Hey everyone!

Like what we did for the past couple of years, we’re having guest posts from the lovely folks on Patreon, to help us take stock of our drama years, yay! 🥳

My annual year-in-review, which usually comes out in December, will also come out after all the guest posts have been published.

If you missed our earlier posts, you can check them out as follows: Ele, Natalia, JJ, Sean, j3ffc, Uyen, MC, Elaine, lotusgirl, ABV, learjet, dreamingdrama, Diasporic Chick, Taeho.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that Trent is sharing his drama year!

Like I’ve mentioned before, Trent’s drama taste tends to overlap quite a lot with my drama taste (with his leaning a little darker and bloodier, admittedly 😅), so I do like to know what he thinks about the various shows that he checks out.

So if your drama taste is like mine, you’d likely be pretty interested in Trent’s drama opinions too. 😁

Trent also writes about dramas on his own blog, which you can visit here.

Thanks Trent, for taking the time to write this post! 😘

I hope you guys enjoy!

~ KFG ❤️

Good day, all gentlepersons here assembled. 

This is my third annual year-end post on the esteemed FanGirlVerdict, so let’s see if I can speedrun the introduction this time:

Born and raised in the U.S.; currently live in California; first started watching kdramas in May 2020; been benefiting from the guidance of our hostess and enjoying the lovely community since November-ish 2020.

My first year-end effort was…kinda long, to be honest.  I thought that surely I would manage to streamline my second year-end outing, and instead it ended up half again as long as the first. Oops.

This year?  Success!

I finally managed to streamline…a little bit, at least. Of course, a good bit of that is attributable to the fact that I ended up watching fewer shows this year–a total of 46, rather than the 60 or so of the last two years.

I’m not sure what it was this year. I hit the dreaded drama slump, yes, but why?

I can think of a couple of possible reasons: one is that I just honestly feel like, overall, the shows on offer weren’t as good this year.

Oh sure, there were good shows, just…across the board, once you get past the gems that show up every year, there was less to write home about, you know?

A related factor is that I got really distracted by the shiny this year, regrettably so, and then when it turned out to be fool’s gold, too bad for me!

What I mean by that is I would see a new show advertised with a very pretty cast and a flashy trailer, and then get seduced into starting it, and sure maybe the first three or four episodes are pretty decent, and then it falls off a narrative cliff and ends up mediocre or worse.

Woe!  Woe, I tell you!

(This is where all the Wise Heads among us nod and cluck and say stuff like “yep, yep, y’all should be ruthlessly dropping shows! Just Marie Kondo those suckers!  If’n they don’t spark joy, well by golly, give ‘em the ol’ heave ho!”  Yes, yes, you are all very wise, and I am only an egg.)

A regrettable consequence of getting distracted by the new shiny, though, (and I mean this sincerely) is that I didn’t make any progress at all on my list of past dramas that I’d like to watch. It’s a respectably long list!

The last two years, I’ve had separate sections for my “current year” top ten list, and then my “pre-current year” top ten list.

You know what I found when I sat down to organize this EOY post, and looked over the list of shows? I thought I might have trouble even getting ten pre-2023 shows!

Friends, it was even worse than I thought.  You wanna guess how many pre-2023 shows are on my list of shows I watched this year?  …ONE.  YES! Only one!  Needless to say, there will not be a “pre-2023 top ten” list this year (cuts down on the length, at least).

That brings us, somewhat indirectly, to the second reason that I feel like maybe this year was slower, and that’s because I really got off to a pretty slow start out of the gate, in the first couple months of the year.

Why?  Well, that’s attributable to the one “old” (sorry, “classic”) show that I did watch this year, which was the object of the epic twenty-first anniversary Winter Sonata group watch. Which, I have to confess, took a lot of time and attention.

I don’t regret it at all, I had a blast and hope at least some of you did, too, but writing up those recaps every week took a lot of time away from being able to blaze through other shows.

(A positive side effect was, of course, renewed respect for the effort that KFG puts into following and writing up notes for so many shows).

Anyway, by default, Winter Sonata is my top-ten-all-in-one winner for the pre-2023 category.  And for all its flaws and foibles (reviewed and discussed in exhaustive length during the watch), it is a classic, so good for it, right?

As with last year, here’s the list of this year’s shows, for anyone curious as to what I saw:

And now, without further ado, the Top Ten list from last year, in reverse order.

(As always, the ranking is very contingent and shaky; if I came back and looked at it in a week, I would probably shuffle the order around.  It’s not exactly set in stone).

Top 10 Shows (2023)

Honorable mentions: Call It Love; Bloodhounds; My Perfect Stranger

10. (tie) Dr. Romantic S.3.

This is the third installment of what we might alternately title “Tales of the Jolly Crew at Doldam Hospital,” and like its two elder siblings, it delivers rock solid entertainment value.

Although it still at least nominally revolves around Han Suk-kyu’s titular Dr. Romantic (aka Kim Sabu), the iconoclastic and crazy-gifted head surgeon of our humble out-in-the-boonies hospital, I feel like Kim Sabu stepped back a bit from the limelight here to allow the narrative momentum to be carried by his younger proteges.

Ahn Hyo-seop and Lee Sung-kyung’s young surgeon characters from the second season return, their relationship status solidified, as they have just moved in together.

A major narrative thread has her father showing up to take over as head of the fancy new trauma center that’s just nearing completion.

