Went to a friend's wedding in June. It was lovely.
The dramas I watched were less lovely.
Daily Dose of Sunshine
I appreciate that conversations around mental health in Korea might not be quite where they are in New York City. But there was something so heavily "educational" about the way mental health conditions were talked about in this drama, Daily Dose of Sunshine, set in a psychiatric ward.
Jung Da-eun (Park Bo-young) is learning to be a nurse and gets transferred into a psychiatry department. She finds she really connects with patients there but she also has no idea how she should actually be handling these patients. While she is working out her jobs, she catches the eye of an obsessive-compulsive colo-rectal doctor Dong Go-yun (Yeon Woo-jin) who happens to be friends with Da-eun's childhood friend and neighbor, Song Yu-chan (Jang Dong-yoon). One of the psychiatrists, Hwang Yeo-hwan (Chang Ryul), falls for one of the other nurses, Min Deul-re (Lee E-dam) but she fears getting close to anyone. So there is a lot of romance trying to happen while also running a psych ward.
Netflix clearly poured a lot of money into special effects to create the sensations and perceptions of the patients including one who is delusional and loses himself in the narrative of a video game universe as well as Yu-chan who suffers from a panic disorder. Though I might have preferred the patients express things themselves rather than an overly artistic expression of what they are experiencing.
It's funny to think this show about mental health hardly depicted any talk therapy. There was some but it was not driven by that so getting a sense of how people were feeling again often came from external manifestations rather than their own voices, including this visual landscape.
Clearly this bugged me. It made struggles look fantastical. I get that this is a visual medium but it felt like the visuals came at a cost to actual writing and storytelling.
The show hits a sharp turn when one of the main characters has a mental health breakdown. But as quickly as things took a turn they also seemed to be righted again (medication really does a lot of heavy-lifting in this drama...but not talk therapy...argh).
Though the show digs into the cultural stigma around mental health and, again, in a very heavy-handed way explains to the audience how wrong this is. The best manifestation of the show actually showing the stigma centered around someone with a schizophrenic family member and the neighbors trying to turn them away from moving into the building. In a rare instance, the family member was allowed to share her feelings on screen and I think it was one of the stronger moments of the series.
While I sometimes appreciate Korean dramas approach subject matters in a different way than American television, here I felt like I was watching more of an American after-school movie from the 1980s. So the cultural disconnect for me was too much to traverse.
Also I was totally not into any of the romantic couples so...fire this casting director.
Reunited Worlds is mysterious series about a teenager who died in an accident suddenly coming back to the world after 12 years and finding how his friends and siblings have grown up in the shadow of his death. Overlong and heavily sentimental the show overstays its welcome at 20 episodes.
Seong Hae-seong (Yeo Jin-goo) is a happy teenager who has a crush on his friend Jung Jung-won. But one night at school he encounters a classmate dying in the art room and as he goes for help he is hit by a car. He is blamed as the murderer and his siblings grow up with the stigma of that crime around them. His friends go their separate ways, particularly, Jung Jung-won (Lee Yeon-hee) now an adult, who has blamed herself for Hae-seong's death and is pursuing a dream of becoming a chef mostly because that was Hae-seong's dream.
After Hae-seong returns, he finds how everyone has struggled in different ways from his death. And while it feels like he was only gone for a minute to him, 12 years of grief and pain have existed for everyone he left behind.
The show's greatest strength is focusing on how grief manifests and how even with Hae-seong's return that does not eliminate the pain these survivors have experienced. And we see how each person has grown-up around that loss. His return does not miraculously cure what ails them.
But then it all gets so dragged out. There are romantic triangles. Mysteries of other people's family identities. And then the actual crimes Hae-seong is trying to get to the bottom of. Also throw in a random half-assed kidnapping at one point.
I started to lose interest by around episode 12 and it was a slog to get to the end.
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