I can’t remember the title of the show where a rich twentysomething layabout finds that his ne’er-do-well friends are now his roommates. There was “Romance Is a Bonus Book” (a publishing drama), “My Shy Boss” (he wears a hoodie and turns out to be a great chef), “Love Alarm” (an app pings when your secret match is within a ten-metre radius), and “It’s Okay to Not Be Okay” (more gothic, set partly in a psychiatric hospital). We kept watching K-dramas straight through the summer. It was becoming clear that our trip to Seoul, planned for late June, 2020, was not happening. Later, alone, I found the “Reply 1988” theme song on YouTube and played it over and over, getting misty-eyed. We hardly moved throughout the day, and we saw only one another, like participants in a reality show about a family. It’s hard to imagine watching thirty hours of this now, but we were hooked, and the world outside wasn’t safe.
ORANGE PARASITE GAME SERIES
Set in a humble Seoul neighborhood, the series follows a group of high-school friends (and their parents) from the eve of the Summer Olympics to graduation and beyond, as they all eventually leave their community behind. (The violence was more intense, but not above a PG-13, or maybe our parental standards were just slipping.) Next up was the longest and the best: “Reply 1988”-twenty episodes, each one the length of a feature film-a nostalgia trip filled with love, hardship, and awkward fashion choices. A drawn-out love triangle is eclipsed by a simmering revenge plot, as an ex-con restaurateur vows to destroy the food-service mogul who ruined his life.
That same day, I asked a Korean American novelist friend, “Have you seen Crash Landing on You? (We all just finished.)”Īfter “Crash Landing,” we-my wife and two sons, then nine and twelve, and I-plunged directly into another hexadecalogue: “Itaewon Class,” set in the cutthroat gastropub biz. I synopsized it again for a friend in Rhode Island. “The corniness is undercut by one of the North Korean soldiers who is secretly a fan of South Korean soaps: whenever there’s a tight situation, he imagines what would happen in a soap (and then that thing either does or doesn’t happen).” Two days later, I e-mailed a friend in Arkansas about this “goofy” but “irresistible” show, pitching it more succinctly.
A North Korean soldier takes her in.” I noted that most of the K-drama’s “16 very long episodes” take place in the D.P.R.K., and called the show “really good, kind of demented.” I tried to sell him on its self-awareness. A tornado (à la Wizard of Oz) transports her up over the border and into the Demilitarized Zone. “The setup: a high-powered female business owner, next in line to take over her father’s conglomerate (over her two older brothers), is testing one of her company’s products-a paraglider. I told him about “Crash Landing on You,” a Korean drama series on Netflix. In the first March of the pandemic, a friend in Pennsylvania e-mailed me about the slim pickings on TV.
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