Lots of exciting adrenaline-filled operating room and medical emergency action threads through the episodes, keeping things popping until the end.

This is high quality medical drama, and the only reason it doesn’t make it higher up the list is because as the third installment, it’s lost the element of surprise.

But that’s not really a knock on its quality, and it’s well worth the time investment if you have any interest at all in well-done competence porn in a medical guise.

10. (tie) Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938.

Honestly, I enjoyed this show a lot more than I was expecting to, not to mention a lot more than its predecessor show, 2020’s Tale of the Nine Tailed.

The first season had a fairly interesting premise – immortal gumiho (nine-tailed fox) finally finds his reincarnated long-lost love and must save her from a vengeful imugi (snake demon) – but was bogged down by a central romance that was frankly kind of blah (sorry, Jo Bo-ah, not really your fault!), and narrative momentum that kind of ran out of steam by the middle stretch.

Happily, this sequel kept the good stuff (Lee Dong-wook’s main character; the love/hate sibling relationship between Lee Dong-wook’s character and his younger half-brother (Kim Beom)) and jettisoned the boring stuff.

Then it turbo-charged its own story for a pretty over the top but very fun ride.  It did this by virtue of magical time-travel shenanigans, sending Lee’s main character back to (yes, you guessed it!) 1938 to retrieve a magical plot McGuffin.

Back in the past, he in short order runs into:

1) his own previous self (who is, thankfully-for-our-story, strung out on an epic opium bender due to ongoing sorrow over his lost love);

2) his bratty younger brother (who, unaware of future reconciliation, is out for blood, so we get to see the delightful antagonists-to-besties dynamic play out all over again); and

3) his dear friend, a former mountain god, played by Kim So-yeon.

Believe me when I say Kim So-yeon is worth the price of admission all by herself; she gleefully and with great panache chews every bit of scenery up one side and down the other, and looks absolutely fabulous doing it.

Her costume changes almost rival IU’s in Hotel del Luna for sheer style and variety, and she really does give the impression that she’s having the time of her life, swanning about and kicking ass at the merest hint of an excuse.

Anyway. This isn’t high art by any stretch of the imagination, but it sure is a lot of fun if you’re in the mood for a fast-moving magic/fantasy romp that doesn’t demand a ton of intellectual investment.

9.Daily Dose of Sunshine.

This is a really well done look at an important but probably under-covered subject: mental health and how it’s treated (that is, formally diagnosed and treated through hospital admission).

It centers on a nurse newly transferred from internal medicine (where, we learn, she was considered too “nice” and empathetic (!)) to the hospital’s psychiatric ward.

And similar to the episodic “monster of the week” structure of many fantasy shows, we get a sort of “mental disorder of the week,” taking a tour through issues like anxiety attacks, suicidal ideation, depression, etc.

The show does a really good job of walking the line between not being overly perky and unrealistically uplifting on the one hand (somewhat belying its title, thankfully), and unrelievedly grim and depressing on the other hand.

It deals with deep and sobering issues, but in a pretty sensitive and nuanced way.

And although there are some deeply sorrowful and emotionally taxing moments and episodes (this is a show that would take a lot of fortitude to binge, I think), it is threaded through with enough lightness and humor and hope to keep it balanced.

A thoughtful and rewarding show.

8. Agency.

A show about a mid-level female marketing executive who is fighting her way up the ladder at a marketing company embedded in a larger chaebol network, beset by backstabbing, unscrupulous male rivals as she claws her way “up or out.”

This is the first I’ve seen of Lee Bo-young, and she is very good at conveying a sense of the emotional compromises and enforced deadening of feelings required to attain the focus and ruthlessness necessary to succeed for someone in her shoes.

She’s also very good at charting the evolution of her slow reawakening to empathy and being able to consider something – such as other people’s needs and feelings – besides just single-minded pursuit of professional advancement.

There’s a secondary subplot that involves a chaebol princess also sashaying her way toward true power in the family business, in parallel to the main character’s journey.

The details and features of this part of the story do not strike me as particularly realistic, but since I like Son Na-eun (our chaebol princess) and her insouciant, unorthodox peregrination through the back door to corporate control is fairly entertaining, I was more than willing to overlook the more unbelievable elements of this narrative strand.

A good show overall, particularly if office politics and maneuvering hits your sweet spot.

7. See You in My 19th Life.

I really like this show’s premise; I like, for the most part, its execution; and – unlike a fair few – I even find myself perfectly satisfied with its ending and the resolution of its central dilemma.

I agree with those who feel that its core romance is not all that compelling, nor does the romance really live up to its billing as this deep and meaningful and spiritual prime mover in the characters’ lives.

But it was good enough, as far as I’m concerned, and the real draw of the show, in my view, is the FL (wonderfully brought to life by Shin Hye-sun, who can basically do no wrong at this point, at least in my eyes) and her journey and her interactions with her whole web of relationships, not just her love object.

Anyway, to backtrack.

The premise is that our protagonist has lived a number of lives, and each time she dies and reincarnates into a new life, at some point in her childhood she awakens to all of the memories of her previous lives that she’s lived through.

Her current reincarnation is her nineteenth life; her eighteenth life was unexpectedly truncated by a suspicious car accident in her mid-teens.

Once launched into her nineteenth life, she sets out to reconnect with the young kid (now grown) with whom she had been forming a connection in her eighteenth life.

