Closing out a weak year of dramas...with dramas that started out promising or offer some good performances in less than stellar material.
Praying 2025 breaks the drama drought!
I was immediately smitten with Family By Choice, a remake of a Chinese drama, but when the story leaps ahead in time, and the characters change dramatically, it left me behind.
I thought Jung Chae-yeon read a little too old for her character, who behaves like an incredibly babyish teen. Since the series leaps ahead in time, it makes sense they cast older actors as these teens but it's the hardest one to pull off because they have written her to be extremely immature (frankly to a questionable degree).
If you have mother issues, this series will not help with those. Truly some of the worst moms they could round up here. San-ha's mother is played as hysterically narcissistic about her pain and needs. Hae-jun's mother is seen to be all about money.
As time goes on, the two dads end up acting like an old married couple which is a delightful angle. I don't feel like we get this kind of older male friendship/relationship model very often in dramas.
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Family By Choice
I was immediately smitten with Family By Choice, a remake of a Chinese drama, but when the story leaps ahead in time, and the characters change dramatically, it left me behind.
Three kids are raised together under the same roof but they each come from a different family. Yoon Ju-won (Jung Chae-yeon) is being raised by her dad. He is set up on a date with single mother and the relationship goes nowhere but he ends up taking in the woman's son, Kang Hae-jun (Bae Hyun-sung). Upstairs, Kim San-ha (Hwang In-youp) is being raised by his divorced dad. As they've grown up together there is a sibling-like energy to their dynamics. They look out for one another and are protective of each other. They face a lot of community scrutiny because of their family situations. They aren't always nice to each other but there is a kind of familial love bond there.
Their abandonments are each unique. And pain them in different ways. San Ha is being punished by his mother because when he was young he was left alone with his younger sister and she ended up dying. His mother has never forgiven him. It ruins her marriage and that is why she walks out on them. Later, she returns demanding San-ha love and care for her new daughter from her new marriage. As plot points go, it is one of the most infuriating.
Hae-jun wants an answer why he was left behind by his mother. Meanwhile, Ju-won is kind of carefree, never talking about her mother, and just happy she finally has some siblings and a "family."
Bae Hyun-sung's performance is what pulled me in. His vulnerable teen self is constantly worried he will be sent away again. We frequently see flashes of his inner child who is terrified--shaking and sobbing that all this could go away at any minute. He is so easily fed by any crumb of food, love, or attention (even a younger sister who is mean to him).
I thought Jung Chae-yeon read a little too old for her character, who behaves like an incredibly babyish teen. Since the series leaps ahead in time, it makes sense they cast older actors as these teens but it's the hardest one to pull off because they have written her to be extremely immature (frankly to a questionable degree).
If you have mother issues, this series will not help with those. Truly some of the worst moms they could round up here. San-ha's mother is played as hysterically narcissistic about her pain and needs. Hae-jun's mother is seen to be all about money.
As time goes on, the two dads end up acting like an old married couple which is a delightful angle. I don't feel like we get this kind of older male friendship/relationship model very often in dramas.
But the time leap really ruined the series for me. Naturally, there is going to be some sort of romance with Ju-won but how it gets laid out and told is fast and sloppy. They become an insta-couple without any real conflict. Worse, Ju-won is kind of nothing character. We spend a lot more time seeing the character who is in love with her and very little is focused on her and her feelings.
Nevertheless, Hae-jun's storyline, as they get older, remains the emotionally gripping one. I could take or leave the romance, but the struggles he has to finally accept he is loved is the real core to this show.
Nevertheless, Hae-jun's storyline, as they get older, remains the emotionally gripping one. I could take or leave the romance, but the struggles he has to finally accept he is loved is the real core to this show.
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Gangnam B-Side
I am such a sucker for Ji Chang-wook shows when they fit his narrow skillset. Is he fucking, fighting, and sad...<chef's kiss>. Anything else and I'm not sure it works for him (or else he has some of the worst taste in picking projects). But lately he has returned to the crime thriller genre and it's really working for him.
