Doctor Slump. Here, childhood neighbors Bae Seok-ryu (Jung So-min) and Choi Seung-hyo (Jung Hae-in) haven’t seen each other in a long time. Seok-ryu has been working for a prestigious tech company in the US and is engaged. But she shows up unexpectedly back i...
My Favorite K-Dramas Ranked
A ranking of the K-dramas I have watched and written about
August 2024: Drama Slump Continues
June-July 2024: A Drab Summer of Dramas
What the hell have I been watching all summer? I cannot think of any other time since I started my K-drama journey that I have floundered for so long looking for a show to catch my attention. Even my Korean teacher was complaining about this so I feel like it's not just me. We're having a dud summer of dramas. In less of a review and more of an issue of record-keeping, these are the shows I poked around with this summer but (mostly) could not finish.Missing Crown PrinceThis is the one show I man...
May 2024: Time Travel, Superpowers, and Serial Killers
April 2024: Tears, Trauma, and Giving Up
I was a little off my game this month. With all the Broadway openings in April, I was mentally spent so I didn't keep great notes on the shows I was watching. I felt compelled to catch up on some K-drama "classics" but with older dramas sometimes the age issues make them tough to get through. I kept giving up on shows before the end. But here's my April rundown such as it is.
Book Review: K-Drama School
Grace Jung’s educational and frequently breezy bookis a great starting place if you don’t have any Korean cultural or historic context to K-dramas.
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
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
February 2024: Demons Mental and Literal
I've had a bit too much time on my hands and have been watching too much TV. Some shows were not even worth finishing. I'm listing them for completeness. But 12 shows in one month is too many (ethe shortest month with only 1 extra day) and I was scraping the bottom of the TV barrel at times.
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
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
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
I went to Gwangju for a few days to see some of the historic site
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
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
September-October 2023: Liars, Liars, and Love
A bunch of shows sort of drifted between September to October so here's my wrap-up for the two months.
August 2023: Running Out of Steam
Did the dramas I watched in August run out of steam or did I?
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
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
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
April 2023: The Glory of a Slow Burn
One of the great joys of the romance genre is all the different ways you can show how someone comes to love someone else.
February-March 2023: SKZ, Crash Course in Bad Dramas
I've been really busy with work for the past few months and my drama writing has fallen to the wayside. But I wanted to keep track for posterity a few shows I saw.
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
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
October-December 2022: Queens, Cross-Dressing, and a trip to Korea
I spent two weeks in Seoul, Busan, and Tokyo in November. It was an incredibly relaxing trip. I've included some pictures below for fun.
We did some sightseeing, visited museums, napped, ate, and saw some musicals--including the Crash Landing On You mu
We did some sightseeing, visited museums, napped, ate, and saw some musicals--including the Crash Landing On You mu
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