Hello! Could you please write a post with your recommendations for the best “family dramas”?
I think that is what you call the shows that have lots of episodes and a sit-com feel to them, having most episodes filmed on a few sets and broader comedy.
I really enjoyed My Father is Strange and All About My Mom. I saw in your review of My Father is Strange that you mentioned Ojakygo Brothers.
Are there any other great Family Kdramas? What do you know about this sub-genre? Thank you!!!
So, I’ve been looking through all the kdramas that have really helped me feel a bit better since the start of the lockdown. I found I am really craving stories that are set somewhere other than a large metropolis like the one I’m currently stuck in.
So, something relaxing and contemporary as opposed to historical and action/suspense oriented. The last one I really loved was Racket Boys; for both characters and settings.
Before that I watched When the Weather is Fine and found it soothing mostly based on the atmosphere. I’m having a hard time finding more though. Your recommendations have never once let me down. Can you help?
I don’t know if you guys know this about me, but I really do enjoy a good family drama. The best ones give me such cozy, heartwarming feels; it’s like getting wrapped in a fuzzy, floofy blanket, as you sink into the feels.
I just don’t watch them much anymore, because they tend to be upwards of 50 episodes, and that’s a lot of drama hours that I could be using elsewhere. 😅
..Which makes this little drama special quite perfect, in my opinion. I get all the family drama feels, but in a compact little 1 hour and 11 minutes. Win and win, I say.
I was watching kdrama clips and have been wondering. They all look so pretty, even one with jobs in which there is exposure to excessive sunlight and dust look so…. clean. Its all good adding to kdrama fantasy but are there any dramas whose leads look more like normal us…with common jobs and maybe cheaper clothes?
Maybe all I am talking about is more realistic dramas out there. I liked Another Oh Hae Young in that aspect and felt I was more into the story and scenes rather than their appearances.
I have a Dear kfangurl question to ask! My question is whether you’ve ever had a problem watching the same actor in a different role, because you have such a strong impression of him/her in the first show you saw the actor in?
Asking because I just started watching K dramas last year, and i started with highly rated ones like Crash Landing on You and Healer, where the OTPs are so smashing that I was reluctant to see the actors in other shows as it would feel to me almost like they were cheating on their original OTP! Lol.
So far I haven’t “repeated” any actors besides Lee Jun Ki – I first saw him in Arang and the Magistrate and a few months later in Flower of Evil. But to me that felt ok as his performance made the two characters feel completely different. It probably helped that his Flower of Evil character was supposed to have antisocial personality disorder so has flattened emotions.
But now almost a year after watching Healer, I’m watching Park Min Young in Her Private Life and I keep getting flashbacks to her Healer performance, especially when the two characters overlap on certain traits like optimism, pluckiness and sunny smiles.
It’s probably a personal quirk but I do wonder if anyone faces this issue too! For now there are so many dramas out there that I can avoid repeats of actors but soon it won’t be an option! Ha ha.
Confession: this Dear kfangurl post wasn’t actually triggered by a Dear kfangurl question. It just made sense to group it with the other Dear kfangurl posts, coz that’s where the other lists on the blog live, heh.
BUT! This post was triggered by a conversation with my friend Jan on Twitter.
Basically, yesterday, Jan had remarked that she was looking for a Kim Ji Suk fix, and I’d suggested 20th Century Boy and Girl, in which he is the sweet, perfect boyfriend.
Less than 24 hours later, Jan’s super happy with the drama suggestion, and her tweets are filled with happy spazz, and she’s also said that this was the rom-com she’d been looking for.
..Which got me thinking. With all the darker &/or heavier shows that Dramaland’s been serving up of late (like World of the Married, Graceful Friends, Flower of Evil and It’s Okay To Not Be Okay), as solid as these shows are, maybe some – or many? – of you guys might be looking for something lighter to make these dark pandemic days a little brighter.
In the course of one of our chats scattered across the blog, where I was trying to think of dramas to recommend to Jesse, I’d suggested Romance Is A Bonus Book.
He’d ultimately sounded quite happy with this suggestion and said that he would probably check it out soon, but, he’d also said this, about the first time he’d considered watching the show:
“I remember at the time that I came across the show in a search awhile back, I saw the word “success” (as in Cha Eun-ho is a successful author) and completely lost interest.
I didn’t want to see successful characters! I wanted to see losers and average Joes, because that’s who I could relate to at the time. I wanted to see love interacting with unremarkable people so I could nod and say, “See, Jess – it happens. Just you wait…”
..And that made me realize that Dramaland’s been so focused on creating everygirls and everywomen to give the female viewers (traditionally a majority) someone to identify with, that it’s forgotten that our growing number of male viewers would also appreciate an everyman to identify with.
So I set about coming up with a list of dramas featuring regular guys – instead of the usual chaebol prince, or requisite geeenius – as romantic leading men.
You know a show’s gotta be Quite Something, if it’s luring me out of the writing-hiatus-cum-drama-rut I’ve found myself ensconced in for the last couple of months.
I literally just finished watching the last episode of Father Is Strange today, and liked it enough to start poking around to craft a review right away.
Considering that 1, Father Is Strange is a 52-episode family drama, and 2, I’ve been feeling pretty uninspired on both the writing and drama fronts, this is a Big Testament to how likable I’ve found this show and its characters.
Even if you’re not usually into family dramas, I really do think you might like this one.
A fairly typical contract-marriage-meets-terminal-illness sort of melodrama that doesn’t pack many narrative surprises.
The surprises mostly come in the form of the fantastic deliveries by the main cast. Namely, UEE is flat-out fantastic in this. So is Lee Seo Jin, and so is little munchkin Shin Rin Ah. The chemistry between these three, any which way you slice it, is golden, and alone is worth the watch.
So I’ve been meaning to do a k-love post for Joo Won for more than a year, ever since blog reader sarahlantz made a request (or several 😉 ) last year, for some Joo Won lovin’ on the site.
Honestly, I did a bunch of preliminary, er, research for this post as early as May 2014. Heh.
And by research I mean spending hours and hours trawling the interwebs for Joo Won pretty. Oh, the hardship – not! XD It’s just only now that inspiration has struck in full force, for me to actually top off that research with one last burst of goodies, and put the post together.
Coz yes, k-love posts need inspiration too – you guys are looking at an inspired piece of research, I swears!