Along the way, we get glimpses into her earlier lives, and slowly unravel why she has been reincarnating and remembering her past lives.

This show just really worked quite well for me; it has a clever idea, it mostly does interesting things with it (no, it’s not perfect, but the less-good bits are easy enough to glide over, I think), and it projects a warmth and humanity leavened with just enough angst and conflict to make it spicy and not bland.

I’d be plenty happy if all the shows I watched were at least this level of quality.

6. Revenant.

I’m really really not into horror as a genre, an inclination that I’ve held consistently since I was but a wee lad. And yet, here we are!

So I guess to maintain my anti-horror bona fides, I should point out that although Revenant is nominally horror, I feel like it would be better described as an “occult mystery.”

Yes, it deals explicitly with the supernatural, very much including ghosts, and it has a solid helping of creepy atmosphere and even some straight-up scary scenes.

That said, it feels very manageable, not particularly overwhelming even for someone who is not into horror and isn’t looking for the dubious rush of being scared silly by the show they’re watching.

And the payoff is that this is a really good occult mystery.

I mean, just look at the cast: Kim Tae-ri, Oh Jung-se, Kim Hae-sook? It doesn’t get much more top-tier than that.

And it’s an interesting, twisty story. The revenant of the title is an “angry ghost,” or “evil spirit” that has previously been responsible for the deaths of both Kim Tae-ri’s character’s father, and Oh Jung-se’s character’s mother.

Before long, the spirit has managed to possess (although with only very intermittent control) Kim Tae-ri’s character, and she and Oh Jung-se’s character (a professor of traditional folklore and supernatural beliefs) have to team up to try to figure out the origins of the spirit and how to successfully exorcize it.

This was a really good show; intense, spooky without being terrifying, containing a good mystery with some good twists…well worth a watch.

5. The Glory.

When I first heard about this show, it didn’t really register as something that would be particularly interesting. And getting a garbled version of the premise didn’t help (i.e. that the FL takes revenge on her high school bullies by threatening/harming their children).

Thankfully, that was in fact a garbled version. What we end up with, in fact, is a stylish, fairly meticulously plotted, well-acted revenge thriller.

Song Hye-kyo headlines as the victim of severe bullying in high school at the hands of a nasty clique. She leaves school, works her butt off to pull herself out of her straitened circumstances and put herself through college.

All the while, she is carefully and in great detail planning out her revenge on the group who scarred her, literally and figuratively.

A number of years later, when she’s finally ready, and all the elements of her interlocking plans are in place, she sets out to execute against her previous tormentors, who are living lives of various levels of affluence, debauchery, and ease.

I was a bit surprised at how engrossing I found this show.

The villains are reprehensible, while Song Hye-kyo’s usual somewhat chilly aspect is actually tailor made for this particular role. The plot is fairly fast-paced and exciting.

And although it stumbles somewhat in the homestretch – I honestly think it would have landed higher on the list with a stronger ending – overall this is an impressive achievement.

4. My Dearest.

This actually had a strike or two against it in the early running out of the gate.

After the first couple episodes, I was half convinced that Ahn Eun-jin might have been miscast as the FL – a bit too silly? maybe not enough gravitas? – and then it had to split its twenty(one) episode run into two ten episode parts (well, eleven on the second; they added a (looong) final episode), with several weeks of dead time between them.

But no! Show eventually overcame its potential handicaps and stumbling blocks to serve up a suitably epic story that delivered the goods in the end.

If you’ve seen any commentary about the show at all, you may well have seen comparisons to Gone With The Wind, along with the writer’s admission that GWTW was an “inspiration” in the writing.

I think it’s a fair comparison to a point – the character archetypes of the main roles are certainly recognizable – but this show is set in a different time and place, and has no problem forging its own path.

I also owe an apology to Ahn Eun-jin, since her character is intended to be flighty and spoiled at the start.

She of course undergoes significant growth under fire and the press of adverse circumstances, and AEJ rises to the occasion with believable weight and skill. Her counterpart, Namgoong Min, of course makes an excellent Joseon Rhett Butler…

This is set against the backdrop of the Qing invasion of Joseon and the taking of the Crown Prince back to Shenyang as a hostage, along with numerous captive commoners.

These events and circumstances play a significant role in the plot of our story, as the characters become caught up in the epic events of nations.

I had previously observed that in a way the show can be seen as a prequel to Chuno (The Slave Hunters), in that it covers the wartime humbling of King Injo, the Crown Prince’s sojourn with the Qing, and his return and demise, while Chuno takes that as roughly its starting point. Anyway.

My Dearest is a real historical epic with a solid romance at its core; well worth your time if you find that sort of show of any interest.

3. Lies Hidden in My Garden.

I feel like this show didn’t get nearly the love and attention it deserved, although I can also understand it not being a breakout hit or anything, because it really does require patience and attention to appreciate what it’s offering.

It has a very art house sort of vibe, and particularly in the opening episodes, there is clearly a lot of unreliable narrator and character gaslighting going on. To add to that, at its core it’s a mystery where it’s not at first even clear what the mystery is.

So yeah, it demands some effort. But it is worth it! And all will eventually become (mostly) clear over the course of its eight episodes.

Kim Tae-hee is a very emotionally buckled down, high-class housewife, married to a wealthy and successful doctor.

