![]() I have never really been a fan of this actress (which is sacrilege as a K-enthusiast, I know) but her ability to perform poise to disguise quiet desperation is truly something to behold. The repetition of South Korea’s traumatic political reality is mirrored in the main character Yoon Se-ri’s (played by Son Ye-jin) traumatic backstory. The drama earned a whopping 21% in its final episode, placing it second only to SKY Castle, the 2018-19 juggernaut from JTBC on the list of most popular cable dramas of all time (see Wikipedia Korean Drama).īack to the sadness. But she did it better and now she has the ratings to prove it. With Crash, I feel that Park Ji-Eun mixed the histrionics of Goblin and the political intrigue of Mr. I bid my own farewell to the drama after episode 9 and have looked back with neither wonder nor regret since my departure. In my opinion, Legend was good but it was not great. Sunshine to match her previous attempt with the latter drama just narrowly failing to overtake Goblin’s popularity. ![]() Kim would then re-emerge at the beginning of 2018 with Mr. While the ratings matched in numbers, Kim would emerge the clear winner as cable audiences were much smaller than network audiences at the time (a trend that is quickly changing). Then, who could forget 2016? When Park’s Legend of the Sea and veteran Kim Eun-sook’s Goblin were pitted against each other in a battle of the ages. Both titles remain on my top 10 dramas despite having watched nearly 100 Korean dramas at this point (did I mention I am 41 and single?). Her follow-up Producers used a small workplace setting to ponder the very meaning of life and nature of belonging. An epic defying the rules of time and space to make the viewer feel the most intimate emotions, both filial and romantic. Her previous work, My Love from a Star (2013), was a gorgeous piece of writing and marvelously executed to boot. I believe her to be one of the great drama writers of our time, if not the greatest. The main reason I was eager to watch this drama is that I am obsessed (pretty sure that is the right word) with Park Ji-eun. The people who share their language, history, culture and even genealogy.īut before this review gets too crushingly sad. The mournful backdrop demonstrates an important contradistinction: despite the South’s access to unprecedented international cultural acclaim and capital accumulation, South Koreans remain completely separated from those that they are closest to. Yet, it is with sadness rather than fear or anxiety that this story of contemporary Korea is told. It is hard to imagine a more divided house than Korea given that the peninsula remains under the imminent threat of war and international interference at all times. The first twelve episodes played like saccharine melodrama that I interpreted as yet another spin on the Romeo and Juliet narrative. I realized that I didn’t like the drama at first because I only took it at face value. The drama’s repetitive goodbyes serve a succinct purpose….to remind the audience of the goodbye that the Korean people never got upon their country’s partition. But Crash Landing On You is an exception. ![]() Sometimes good-byes feel like emotional manipulation designed to engineer audience obsession over a character or plot (think Dr. It is the stuff bittersweet dreams are made of. I realized that the “goodbye” forms the bedrock of melodrama. But I won’t write this review like this….because when I finally began to understand the drama’s narrative (which I admit only happened at the end of episode 15), I felt a little ashamed at my initial reaction. I was so bored by all the good-bying that I wanted to give up on watching the drama early, and often. I wanted to write a very wry review of this drama demonstrating my frustration at its meandering and repetitive plot.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |