Jona's Top 10 Dramas of 2021
Hello and welcome back. I'm as surprised as you are that this got done before the end of January.
It was really hard for me to identify a favorite of 2021. There were a lot of dramas that I enjoyed, but very few that distinguished themselves as new and indispensable favorites. 2021 was kind of a weird year for dramas. The landscape looks quite a bit different than it did in 2020. It's the year of Squid Game and streaming service originals. And not just the sort that aired on a cable stations and then Netflix slapped a logo on them.
Also, I know I said in the last list that my rule for what makes a 2021 drama is that it had to finish airing in 2021, and I'm immediately going to break that rule because (spoiler alert) The Red Sleeve is on this list. But I'm pretty sure that drama finished airing on New Year's Day just to annoy me, and if I don't go ahead and put it on this list and review it then there's a high likelihood it's never going to make it on a list at all. And I want to talk about so...
Alright, let's get back into it.
I was looking forward to The Silent Sea long before Squid Game was a twinkle in the public consciousness. It's not hard to understand why that is. Getting to see Bae Doo Na and Gong Yoo acting head to head in a high budget spaced-based thriller with (presumably) a nice dose of eerie horror was too delicious a prospect to pass up.
And yet, in the aftermath of the unexpected cult status of Squid Game, Silent Sea was almost inevitably going to hit differently and invite all kinds of narrow comparisons from Western commentators who have next no familiarity with either the actors involved or the state of Korean television over the past 3 years. Needless to say it was frustrating to see.
And yet, I spent my Christmas (snowed in with my parents) watching Silent Sea between bouts of food prep, and generally enjoying myself very much. It gave me the very briefest of glimpses of what it felt like to watch something completely isolated from public discourse, and a sense of warm, cozy isolation to contrast with the cold and inhospitable isolation of the characters. It was definitely the ideal watching situation.
In a better year for dramas, or even in a year where I got more watched than I did in 2021, The Silent Sea would probably not have made it to this list. It's a little bit too long for what it's trying to do (it probably would have worked better as a movie than a short run series) and ended up having to rely heavily on repeated flashbacks and quiet scenes that lasted far too long to pad out the run time. But the cast is exceptional, the plot was surprising in the right measure, and they managed to pull off the brand of space horror they were going for. It works well as a short binge.
Move to Heaven is the second Netflix exclusive drama on this list, and from what I could tell was generally well received by the fandom, with a overwhelmingly positive rating on MDL. I loved it as a meditation on family and mortality, and overall enjoyed the episodic format focused on getting to know the essential characters of the departed through the objects that they left behind.
The central conceit of a trauma cleaning service is very strong on its own, and adding on top of that a story of bonding between Le Je Hoon's Cho Sang Gu stepping in as the reluctant care-taker of the neurodivergent Gue Ru, after Gue Ru's father (Sang Gu's brother) suddenly passes away, the drama was well positioned to become an instant favorite for lovers of heartfelt, sentimental slice-of-life.
The highlight of the show for me was the gradual bonding of the highly intelligent and sensitive nephew and his ratty trash uncle. Lee Je Hoon is as usual wildly charismatic, and could probably have carried the whole show on his back if he wanted to. His character is also complex, comedic, absurd, and flawed in a way that made him a joy to watch.
Unfortunately, and the reason that MtH is showing up so low on my list, the show doesn't manage to balance all of its elements consistently throughout the run and the pacing becomes strained in the last leg. Very unnaturally, as though the drama was originally written as a limited run series and the potential for multiple seasons opened up very late in the creative process, the last episode almost feels like it is a part of a different show. It loses its urgency and grounded feeling, and the last moments blatantly pitching for a second season feel awkward and tonally dissonant.
Although I often asked for and even enjoy artful, naturalistic dramas with true-to-life human stories, deep down, if I'm honest with myself, what I really want is something absolutely bonkers that keeps me coming back to it week after week. I'll admit that I groaned inwardly when I saw that Ji Sung had signed on to play a judge. Yet another dry drama about the legal system, I thought to myself. And I decided that I probably wouldn't watch it. But gradually, as more posters and teasers were released for The Devil Judge I began to realize that what we were dealing with was a different breed of drama entirely.