They, along with their high school aged son, have recently moved to a very nice home in an affluent suburban neighborhood.

She has recently become convinced that there’s a weird odor emanating from out in the garden of the home; her husband is at pains to repeatedly assure her she’s imagining things.

Meanwhile, Lim Ji-yeon is pregnant and married to a pharmaceutical salesman who abuses her, and also dabbles in a bit of extortion and blackmail on the side to make ends meet. These characters’ paths will all intersect in various ways.

This is a bit of a slow burn as the layers of the narrative onion slowly peel away and what is happening gradually becomes revealed.  If you can exercise patience and let the show get its hooks into you, though, it’s an excellent ride.

2. Alchemy of Souls: Light & Shadow

So this is the second and concluding part of the story that began with last year’s Alchemy of Souls (which occupied the equivalent spot on last year’s top ten list).

Saying too much would be inherently spoilery, since part one ended with such an upsetting upheaval.

This part opens three years after the events of the first part, and follows the threads of the main characters’ lives as they have picked up the pieces and tried to move on.

As with the first part, this is a sumptuous and enticing journey through a well-constructed secondary world where magic and those who wield it are a major strand in the social fabric.

Although the plotting still retains an occasionally ad hoc feel to it (unanticipated problems and obstacles popping up without warning, only to have the solution also pop up out of the blue), for the most part it all holds together well enough while maintaining a pleasing forward momentum.

And crucially, the central relationship between Lee Jae-wook and Go Youn-jung’s characters is deftly sketched and easy to get sucked into rooting for. Would love to see another fantasy come along at this level of quality.

1. Moving.

I had no idea when I started this show that I would be falling for it by the end of the first episode, and by the end of the second episode, I would be in love.

And even now, it’s kind of hard to explain why, because it seems so darn ordinary, those first couple-few episodes.

On its surface, it starts out as just a standard high school drama, and boy if there’s a list of subgenres that don’t light my blood on fire, high school dramas are for sure on it. But somehow this pleasant little tale about the budding friendship between Bong-seok and Hee-soo grabbed hold of me without me even noticing it.

Of course, this is a show that runs on parallel tracks, and in the background, while we are enjoying all this pleasant high school non-drama, there is a world of agents and assassins, where a ruthless operative is hunting down retired agents and eliminating them.

Oh, and the assassin and agents have super-powers – extraordinary healing ability; super-strength; x-ray vision; super-senses; the ability to fly, etc.

And it turns out the kids we’ve been introduced to do too, and their parents (from whom they inherited their abilities) have been trying to keep them concealed so they don’t end up government pawns, like they were back in the day.

The best thing about this show is just how much heart it has, and how it winds that emotional authenticity in and around and through all the super-hero adventures and antics.

The amazing thing is that it is roughly divided into three sections; I spent the first seven episodes really grooving on the kids’ story, and then it jumps to its flashback middle section to fill in the parents’ story, and when it did I was like “wait! Give me my kids back, where did they go?!”

But then within the space of an episode, I was fully absorbed in the parents’ stories!  The final section brings the various threads back together and ties it all up in an action-packed finale (too much of a good thing? I mean, maybe in spots. But overall it’s great).

This is just really compelling entertainment, and if they came out with a sequel or a related series, I’d line up to watch it in a second.

Best Female Lead

The nominees. (I ruthlessly culled this perennially over-subscribed list, which is how I ended up with only… seven nominees this year):

Kim So-yeon (Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938).

I’d never seen Kim So-yeon in any drama prior to this show, and in fact I recall being somewhat exercised a couple years back when she won Best Actress (for Penthouse) at the Baeksang Arts Awards, just because I was really rooting for Shin Hye-sun (Mr. Queen) to win.

After seeing her in Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938, I recant my presumption and respectfully beg her pardon.

I still haven’t seen Penthouse, but she was a real force of nature in this show as a former tutelary deity and close friend of Lee Dong-wook’s ML.

Beautiful, imperious, powerful, but also capable of nuance and depth of feeling, Kim So-yeon is unfailingly interesting to watch here, and she really elevates the whole show.

Lee Sung-kyung (Call It Love, Dr. Romantic 3).

Appearing in season two and three of Dr. Romantic, Lee Sung-kyung was perfectly delightful as a novice thoracic surgeon.

Then in Call It Love, she gets a role that really demands an extra gear, some additional range, and she delivers quite well.

She plays a character living with a powerful sense of grievance due to the injustice of past events, which is mostly bottled up, left simmering inside, but still an ever-present fuel powering her actions and reactions.

Then she has to go and slowly, reluctantly fall in love with what is – or should be – nominally a sworn enemy. It’s a delicate balancing act, and Lee Sung-kyung walks it well.

Park Bo-young (Daily Dose of Sunshine).

I’ve long had a lot of respect for Park Bo-young – not only because it’s not easy pulling off high-wattage aegyo so effortlessly that it doesn’t come off as mannered or artificial, but also because in movies like Scandal Makers and On Your Wedding Day she delivers solid emotional beats that are believable and moving – but in this show, she really inhabits a difficult role and acquits herself very well.

As a kind-hearted, well-meaning psychiatric ward nurse who is facing her own mental health challenges, Park Bo-young really manages to convincingly portray a good person struggling to find an even keel in the face of some non-obvious but nevertheless very real vicissitudes.

Kim Tae-ri (Revenant).

