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The writing is so good it takes your breath away
Park Hae Young has hit the proverbial baseball out of the park.
Phenomenal performances by a group of esteemed actors, a production of discreet perfection by a crew and director who deserve a thousand drunken toasts.
A story about storytelling that was so rich and real that I kept talking back to the screen and giving the characters advice. It was embarrassing. I had to keep the door closed.
And there was a poet. Of course. A drunken poet! When he wrote a poem about spring I was so baked by that point that I sobbed all the way through it as the lines appeared, superimposed on the scene.
I realized what I had been missing this year in kdrama. It was topicality. I always say that Kdrama is all about the emotion and the music, but emotion is always and only driven by our feelings about reality. About our realities, as different as they may be.
Lately shows have been tiptoeing around real life in Korea as if they were trying to behave themselves for international viewers. Even the actors have been looking bland and dispirited in kdrama lately.
PHY's characters talk about everything important in their lives, including the threat of AI, the appropriation of women's work, childhood trauma and the overcoming of it, pride, jealousy and despair... they do a lot of drinking and fighting, and then get up the next morning and go to work again.
The one thing the characters do not talk about directly but do consistently show is love. Love between lovers, between friends, in the family and between the most married couple you have seen this year (and I do not mean that final term positively).
So much happens in each episode that I would nervously stop to see if the episode was almost over and find it had barely started!
This show does take some fortitude. I have known a few people like the main character, Hwang Dong Man, and they have been very difficult to take. Annoying, abrasive and embarrassing. Koo Kyo hwan is a great film actor, but you never know how that skill will turn out in dramas. This is a tour de force. Not the least because KKH has the capacity to imperceptibly slip from being incredibly irritating into Chaplinesque behavior, awkward and heartfelt.
Totally recommended. Astounding, amazing and wonderful.
Phenomenal performances by a group of esteemed actors, a production of discreet perfection by a crew and director who deserve a thousand drunken toasts.
A story about storytelling that was so rich and real that I kept talking back to the screen and giving the characters advice. It was embarrassing. I had to keep the door closed.
And there was a poet. Of course. A drunken poet! When he wrote a poem about spring I was so baked by that point that I sobbed all the way through it as the lines appeared, superimposed on the scene.
I realized what I had been missing this year in kdrama. It was topicality. I always say that Kdrama is all about the emotion and the music, but emotion is always and only driven by our feelings about reality. About our realities, as different as they may be.
Lately shows have been tiptoeing around real life in Korea as if they were trying to behave themselves for international viewers. Even the actors have been looking bland and dispirited in kdrama lately.
PHY's characters talk about everything important in their lives, including the threat of AI, the appropriation of women's work, childhood trauma and the overcoming of it, pride, jealousy and despair... they do a lot of drinking and fighting, and then get up the next morning and go to work again.
The one thing the characters do not talk about directly but do consistently show is love. Love between lovers, between friends, in the family and between the most married couple you have seen this year (and I do not mean that final term positively).
So much happens in each episode that I would nervously stop to see if the episode was almost over and find it had barely started!
This show does take some fortitude. I have known a few people like the main character, Hwang Dong Man, and they have been very difficult to take. Annoying, abrasive and embarrassing. Koo Kyo hwan is a great film actor, but you never know how that skill will turn out in dramas. This is a tour de force. Not the least because KKH has the capacity to imperceptibly slip from being incredibly irritating into Chaplinesque behavior, awkward and heartfelt.
Totally recommended. Astounding, amazing and wonderful.
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