The Devil Judge portrays a near-future dystopian Korea, trying to claw its way back from a deadly virus outbreak and widespread economic devastation. I don't blame anyone for tensing up immediately upon reading that description. It definitely hits a little too close to home. But the beauty of Devil Judge is the way it grabs that disquietingly familiar premise with both arms and runs sprinting with it off a cliff:
In order to combat what he sees as rampant unchecked injustice and return the power to punish evildoers to the disenfranchised populous, vigilante judge Kang Yo Han conceives and executes a real life courtroom drama by way of reality show. In Yo Han's court people can vote on the verdict through an app and the draconian sentence is then carried out for the enjoyment of the viewing public. It's crackerjack television, with every trial full of twists and turns each more lurid and sensational than the last.
Kang Yo Han fills the role of a sort of amoral Batman, complete with creepily vacant gothic mansion, disguised nighttime excursions to rain down kung fu justice on unsuspecting ne're-do-wells, and cat-and-mouse games with an extensive cast of larger-than-life comic book villains. And I'm not even really scratching the surface of the plot of this drama. Such as his extensive flirtation with junior judge Kim Ga On, his tragic backstory involving a church that was just begging to burn down, or the vast conspiracy of murder and political corruption he's attempting to dismantle. You're just going to have to watch it for yourself.
I don't know that I'm particularly hard on romcoms, but I certainly seem to have a hard time finding romcoms that will hold my attention through the entire run. Perhaps it's because there are so many elements that have to be working in concert for me to remain invested. I need to like the leads and want to see them together, but I also need there to be adequate conflict not to get bored. All fluff and cuteness doesn't cut the mustard. That being said, if you dial up the angst and the miscommunication too high, there's always the risk of my losing sympathy with the characters and wandering off. I think the romcom is a deceptively simple genre. It's really easy to screw up the balance.
Luckily for me Dali and Gamjatang (or Dali and Cocky Prince) seems to have been written by someone who has opinions about romcoms just as strong or stronger than mine. It watches like the writer cut her teeth watching chaebol romances. The show is definitely a chaebol romance, but it also feels like a light critique of the genre. Both the leads start out the show as wealthy heirs (new money and old) and yet they are genuinely kind and likable individuals. The drama continually plays with class dynamics. Even the second male lead, played by Kwon Yool, feels like a pointed criticism of everything that makes jerk-ass chaebol leads detestable with all the paternalism and entitlement that entails. Every time I thought this drama was going to zig it zagged. Subverting my expectations once or twice is one thing, but managing to surprise me pleasantly throughout is something I always hope for and rarely get.
All that isn't to paint Dali and Gamjatang as some kind of highly intellectual exercise that you have to push your glasses down to the very end of your nose to enjoy. Mostly Dali is a sweet and hilarious romp, with both Kim Min Jae and Park Gyu Young showing a lot of appeal, chemistry and comedic versatility. I've had my eye on Gyu Young since It's Okay to Not Be Okay, but between Dali and Devil Judge it's clear that she's one to watch. Kim Min Jae, for his part, has clearly entered his leading man epoch. And there was much rejoicing.
To my great chagrin, I've been aware of Shin Hye Sun for some time now--I've watched large swath of her filmography almost by accident--but I've never really fallen in love with her until recently. It's not that I wasn't impressed with her. It was impossible not to be impressed with her when she's played a character like Young Eun Soo in the first season of Stranger or carried the heavy and heartbreaking Hymn of Death. But I suppose she really hadn't made her presence felt as one of my all time favorite female leads, simply because she hadn't yet made a drama that hit the exact intersection of my interests.
And then Mr. Queen came along, and I was justly clobbered for my oversight.
Mr. Queen is both a time-slip drama and a gender bender. It's a rollicking comedy and a fusion sageuk with some legitimately heavy elements. It is the story of Jang Bong Hwan, chef to the Blue House and incorrigible fuckboy, who falls off his apartment balcony into a swimming pool and wakes up to his ample horror in the Joseon era in the body of the queen.
Shin Hye Sun is legitimately so good in her dual role as both original-recipe Queen So Yong and extra crispy Bong Hwan that it really doesn't do to try to describe it. You just have to watch it for yourself. She embodies the role with so much energy, range and physical comedy it elevates the whole show. Kim Jung Hyun makes a wonderful counterpart as the hapless himbo, King Cheol Jong, and they have phenomenal chemistry both romantically and comedically, but Shin Hye Sun owns this drama.
