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K-Drama Reviews

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Explore a featured selection of K-drama reviews below.

Mildly Bitter's Musings •

June 2025: Suffering Alone, Stalkers, Borrowed Eyes

All seven members of BTS returned from the military this month. We finally got to peep Min Yoongi at J-Hope's concert and then see his full FACE upon the first OT7 live announcing they will work on an album and a world tour for next spring. My savings account is ready. I also saw Stray Kids during their world tour in NY. We had some adverse weather conditions but after the nightmare of Ateez's NY show last summer we were ready for this one. A good time was had by all. One of my closest friends m...
M •

February-March 2025: Comic Book Violence, Inner Children, and Bad Princes

Life got away from me with concerts, surgery, and a busy work project. Saw J-Hope's solo show, Hwasa's world tour, and got very buried in my job. But there were a few dramas I wanted to talk about from February and March.Study GroupHappy to see Hwang Min-hyun in a more playful, action-comedy role in this high octane high school drama that feels a bit like Muppet Babies Fight Club.Everything in this show plays delightfully against type. It is centered around a nerdy high school student, Yoon Ga-m...
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

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...
Mildly Bitter's Musings •

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...
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
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