Here he is a guy living on the fringe of society, Yoon Gil-ho. He works as a driver/pimp taking care of escorts who have asked him for his protection. This is a seedy look at the nightclubs of Gangnam, the women who go missing in this underworld, corruption in government, the prosecutor's office, and the police force, and the lives that are ruined by men in power. It was inspired by the Burning Sun scandal. Kang Dong-woo (Jo Woo-jin) is a police officer who ends up leading his own investigation when a friend of his daughter's (Bibi) goes missing and his daughter disappears as well. He teams up with a rising prosecutor, Min Seo-jin (Ha Yoon-kyung) who has been taken under the wing of a powerful leader but she isn't sure who to trust.
This series is kind of a fascinating mess. The visual language is more successful than the writing.
There is a real visual fetishization of pain and violence that swings between beautiful and awful. The characters are suffering and broken and have no way out of this world they are trapped in. So when they find even a bit of love, respect, friendship, kindness it is seismic. The plot gets confusing at times.
But there is one scene where the camera lingers on Ji Chang-wook and Bibi as he tattoos her arm and they smoke. And it was kind of everything. For all the bombast, fighting, blood spatter, and what not in this series, that scene ends up saying so much more about the characters, their lives, and this unspoken mettle that Bibi's character has. They have again shown real chemistry with each other and maybe this made my Top 10 for the year for this scene alone.
In a way the show is trying to speak for these voiceless women, though mostly using men to do so. But Bibi's performance makes her character a woman to be reckoned with.
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The Trunk
If Decision to Leave was an "erotic" shitty Netflix psychological thriller, it would be The Trunk. I don't know why you'd hire an incredible cast and given them such weak material to work with. But here we are.
Come for Gong Yoo and Seo Hyun-jin's acting because there will not be much else. They are stunning on their own and I enjoyed watching them work off each other. But I felt dumber at the end of watching this series.
Noh In-ji (Seo Hyun-jin) was engaged to be married to a bisexual man but he ran away after his sexuality was made public and she was driven into the strange world of marriage contracts. She works for an agency where she is set up on secret contract marriages. Han Jeong-won (Gong Yoo) agrees to enter into this contract marriage with Noh In-ji because his ex-wife (Jung Yun-ha) has insisted he do so to get her back. He is desperate to please her and cannot be without her. He's been manipulated and domineered by his ex-wife for their whole relationship so this makes some perverse sense. The ex-wife has just gotten married to a younger man herself. And takes pleasure in flaunting her unavailability to her ex-husband (and bedding her new husband).
In any event, things do not go according to the crazy ex-wife's plan (whatever that was--why would marrying off your ex get him to come back to you?). There are time leaps backwards and forwards to a trunk washing up on the shore of a lake...and a dead body. And truly at times I wasn't sure where we were.
The way the series is filmed is in this very cool, detached way (that put me in mind of Decision to Leave) but it feels like it's all trying to dress up something more straightforward and banal.
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Love Your Enemy
This pretends it's an enemies to lovers story but there's something a little deeper going on. Though the flashbacks to a teen romance have more frisson than the adult romance.
Seok Ji-won (Ju Ji-hoon) and Yoon Ji-won (Jung Yu-mi) were born on the same day to families who have always been in conflict with each other. Raised to "hate" the other, they actually fell in love as teens (played with charm and sadness by Hong Min-gi and Oh Ye-ju). But a miscommunication and a separation caused a fracture and they have not seen each other since. They are awkwardly reunited in adulthood when Seok Ji-won returns from abroad to take over the school where Yoon Ji-won works.
While so often dramas make 30+ actors play their teenage selves, blessings that no one made Ju Ji-hoon play a teenager here. The actors playing the teens are actually one of the stronger parts of the show. It's a volatile, secret juvenile romance that was real, meaningful and a reasonable thing to haunt them so many years later because it was lost.
But sadly when we move forward in time, Ju Ji-hoon and Jung Yu-mi don't have any chemistry. At times, we can see the inner-teen in Jung Yu-mi and how that direct, strong-willed girl was lost due to various family tragedies. But it's hard to see the inner-teen in Ju Ji-hoon or where that lovesick young man went. He just seems less at-ease with this more comedy-forward material.
The family rivalry stuff is not very interesting and a late in the series "reveal" didn't change much for me.
However, someone on the costuming staff must hate Jung Yu-mi because they are constantly dressing her in clothes that don't fit. Eventually, it's like they are dressing her like they are hiding a pregnancy! No one is pregnant! It's just bad.
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