It actually breaks my heart to have to put the drama down this low on the list, because up until the last episode it was on track to become an all time favorite of mine. But unfortunately I had to rate the show down dramatically because of the hasty and plot-hole-making no-homo ending the show runners pulled out in the 11th hour. Up until that point the sexual dynamics of this drama were as daring as they were irreverent. I guess tvN wasn't ready to stand by that. I'm not particularly surprised but I am bitterly disappointed nonetheless.
If you choose to watch the drama anyway, I recommend watching only the first 19 episodes and choosing to pretend--as I do--that for some reason those were the only episodes that made it to air.
It feels like Song Kang has been nearly inescapable the last couple of years. Especially if you're watching dramas on Netflix, because he seems to be in every third one. I'm fairly indifferent to his meteoric rise. I neither stan nor dislike him. Whether or not you have an overall positive impression of him and his abilities probably largely depends on what you've seen him in. Personally, I quite enjoyed Sweet Home and was excited to see more of him after finishing it. I dropped Nevertheless--a drama which holds the dubious distinction of both making my skin crawl and boring me out of my skull--rather later than I should have trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.
But if you've managed to avoid him so far and you really want to see what Song Kang can do for you, then may I suggest you check out Navillera. Navillera is one of those "healing human dramas" that you watch when you're in the mood to cry a lot and have your heart warmed within an inch of your life. It follows the journey of Shim Deok Chul, a 70-year-old retiree who decides it's not too late for him to pursue his life long dream of dancing ballet on stage, and the grumpy 23-year-old ballerino with a hard home life who reluctantly ends up teaching him to dance.
A lot of people probably came into this show because of Song Kang's involvement, but undoubtedly Park In Hwan as Deok Chul is the star of the show. As soon as I saw harabeoji watching a performance of Swan Lake with such rapture and shining eyes, all I wanted was to for him learn to dance and achieve his dream. For me this drama was just comfort food for the soul, and I really enjoyed it and the whole extended cast.
Since I finished The Red Sleeve earlier this month, I've been trying hard articulate my feelings about it. Every time I approach it, I feel like I can't quite get my arms around them, forget distilling them into a few pithy paragraphs for this list.
I'll start with the easy stuff: Lee Jun Ho and Lee Se Young could not have been more perfect. I've talked about it a bit elsewhere, but I genuinely think they left nothing that could be improved on here. This is one of those dramas where a lot is left unsaid, and must be conveyed through the nuance of the actors' performances alone. I can't think of anyone who could have pulled that off better than these two. The Red Sleeve is also a lot of what I want in a sageuk. A drama that focuses on the intricacies of palace life for the servant class, specifically for the ladies of the court. A drama that gives me big emotions, high stakes, messy feelings and no easy answers.
The Red Sleeve is also one of those shows that made me tremendously uncomfortable. In this case I don't mean that as a criticism. If anything it is one of the highest compliments I can pay it. But for the second half of this show, at least for me, this wasn't exactly an enjoyable watch. It left me conflicted and torn up my heart. San, while sympathetic and humanely portrayed by Jun Ho, was profoundly unlikable at times. Despite the seeming inevitability of their connection and their end, I frequently wished for Deok Im to run as far away from him as she could get and never look back.
This drama, overtly and subtextually, interrogates ideas of power and consent. It poses the question of whether consent is ever really possible, even between two people who love each other, when one party doesn't have the personal autonomy to say no. It draws into question the very possibility of love without freedom and what kind of responsibilities we have to ourselves above and in spite of the love we might feel for another person. It examines what types of freedom, of self-determination, can exist in a master-servant relationship. What it means to give yourself to someone. What it means to belong to someone, and what it means to belong to yourself.
I found it disquieting, thoughtful, and highly worth the watch.
3. Lost (aka Human Disqualification)
Rarely have I descended into such paroxysms of undignified fangirlish glee the way I did when Ryu Jun Yeol's return to dramaland was announced. After Lucky Romance I feared we had lost him to Chungmuro forever (and if you saw Lucky Romance then you know it was no more than we deserved). But no! He was coming back, and not only that he was coming back to make a human melodrama involving a older-woman-younger-man dynamic, i.e. catnip for this particular masochist right here.
Then the drama came out and nobody watched it.
Alright, that's not true. A lot of people in my little twitter circle and people who I was aware of through tumblr not only watched it but appreciated the drama for what it was. There were also plenty of people who found it unutterably boring. And the ratings in Korea definitely reflect that people had no idea what to do with this show.