One thing you can say about Kim Tae-ri, she always brings a lot of game to whatever role she takes, and this one is no exception.

She first appears to us as a fairly unexceptional young woman in her mid-twenties, scraping through life along with her somewhat addled mother.

But before too long, she becomes possessed by an angry, malevolent ghost, and you gotta believe that’s going to wreck your day, right?

Unsurprisingly, Kim Tae-ri is more than up to the task not only of tracing the evolution of someone just trying to get along into a person with a mission – exorcize this damn ghost, and also try to protect the people it targets for elimination now and then – and also transforming into a very creepy, unsettling aspect on those occasions when the ghost surfaces to take control.

Good stuff!

Go Youn-jung (Alchemy of Souls: Light & Shadow; Moving).

I’ve liked Go Youn-jung since she showed up in supporting roles in Sweet Home S1, and then as a courageous victim of intimate partner violence in Law School.

Now she’s moving into starring roles and likewise doing well.

She was a delight as the straight-forward, good-hearted daughter of Ryu Seung-ryeong’s teddy bear dad in Moving.

And she took on a potentially quite challenging role in the second part of Alchemy of Souls, where she had to step into the shoes of a character portrayed by a different actress (Jung So-min) in the first part, and make it believable that this is the same soul and personality in a different physical package.

Opinions will differ (I have a friend for whom the switch didn’t quite work), but I thought she did very well, and was an indispensable part of what made the second part a compelling watch and a fitting conclusion to the story.

Kim Tae-hee (Lies Hidden in My Garden).

K-ent legend Kim Tae-hee headlines Lies Hidden in My Garden, a really impressive little show (as you can see by its inclusion on my top ten list).

It’s not too surprising that I haven’t seen her in a show before this, since I gather that her real acting heyday was a decade and more in the past. And so I don’t have any particular sense for her acting chops, broadly speaking.

What I can say is that I think she is particularly well suited for this role, and is nearly pitch perfect as the well-coiffed, well-turned-out wife of a wealthy doctor who has numbed her emotional antennae and responsiveness to almost Stepford Wife levels of passivity.

Until, well, until events conspire to awaken her from her slumber.

Han Hyo-ju (Moving).

I’ve only seen her in a couple of things prior to this (Happiness; a cameo in 20th Century Girl), but she’s been a delight in both.

Now here she is, showing up as a pillar in the ensemble cast of Moving, our number one show for the year.

She really impresses as the doting mom of a “gifted” son in the present-day timeline, as well as (via flashback) a young former-agent and office worker with heart in the past.

Then when the ball goes up and things go crazy, she shows us she’s still at the top of her game, and when her boy’s safety is on the line, she plays for keeps. Moving has a lot of pieces that are integral to its success, but Han Hyo-ju is certainly one of them.

The Winner(s):

Always a tough category to pick a winner, so let’s spin the ol’ roulette wheel and see what it lands on, shall we?

I think I would give this one to Go Youn-jung, for making the amnesiac priestess whose core characterization has already been established by another actress interesting and believable.

Best Male Lead

The nominees:

Lee Jae-wook (Alchemy of Souls: Light & Shadow).

Here we have a repeat nominee, as I also tapped Lee Jae-wook last year for the same role in the first part of this story.

Reprising his role as Jung Uk, with the added weight and context of the climactic events at the end of the first part shading his portrayal, Lee Jae-wook continues to come through with strong leading man force and energy.

Ryu Seong-ryeong (Moving).

So the thing is, Moving is really kind of an ensemble piece (with a very strong ensemble), so it’s kind of hard to pick out a clear ML. Others might be inclined, for instance, to pick Jo In-sung.

But I was really fond of Ryu Sung-ryeong’s teddy bear daddy in this.

He’s just a good-hearted, loyal dude whose super-power happens to be his extraordinary healing powers. Which means he kind of stumps through life just doing his best, but if he gets in a fight, look out, because he just never stops coming.

Namgoong Min (My Dearest).

Always bringing his “A” game (that I’ve seen, at least; The Veil was the script’s failing, not his per se), Namgoong Min leaves it all on the field in this epic sageuk set in a tumultuous time in the history of the Joseon dynasty.

As a roguish but extremely capable nobleman who bootstrapped his way to affluence via mob ties and trading acumen, and then essentially bought his way into the yangban class, he has the skills and smarts to navigate the treacherous upheaval of the Qing invasion. Although his life is significantly complicated when he ends up falling for a spoiled young provincial beauty…

Namgoong Min is a past master at projecting an air of detached, almost ironic amusement as a cover for his smoldering inner fire, and this role is no exception.

Han Suk-kyu (Dr. Romantic 3; Recipe for Farewell).

Han Suk-kyu always feels like he’s in total command of whatever role he’s inhabiting, and that goes double with Kim Sabu.

He’s been playing the iconoclastic surgeon for long enough now that he inhabits the character’s skin with frictionless ease.

He’s such a steady, calming presence, even in the midst of operating and emergency room chaos, that sitting down to watch him work his magic is not only entertaining, it’s downright soothing.

Lee Dong-wook (Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938).

This is basically Lee Dong-wook being Lee Dong-wook, which to be clear is not a bad thing!  It’s mostly quite a good thing.

What I mean is that he just kind of slopes through the landscape with a sort of back-handed, insouciant cool, even in the face of obstacles and peril.

