@Trent – Would you expound more on how you would like to see Kdramas acknowledge the essential element in romantic relationships? Would you want them to go more for a Western TV route? I like the example you provided from IOTNBO. I am wondering what would you have liked to have seen more from Hometown Cha Cha Cha or any other of your favorites that you found a bit lacking in this area?

I might be the only one in our Patreon group (wait besides me someone else who called it a guilty pleasure, gah, memory!!! Natalia? Paulina?) who made it through Nevertheless (it was the music that kept me hooked as well as both leads) as KFG dropped it in seconds! And they did not shy away from intimacy as it was central the story. I saw an interview with Song Kang and Han So Hee where they watched some episodes together. And I remember Song Kang being totally shocked one of their scenes made it to air. It was a very funny moment.

I remember being a little shocked to see so much intimacy in a Kdrama and then pleased on how well they handled the intimate moments. Then, I learned the Show had a female director and tried begging(totally unsuccessfully) KFG to give it a try again ! LOL!

Its not a great Show, but I found it interesting.

I think SLA is exemplary, and sorry my way of saying this has confused you. Indeed, since it was one of the first K drama shows I watched, I have been puzzled and disappointed ever since as to how this part of romantic engagement has been dealt with in 99.9% of K Dramas. This is especially so since many of these same dramas do such a bang up job detailing the emotional nuances and challenges of hooking up so well, albeit in part because of the lack of emphasis on sexuality.

Insofar as the latter, my disappointment has had several undercurrents, including my own physical realities. Because of infirmity, I probably watched too many shows and became a bit jaded. But also because I believe the best K Drama shows set such a high standard for all the rest. I could not watch Bossam for example without the recent group watch of Chuno–relatively same time period, and several similar tropes–in mind. The latter was a show for the ages, imo, one of the greatest pieces of filmed work to ever hit the screens anywhere in the world. It was a consummate entertainment, a tragedy, a heroic tale, wildly comedic by turns, with an incredibly able support ensemble that went on and on and on, and a lead role enacted by perhaps the world’s greatest physical actor in the role of his lifetime. The former, to me, by contrast: meh.
But also I have predilections. I do love well done sageuks or historical tales, but the last great one I saw was Nokdu Flower. I liked more recently B level sageuk styled shows like Rookie Historian and The Tale of the Nokdu, each less for their stories and more for the acting of specific characters. More recently, last year I thought The Crowned Clown did a bang up job taking the fine movie (not to mention Lee Byung Hun’s astonishingly good performance) Masquerade and by developing the story turning the show into a top to bottom well crafted series. I appreciated how somehow Kingdom managed to mash up that particularly silly horror trope of Zombies to which South Korean film is so wildly addicted with a hard hitting political indictment making use of the sageuk form. And most of all, albeit the story hardly interested me, thought Shin Hae Sun put on such a spectacular performance in Mr. Queen, I simply loved the show from almost start to finish. I have wanted to like sageuks on Netflix or Viki this year, but honestly ho hum.
With the two guilty pleasure shows of this year, Vincenzo and Devil Judge, both suffered from a problem widespread throughout the history of K Dramas apparently since it is so widely discussed–not knowing how to stick the landing. Vincenzo started out so spectacularly well that its failures in the final four episodes were particularly galling. The whole show pinned itself on the combination of its violent menace being undercut and overthrown by its wildly inventive, surrealistic, and absurdist play on S. Korean broad humor. The final four episodes, however, the violence and menace, far from moving the plot necessarily forward, became cliched, cynical, sadistic, and bitter and the wonderful absurdity of show reduced to comic book caricature.
With Devil Judge, show already having problems with the gratuitous and slimy over the top violent, creepy self indulgences, might still have stayed afloat somewhat if the final episode had not appeared so hastily thrown together, one unbelievable outcome following the next.
Then there was Sisyphus! A big, overblown, sci fi dystopic production which seemed to be a parody of itself from the first moment without the least sense of its own spectacular ridiculousness. Big name actors, big production, really bad. Bad, bad, bad.

Yes I understand dystopia is the carte du jour, and I cannot really say much about Squid Game having only watched a couple episodes, the second of which put me to sleep–I mean Hunger Games meets Red Light, Green Light with a dash of–god how many shows and movies about this do I have to see that class has been an issue for hundreds of years in South Korea, and thus, any old eyes open cynic could use that old stick to poke the dystopic futuristic bear–class warfare thrown in. I might yet still watch the show, so many, including K, not really given to praising such fare, have enjoyed it, but something about its world wide popularity, when shows such as Youth of May or even moreso as I have mentioned On the Verge of Insanity, a very small show, with an excellent, if not star studded, ensemble, taking the stuff of everyday work a day frustrations, and turning it into a kind of refuge entertainment, funny and touching by turns, fly almost completely under the radar. i am glad Vincenzo will not be reprieved, despite how much I love Song Joong Ki in that role, and I am disheartened to hear Squid Games is going to have a second season.

I quite liked Navillera, the wonderful slice of life piece on Netflix this year, albeit I will say for folks who liked Navillera, Dear My Friends lifts the same theme in a heftier package with many more great performances to it. And I quite loved the moving Romeo and Juliet go to the Gwangju martial law massacre riots of the 1980s that was The Youth of May, in which imo Go MIn Si puts on the best performance I have seen all year by a lead woman actor. But here again, I can say that Youth of May could be said to fit into one small corner of the mid 1990s epic Sandglass, whose coverage of that same time and place was far more nuanced and even more devastating, especially in terms of presenting those events in their proper scope.

I had high hopes for You Are My Spring because I just find Seo Hyun Jin thoroughly delightful. But it like a lot of shows I have seen this year have fallen prey to a kind of this is K Drama so you will love it and all its goofy tropes with good actors we can throw into it, not to mention mashing up serial killers with off the wall rom com neurotics mentality. I am not one who says “oh the good old days.” For me this is simply a likely slump, especially as the medium has risen to a kind of international success story. I suspect enough good writers, directors, and actors will continue to produce worthy shows, albeit perhaps one should take this like any other pop culture stream with the understanding cliches and formulas are inevitable, freshness harder and harder to come by, but when it does…how cool is that?