My 20th Twenty (2023)

A Sweet Fantasy Web Series, Though Sadly Lacking...

My 20th Twenty is pretty much what the title suggests; Kang So Won ( Choi Yu Ju) was turning twenty during the millennium ( 2000). However, after encountering a bitter witch ( Go Soo Hee )who takes offence at So Won's actions, she is cursed to remain at the age of twenty forever.


While sounding like a dream come true to remain youthful, So Won finds her situation turning into a living nightmare. Her friends and those close to So Won cannot remember her after a year. She is forced to move from different jobs and places after a year ( due to the spell) and remains like a living ghost.


Now chronologically in her forties, So Won is desperate to try and find a lead about the witch and finally break her curse. After several mishaps, she meets cold and stoic Min Kang Hyun ( Jung Su Bin) and the kindhearted Jo Sang Wook ( Dawon). Despite bearing a close resemblance to her first love, Kang Hyun is the opposite of him in both temperament and personality. However, as the series progresses and So Won finds herself chasing further leads, she becomes more involved with the two youths.


For a short web series, My 20th Twenty has a surprisingly interesting premise: a girl is cursed to remain twenty forever, it is not all it cracks up to be, and she finds love along the way. It is simple, yet sweet. Naturally, it is fair to say the series was never going to be a tour de force example of flawless writing and execution. The characters are fairly cookie-cutter from other drama and pretty much ticks all the boxes you would expect from a short romance series; the oblivious, yet charming female lead, the stoic male lead and the bubbly second male lead, jealousy, and a hidden secret somewhere in the midst. It is a fair cliché series with characters only playing their roles to be assets to the short plot.


The acting is better than you would think, shockingly. Naturally, there are some more questionable and cheesy acting moments, but the main leads delivered fairly well, with all things considered.


The execution of the web series was one of its major downfalls. It would naturally be a rush, and try to fit in as much as possible into such a short time. Still, the heavy focus on the romantic factor for most of the narrative often left the more intriguing elements of the female lead's quest to find the witch in the background, leading to a rushed resolution. The ending was fairly sweet but was a byproduct of this writing direction.



Overall, My 20th Twenty is a fairly lighthearted and sugary web series with a romantic factor and a surprisingly interesting premise. Sadly, time restraints, a restricted budget and writing did mean the series felt a little easy to forget from short web dramas with similar plot scenarios and setups. Overall, it made an easygoing binge-watch, but little else.

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Twenty forever?

Actually, I was not going to write a review for this drama but then I noticed that there weren't any so I might as well jott down a few of my impressions. I just love this kind of fantasy and this one has an novel way to work with time!

It is a story of a young woman who, on the eve of becoming twenty, categorically refuses to buy a packet of chewing gum from a bizarre looking woman. Little does she know that that woman is a witch who goes on to curse her, as a repercussion, to remain 20 forever. So on every New Year, the girl's life gets reset and everything she'd done gets deleted: her family and friends do not know her anymore. Everything starts to change when , twenty years later, she meets her first love's doppelganger, creates solid connections with old and new friends and finally finds the witch again.

As you can see, I loved the story. The writing was good and I found it rather convincing since the initial set up was very complicated (time passes for everyone except for her) . She becomes a forty year old woman inside a twenty year old body but still references things from the first time that she was 20 leaving people around her flabbergasted! The drama is funny and sweet. The actors were OK, nothing to write home about, they emoted enough but acting was obviously not their cup of tea. They were easy on the eye so the lack of acting chops are to be overseen since the story is fun to watch even without fireworks. Actually, the FL had better chemistry with the SML, as usual but the ML was cute as a brooding button! One of the most interesting characters was the witch: over the top scary make up who eventually gets sick with Alzheimer's but manages to find a few sane moments to sort the FL out.I did not like the witch very much because of the way they presented her: such a cliché when they could have done something more subtle and therefore scarier!

All in all, they managed to keep the second hand embarrassment to a strict minimum: though it was a bit difficult to believe that the FL was not at ease with all the internet speak: it sometimes seemed she was stuck in time, as if she did not follow the societal evolutions over those twenty years of being 20!

Koreans are definitely very creative when they deal with time problems: be it time slip, time travel, time curse, groundhog day! I am just so happy to have discovered K-dramas because they do not seem to be afraid of any complicated subject and time is very very complicated.

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