Here he’s reprising his role as the gumiho and former mountain god/tutelary deity from the first season.

Going back in time through a magic portal to chase a plot McGuffin has the salutary effect of freeing him from the constraints of a mopey long-lost-love romance (his love object is safely tucked away back in the present), so he has plenty of freedom to just float around being Lee Dong-wook.  Win!

The Winner:

I think this one really has to go to Namgoong Min; he covers a lot of ground over the course of the epic My Dearest, and does it with great dexterity and skill.

Best Supporting Actor (Female)

The nominees:

Woo Hyun-jin (Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938).

I like using this category occasionally to tap actors or actresses that are new to the scene or don’t have a long track record, but caught the eye or were impressive in a role. And Woo Hyun-jin fits that bill, given that she’s a rookie actress in her first role.

She plays a half-human, half-siren nightclub singer in Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938 who ends up as the love interest of Kim Beom’s half-gumiho, half-human character.

The unfolding of their relationship, while never really taking center stage, is really one of the best facets of the show, and their romance, understated as it is, manages to significantly outshine the ML-FL romance from the first season, in my humble opinion.

Ha Yoon-kyung (See You in My 19th Life).

We first saw Ha Yoon-kyung in Hospital Playlist, and then in Extraordinary Attorney Woo, where she did a fine job as Woo Young-woo’s colleague and friend.

Here, she really excels as the FL’s younger sister from her previous (18th) life; she exudes such a “younger sister” vibe that she is immediately believable as someone who grew up having lost her beloved unnie too young, but never stopped missing her.

She really contributes to making one of those strands in the web of relationships shared by the FL, which in turn is one of the things that really makes the show work so well.

Shin Ha-young (Doona!)

I don’t often get second lead syndrome, much less when flippin’ Suzy is the FL.  And I’m not going to say I got it here, exactly.  But I really warmed up to Shin Ha-young’s character in Doona!

Playing the ML’s “first love” in high school, unable to reciprocate his budding affections for complicated family reasons, she shows up in the present to quietly pine after what could have been, while watching the ML get swept up in a torrid but messy assignation with the alluring (but messy) FL.

Shin Ha-young emits a kind of sweet dignity that just makes you want things to work out for her, you know?.

Ju Hyun-young (The Story of Park’s Marriage Contract).

A relative newcomer to the drama acting realm, Ju Hyun-young first made a name for herself as a cast member of the SNL Korea Reboot comedy variety show (for which she’s won several awards, including a Baeksang Arts Award!).

Then she was cast as the FL’s buddy in Extraordinary Attorney Woo, and here we are, with her picking up more acting roles, including this one as the FL’s maid who follows her mistress and friend through the temporal hole from Joseon to the modern age.

Ju Hyun-young is delightful, really elevating the “spunky lady’s maid” trope with her vivacity and great comic chops.

Lim Ji-yeon (The Glory; Lies Hidden in My Garden).

Lim Ji-yeon is certainly not a rookie actress, but I also think it’s safe to say that she’s been having a bit of a moment in the spotlight the last couple years.

In 2023 she appeared in two shows that really allowed her to shine, as well as demonstrate her impressive range, given they were two quite different roles (we won’t mention or hold against her her appearance in The Killing Vote…).

She’s pretty amazing as the wealthy, beautiful, sociopathic antagonist in The Glory (a role for which she won a bunch of awards), and likewise excellent as a pregnant, lower-class, abused wife in Lies Hidden in My Garden.

Lim Ji-yeon has chops, and I perk up whenever I see her name on a show (yes, yes, to my sorrow in the case of The Killing Vote…but that one was in no way her fault!).

The Winner:

This one goes to Lim Ji-yeon, who was kind of a force of nature in The Glory, while turning in another great and nuanced performance in Lies Hidden in My Garden.

Best Supporting Actor (Male)

The nominees:

Jung Sung-il (The Glory).

Looking at his resume, Jung Sung-il appears to have mostly been a theater actor, with a sprinkling of (largely minor?) roles in both dramas and films (a “royal guard” in A Frozen Flower! Now there’s a talking point! Probably didn’t get to meet Jo In-sung or Song Ji-hyo, though).

But so far as I can tell it’s his role as main villain Lim Ji-yeon’s straight-laced, cooley-cerebral CEO husband in The Glory that really elevated him in the public’s awareness.

He absolutely oozed magnetic, tightly-coiled, sharply-dressed masculine charisma, and when he had the opportunity to take his inner pugilist out for a spin, well.  Impressive!

Kang Ki-young (Uncanny Counter S2).

Kang Ki-young is a repeat nominee – on the list last year for his turn as the kindly supervising attorney mentor in Extraordinary Attorney Woo, here he shows really quite impressive range by playing the “big bad” in Uncanny Counter S2.

Rocking an amazing mullet, he’s entirely believable as a demon-possessed bad boy out to bring down our heroic crew of Counters. Quite a good job playing against type.

Lee Jung-ha (Moving).

Although not quite a rookie actor, Lee Jung-ha hadn’t been in a lot of productions prior to taking on the role of good-natured high school senior Kim Bong-seok.

Certainly none in which he had quite as prominent a role, as I think it’s safe to say that he was one of the main characters and an important element in Moving’s success.

He plays Bong-seok with an unaffected, ingenuous aura that’s instantly believable and entirely winning, which makes it very easy for the audience to quickly become invested in his story.

