Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.
This week I finished my Old Fashioned Cupcake recaps and got through episode 3 of the Thai soap opera with an LGBTQ+ character and loveline To Sir, With Love. The latter is 17 episodes so I’ll be working on it for a while, but I’ll start something new next week too.
This week I was also SICK with something dreadful that made me tired all the time. I consoled myself by making it “Woo Bin week” and completing two of his most recent dramas. I don’t often follow actors, I’m much more of a story person, but I’m watching The Heirs, where he’s making me like his character despite the fact that he’s horrible. I felt compelled to find a show where I could cheer him on toward a happy ending. I found one at least.
There’s only one remaining Woo Bin show I may watch in the future and it’s definitely NOT Uncontrollably Fond. Since I also like Lee Jong Suk I may do School 2013 someday.
I watched all of:
Black Knight – 택배기사 – 2023 (Pictured)
A recently aired Korean post-apocalyptic drama with 6 episodes.
In the miserable future, delivery men bringing oxygen to people are the heroes and everything else sucks in a vague kinda way.
This drama was in trouble with me from episode one, when characters spent more time talking about how awesome Woo Bin’s character was than showing him being awesome beyond some superficial actions (he’s nice to people!). Then there was the interior decorating, which involved Ikea couches floating helplessly in grey-brown rooms. The whole drama is very gray-brown.
Bad interior decorating may seem like a silly thing to focus on, but it was a symptom of a larger problem: underdeveloped story and world. Most of the places shown in the drama had a style and look, but didn’t make any sense as far as people living in them or using them. Past looking cool, they didn’t tell me anything about the characters or story.
As a result, things just seemed to happen and it was pretty nebulous why or how things were working. Without a fleshed-out world and rules, the character’s strategy for dealing with problems was usually ‘go to a place and shoot people’, which wasn’t interesting.
Furthermore, single-issue apocalypse stories usually need more immediate, well-contained conflicts. The reality of a world where there is one, single issue plaguing humanity is really more of a fantasy than an apocalypse (can you imagine if we only had ONE problem to worry about???) and is by its nature not that complicated. Most successful stories of this type (Mad Max comes to mind) involve a singular bad guy and a simple setup and goals to build everything around.
Black Knight tries to build a much larger world with politics that should have been complicated but instead were just unexplained. It needed a typical kdrama length to flesh out all the characters and factions involved. Instead half the show was about a young man becoming a deliveryman in a hunger games type situation that fit as clunkily into the world as everything else.
So yeah, not a fan.
But on the plus side, it had Kang Yoo Seok, who is as adorable here as he was in the BL Light On Me. If all you want is Woo Bin and action and post-apocalypse, then you might be happy to just turn off your brain and enjoy this short series.
The Woo Bin drama I enjoyed more was:
Our Blues – 우리들의 블루스 – 2022
A korean omnibus-style drama with 20 episodes.
We meet the various characters living on Jeju and learn about who they are and what they’ve been through.
Not a show I actually recommend binging in one week, as it gets very heavy and emotion-filled at times.
The omnibus style of this drama means that various character relationships are explored for about two episodes before moving on to the next relationship. At the same time, other characters’ arcs would develop slowly in the background until they got their episodes.
This drama reminds me of soap-y, weekender-style dramas because of the range of the characters and story. Unlike the typical dramas that focus on characters in their 20s-30s doing whatever, weekenders give more screen time to older characters and their lives. Our Blues gave characters from a young child to an elderly mother plenty of screen time and focused on relationships beyond the typical parent/child or romantic relationships.
The main downside is that if you aren’t that invested in certain characters, their episodes might not have a lot to offer you. I found most of the characters interesting (even if I didn’t always like them) and while I enjoyed some characters’ stories more than others, I didn’t have anyone I wanted to skip.
The thing I didn’t love was the at times more conservative attitudes presented in a positive light. The respect-your-elders-even-if-they-are-horrible attitude is something I can’t get behind. Here there is a violent father figure whose abusive actions are jail-worthy, but when not beating people he was often comical. At least the show didn’t focus on him long.
Other than him though, I was drawn in by these characters and their lives. In particular, I enjoyed the older characters, and their heartbreaking stories of poverty and struggle illustrated a history of Korea and Jeju that I am not very well versed in. Not that it was all hardship and struggles, the happy moments and simple joys of day-to-day life helped keep things from getting too dark.
And as for Woo Bin, he was a strong-and-silent Jeju boy with a boat and sweet smiles. His romantic arc was a constant in the background even when not the focal character, and also helped add lighter moments when needed. His solid persistence and practical way of approaching his romance with Han Ji Min’s character was heartwarming and reassuring and butterfly-inducing.
This was the Woo Bin I wanted to see.