And even as much as I loved Lost (as evidenced by how high on this list it is) there is probably a pretty narrow set of people I would recommend it to. This drama is the slowest of burns. If this drama was a burner on your stove, you could put the kettle on and leave the house on a trip over the weekend, and by the time you got back the water wouldn't even be simmering. I'll even admit that my bruised and battered attention span didn't always stand up to the test and there were times when I watched it at 1.5x speed. You may or may not believe this but it's the truth: As I watched Lost I was often impatient but I was never bored.
Believe me when I say this drama was absolutely worth the wait. Lost is an intimate mediation on death, grief, and feeling adrift in your life, and it's restrained-to-the-point-of-pain style is suited perfectly to its tone and themes. This drama is dripping with an otherworldly agony. It captures the very essence of yearning, punctuated throughout with soul-bearing monologues from the characters. As for the actual plot, it gradually unfolds as an ever widening circle of character studies, continuing to reveal hidden depths until the very last episode. One of the most rewarding and unique dramas I've watched in several years.
I say this as if anyone was waiting for me to weigh in on which Netflix original drama came out on top as the best of the year: for me nothing even touches D.P. Something made all the more remarkable by how short the drama was, at just 6 episodes all clocking in at under an hour runtime. A bit like a car accident. It was all over so fast and yet I'm going to be feeling it in my bones for years to come.
D.P. focuses on the culture of abuse and corruption present within the South Korean military. It follows Jung Hae In as Ahn Joon Ho, a typical young man trying to keep his head down and get through his mandatory military service when he gets pressganged into a special unit responsible for hunting down and dragging back deserters. It portrays the stories of the various deserters Joon Ho and his partner Ho Yul, played by Koo Kyo Hwan, have to track down with a combination of brutal honesty and pitch black comedy. The tone of D.P. is really fascinating. It doesn't flinch away from the genuine trauma and tragedy endemic to the story, but at times it seems to verge on satire, portraying the higher ups and antagonists as both ghoulish and absurd. Watching it reminded me a bit of reading Catch 22.
It's my understanding that the show has already been renewed for a second season, and I will mostly likely watch that when it comes out but unlike dramas such as Move to Heaven and Sweet Home where the pitch for the second season is ham-handedly baked into the last episode, D.P. watches seamlessly as a stand alone series. This is a show I would readily recommend to people who aren't even interested in Korean television at large. Despite some intensely triggering material (and please, do your research ahead of time if you're sensitive to that kind of thing) I think this drama is that good and that universal.
The Kdrama equivalent of "you had me at hello" seems to be a damn sexy poster. When I first saw the posters they'd released for Beyond Evil I clearly remember thinking to myself, "if this show is half as good as these posters I'm going to be in serious trouble." And I was indeed in trouble.
If you've been hanging around on this blog very long this pick probably won't surprise you very much. There's a cocktail of plot elements that I find nearly irresistible in crime dramas. Beyond Evil has it all. A compelling cast of suspects, a terrifying monster, ambiguous motives, obsession, psychopathy, trauma, and a healthy dash of homoeroticism.
I wrestled with myself as to whether to give the top spot on this list to Beyond Evil or D.P. because I don't necessarily think that one is better than the other. Ultimately it came down to my own personal affinity for the drama and the characters, which is why Beyond Evil won out.
Beyond Evil has a wonderfully twisty plot that continued to surprise and misdirect through out the run, even when I thought for sure the story was going to lose steam. It's masterful mystery writing, which would have been enough for me to recommend it. But what elevates the drama is really the dynamic between Dong Shik and Joo Won. Shin Ha Kyun and Yeo Jin Goo generate so much electricity and breathless intensity between their characters, and the clever scripting helps to escalate that relationship into a thrilling and satisfying denouement. Shin Ha Kyun, in particular, just kept demonstrating, episode after episode, scene after scene, the difference a truly exceptional actor can make to a watching experience. Something preternatural happens when he's on screen, there's no other way to put it. Add on top of that an incredible extended cast without a bad performance in the bunch, and you've got something really special.
And with that, I conclude my lists for 2020 and 2021. I hope you enjoyed reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them (maybe even a little more than that). I'm still doing quite a bit of writing on personal projects. I'm working on another round of rewrites for my novel, which has to take priority for me. But if I have the ability to be a little more present on this blog, I'm going to endeavor to do so. If you want to hear some occasional ramblings from me outside of this blog, though, think about giving me a follow on @outofmeasure on Twitter.
Until I see you again, please stay safe and try to have fun out there.