Kim Byung-chul (Dr Cha).

Just because he could probably play this sort of role in his sleep by now doesn’t mean Kim Byung-chul isn’t very good at it.

As the overbearing, arrogant, self-satisfied chief surgeon – husband and foil to the eponymous Dr. Cha – he is by turns ludicrous, comical, and infuriating.

He’s essentially playing a variation of his character in Sky Castle, the role that brought him a Best Supporting Actor win at the Baeksang Arts Awards.  Hey, why meddle with what works, right?

Kim Beom (Tales of the Nine Tailed 1938).

Reprising his role from the first season as the bratty rebellious younger brother of Lee Dong-wook’s protagonist, Kim Beom has the chance to recapitulate (on account of the whole story taking place in the past) the whole journey from wounded resentment and animus over being “abandoned” by his hyung to gradual acceptance and ultimately ride-or-die brotherhood.

And just as in the first season, he does a great job of it, making this narrative thread one of the best parts of the whole show.

Bonus: unlike the first season, his character gets to have a romance, and it is likewise one of the best parts of the show.

The Winner:

I think I like Kim Beom for this category, since I am very very fond of his snotty younger brother concealing a good and loyal heart in Tales of the Nine Tailed 1938.

Razzie Award 

(“worst show, OR the show that promised so much but delivered so little”)

The nominees:

Island.

I know there are some folks who felt this was a decently entertaining show, and I am very sorry that I am not able to count myself among your number.

This is meant to be a kind of fantasy–horror blend.

Modern day heiress who is actually reincarnation of a medieval priestess goes down to Jeju Island where a big demon pit, policed by a semi-immortal guardian (played by Kim Nam-gil), is about to blow up and set off the demon apocalypse.

I’m afraid I found the script for this pretty uninspired, shading to downright boring after a few episodes, and its overall vibe felt really kind of campy rather than hard-edged fantasy or horror.

It wasn’t helped by the addition of Lee Da-hee as the FL; I don’t have anything in particular against her, but after Love is for Suckers and then this, I have yet to see a show that I’ve liked her in.

And sorry, Kim Nam-gil fans, he was fine in this, but to my eyes he was just kind of there, nothing special.  Ditto with Cha Eun-woo, except he was also extra pretty while taking up space.

Duty After School.

Man, this show is so in my wheel-house.  Or at least, it should have been; all you gotta do is hear the elevator pitch to think “Aw, yiss, sign me up!”

Alas, I haz a sad, because it kind of blew it in the execution.  Slowly at first, then more quickly after the midpoint, and then it took a total nosedive at the end that really left a bad taste in the mouth.

The elevator pitch: an alien invasion suddenly appears in the form of big amorphous blobs that land and then eventually start hatching fast, aggressive, lethal little alien spawn.

Facing a manpower shortage, the government starts recruiting high school seniors to form auxiliary militia units to help fight the alien spawn.  Sounds fun, huh?

The show starts out with a fair bit of promise, but then kind of goes off the rails with its unrealistic treatment of its story – and I’m not talking about the alien invasion, believe it or not.

I mean I don’t think it executed very well on the core idea of “high school seniors forced to become soldiers to survive and protect society,” and it also detoured way too far and too long into “high school angst” territory for my taste.

And the less said about that stinker of an ending, the better. Whew.

This makes the list because it had real potential, and just failed to live up to it.

The Killing Vote.

This looked like it might take a stab at tilling some of the same ground that The Devil Judge attempted to cultivate, hopefully more successfully.

Alas, it was not to be.

The idea here is that a masked vigilante hacks the public’s phones to install an app, and then broadcasts a presentation where he displays an alleged evil-doer who he has had kidnapped, relates their heinous deeds and how they managed to escape justice, and then puts it to a vote of the public whether they should be executed.

Our protagonists are cops in a special investigative unit who are trying to track the vigilante down and put an end to his unsanctioned trials and executions.

This started out with a passable enough concept, but it petered out before very long and turned into a more or less anodyne, replacement-level cops-and-robbers mystery and pursuit.

It wasn’t helped by its network experimenting with the “one episode a week” release schedule innovation, which turned out to be surprisingly effective in killing momentum.

All things considered, not a particular noteworthy or memorable show.

Soundtrack #2

I really grooved on the predecessor show, Soundtrack #1 – it made my top ten list last year  – so it’s a real bummer that this hotly anticipated sophomore outing turned out to be such a letdown.

Here we have two ex-lovers whose previous relationship ran aground for not-entirely-clear reasons. Six years later, they are thrown back together by coincidence; will they reconnect and get back together?

The answer turns out to be yes, unsurprisingly, but the problem is that the narrative journey doesn’t really cohere very well or have a lot of internal consistency, and the characterization is pretty sloppy or underbaked (take your pick).

And the ending, although “happy,” doesn’t feel particularly earned, or logically arrived at.

So yeah, big disappointment, sad to say.

The Story of Park’s Marriage Contract.

This started off so well! Very nicely set up with its framing back in the Joseon era, and some very fun “fish out of water” hijinks after our FL time skips to the present day.

Alas, it lost narrative steam somewhere around the midway point and never managed to regain it.

By the last couple episodes, I was basically staying with it out of (misguided?) devotion to my completionist ethos.

Another show where the supposedly epic, fated love connection felt pretty bland and tepid in the execution, sad to say.

