Many years ago, when the Winter Sonata craze was on, I remember thinking that I should give K-dramas a try. The thought got buried under my schedule and nothing came of it, until earlier this year when I stumbled upon a series called Once Again.
How I discovered Once Again... it happened this way. I’m fond of a J-drama called Aibo that airs on a local Asian TV station. Aibo is a mystery series featuring a pair of Tokyo detectives. I sometimes leave the channel on after the episode ends, and this past spring, noticed that Aibo was followed by a K-drama called Once Again.
Once Again is a comedy-drama about two Korean families, the Songs and the Yoons. Mr. and Mrs. Song run a fried chicken stall in the local open-air market, and Mr. Song is also the president of the market association. They have four adult children: Joon, a TV stuntman; Ga-hee, their divorced daughter who has a young son; Na-hee, a physician who is divorcing her physician husband Kyu-jin Yoon; and Da-hee, their youngest daughter, a college student.
The Yoon brothers, older brother Kyu-jin the physician and his younger brother Jae-seok, a dentist, have issues with their overbearing mother, Choi Yoon, who holds some kind of ownership interest in the market where the Songs work.
Since this was my first K-drama, I have no way of knowing where it falls on the scale of good or bad K-dramas, but I really enjoyed it, got hooked, and watched it until the series ended in September. Like Mexican telenovelas, these K-dramas apparently run on similar schedules: they air multiple episodes each week and end after a number of months.
Koreans are sometimes known as “the cool kids of Asia.” I don’t keep up with trends, but recently I was flipping channels and saw a music video of some impossibly pretty and androgynous young men singing and dancing. Yes, you guessed it. It was BTS, a music group I’d heard of, but never seen in action before.
I’m not sure why all things Korean are suddenly coming into my experience now. It sort of reminds me of when I first became an anime fan in 2005 and rediscovered my own heritage culture of Japan. If I unexpectedly start watching Chinese dramas soon, I’ll let you know. ;-)
To continue on K-dramas – I’ve been watching, or have tried to watch, a K-drama called Alice. Unlike Once Again, which had English subtitles, Alice is being shown on another Asian channel without subtitles.
I got caught up watching Alice at first because it appeared to be a cool futuristic techno-thriller, as well as a deep mystery story. The main character is a detective – I think – and he seems to be a target of a stealthy black ops organization that has their secret headquarters on a mountain that they can actually cloak with energy and hide from sight.
At this headquarters, men in black and women in black monitor their targets through video cameras hidden all over the city. There’s also time travel involved, and time distortion, and multiple timelines that seem to collide with each other.
I’m saying “seem” a lot, because without the translation, Alice is inexplicable to me. The main character seems to have a girlfriend or wife. This woman, having noticed his near-total obsession with another woman (his girlfriend? wife? mother? from another timeline – she’s the woman in the poster above), becomes jealous, which seems to lead to a different timeline, and, and... I don’t know what’s going on actually. It’s still fun to watch, but kind of frustrating.
I don’t know where K-drama watching is leading me, but Winter Sonata is still on my watchlist... and I wouldn't be surprised if that watchlist grows in the coming months. The Cool Kids of Asia are pretty interesting.