On the plus side, Lee Se-young is a real pro, with a diverse range of acting skills which encompass an excellent sense of comedic timing.  So she’s always fun to watch.

Also a plus, Joo Hyun-young as the lady’s maid; no surprise that her comic chops are also impeccable, since she got her start on the SNL Korea Reboot show.

Although the ladies were fun to watch, not quite enough to make this recommendable, alas.

The Winner:

This is a tough one to pick, since several of these kind of raised my ire with their various ineptitudes.

At the end of the day, though, it has to go to Duty After School.  It had real potential, and ended up making me probably the most irritated of all of these candidates.

Hidden Gem

As always, this is the category for shows that merit some mention but may not really fit elsewhere; worth a look for some aspect or other.

The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House.

I take back the comment that this might not fit elsewhere, at least somewhat, in that this is a show that could actually show up on a top ten list and garner no complaints or blowback from me.

It didn’t bowl me over, which is why it’s not on mine, but it is a very worthy show with a lot going for it.

It is extremely gentle, slow-moving, and low-stress, so it’s just the thing for when you’re looking for something to help you unwind and relax.

It’s the story of two high school age best friends who travel to Kyoto to apply to become maiko (apprentice geisha).

One of them discovers she doesn’t really have the talent or drive to be a geisha, but she loves to cook, and stays on to take the place of the old cook, who is retiring.

It’s a nice little story about the lovely friendship bond between these two girls, and along the way we also get a fascinating glimpse into the world of the geisha and the training these apprentices undergo to become one.

Mask Girl.

This is kind of a hard show to describe in a way that does its vibe and affect any justice.

It is definitely not a show for everyone, to say the least. But it does certainly have some things going for it, and it is for sure off the beaten track for your standard kdrama, as might be expected with a limited edition (seven episodes) Netflix original production.

It’s twisty, in that it is divided into roughly three sections of about two episodes each (and the main character is played by three different actresses: Lee Han-byol (a rookie actress, in her first role); Nana; and Go Hyun-jung) and it goes veering off in directions that were entirely unexpected, by me at least.

It’s a story about a very ordinary office worker; she loves to perform for audiences by dancing, but she is very self-conscious about her looks, so she dons a mask and dances for the camera in her room.

Eventually, she has established a pretty successful youtube channel, where she talks to her assembled subscribers before dancing for them (all while masked, of course). After that…look, we’ll be here all night if I try to describe the plot.

I’ll just repeat: not for everyone, but worth a look if you find quirky, black comedy, off the beaten track shows to be your bag.

Song of the Bandits.

A Western set in colonial era Korea? Sign me up!

Of course there are significant differences between the American West and its assorted narratives and mythologies that gave birth to the Western genre of film and literature, but the tropes and general aesthetic of the classic Western turn out to work surprisingly well in the borderlands of Japanese-controlled Korea.

Kim Nam-gil is a sort of lone gunman, a former lowly native conscript in the occupying Japanese army, serving a collaborationist Korean officer.

He’s managed to muster out and find his way into leadership of a band of rogues and misfits who have taken to highway robbery to earn their daily bread.

Will they get sucked into aiding the anti-Japanese resistance movement? (that’s a rhetorical question…).

Lots of fairly decent action scenes and gun fights!

Blue-eyed Samurai.

This might be cheating a little bit, but since I’m making the rules here, I’m going to let it slide… This is an animated series that has garnered a lot of praise.

It’s set in the era of the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan, one half of the husband-wife writer/showrunner team is half Japanese, and the supervising director is Chinese-American. So it counts as an Asian drama if you squint just right, right?

Anyway, this is a show about the revenge journey of a young half Japanese warrior named Mizu (“water”) whose father is one of the four Europeans allowed in Japan after the Shogun closed the borders to all outsiders in the early 1600s.

Mizu kind of unofficially apprentices to a blind master swordsmith, and also learns to fight with the swords they are making.

Once they’re grown and their skills are refined, they set off to find and kill the Europeans – since they don’t know which one is their father, they’ll solve the problem by getting all of them.

This is a fairly absorbing, definitely “adult” show (some nudity, a little sex, lots of blood and violence).

The visual palette is consistently striking and often quite beautiful; the characterization is pretty nuanced for a revenge tale, and the story is pretty good, too.

Doona!.

Famous k-pop idol burns out, “retires,” and slips off to semi-anonymously take up residence in a group house inhabited by a bunch of ordinary college students.

There she ends up falling for a decent, normal college dude, and they have a brief fling until she’s gotten her head back together and launches out into a resurgent solo career.

With the k-pop idol slot filled by, well, famous k-pop idol (turned actress) Suzy, I suppose there’s some temptation to wonder if this might not be semi-autobiographical, but from the little I know, I don’t think it tracks her career trajectory too closely.

I think she started out in Miss A pretty young (fifteen), got into acting within a year or two after that (Dream High, etc) and before long had transitioned full time to acting, endorsement queen, and general celebrity-dom.

But I’m sure her familiarity with the industry and its folkways helped to inform her portrayal. This is an enjoyable enough watch; it didn’t blow me away but was still decently entertaining.

And that’s it for our End of Year retrospective.

Fingers crossed for some good-to-great dramas in 2024.

Oh, and also, here’s hoping that I don’t get so distracted by the shiny, so I can go back to making some inroads on my “to watch” list…

~Trent