[2021 Year in Review] Endings and beginnings

41 December 23, 2021December 23, 2021

by Anisa

In many ways, 2021 felt like a year in limbo, in waiting. We started the year with so much hope that vaccines would allow us to return to regular life, but here we are in December, with time seeming to have grayed into a featureless, infinite blur.

But things are still happening, even if we feel stuck in time and left behind by it at once. Lives and marriages and jobs and school are still in flux, even if in that one devastating way nothing seems to change. And of course, dramas continue to start and finish. Unlike sports fans who hitch their trains to one team’s fortunes, or fans of multi-season TV or comics, K-drama fans always live in a short season of love (or loathing) with every show before we move on.

It’s one of the things I’ve always loved about dramas—the knowledge going in that you’re getting a complete story in one season. There’s a joy to immersing yourself in the world of a show for a few weeks (or a few days, if you’re hard-core bingeing) and then emerging from your little cave of emotions to recalibrate to real life, blinking in the bright light like a bear that’s been holed up all winter. Maybe that structure is one of the reasons K-dramas are so good at portraying those life transitions in a satisfying way. Most of the time, a drama has one season—one shot at getting right the portrayal of a character coming of age, or falling in love, or letting go of a precious person—or a long-held dream.

Many of the shows I loved this year, set in a K-dramaland that seems to have largely skipped 2020 and its implications altogether, addressed these beginnings and endings, real and fictional. Hospital Playlist 2 was almost entirely about how we move through life’s triumphs and trials as people come and go. So here’s a look at the dramas I loved this year, via liftoffs and landings.

Reality Bites

There’s something about a well-done coming of age story that always gets to me. It’s bittersweet and thrilling, to be plucked out of childhood and thrust into adulthood with no user manual. The students in At a Distance, Spring is Green are told this is the best time of their lives, yet they struggle to get through each day. It’s the relationships they build with friends, mentors and even frenemies that give them the support they need to not only survive, but evolve.

Each character was so well-drawn and relatable in this drama, but male leads Yeo Joon (Park Ji-hoon) and Nam Soo-hyun (Bae In-hyuk) were fascinating—individually, and as a fantastic reluctant bromance that’s going on my list of all-time faves. This may have looked like a fluffy campus drama on the surface, but it deeply and expertly explored themes of domestic violence, trauma, and depression. Every line of dialogue was impactful; every cast member did a superlative job. At a Distance didn’t tell us its characters were growing up; it showed us how they did it, by learning how to break toxic coping patterns and begin to attempt healthier relationships with the people they cared about. I don’t know how many times I cried over these kids—because they broke my heart, because I was proud of them, because I was happy for them.

True Beauty was another unusual youth drama, because it gave us a heroine who decided to transform herself from outcast to queen bee using makeup, without perpetuating the toxic myths about beauty that dogged its protagonist in the first place. It would have been easy for this drama to fall into the trap of using Joo-kyung’s (Moon Ga-young) new look as a stand-in for her growth; how many times have we seen a heroine get more fashionable and conventionally pretty as she falls in love, succeeds at work, becomes a more mature person?

But True Beauty gave us just as many shots of Joo-kyung’s acne-filled face as her unbelievably smooth, fully made up one; the camera loved her equally both ways, and it was part of Joo-kyung’s journey to come around to doing the same. Moon was incredible in this role: effortlessly and naturally cute, vulnerable but with a core of steel, warm to her friends and family and brave in the face of her fears. Besides, this show gave us Hwang In-yub as the essentially harmless high school bad boy anyone would fall in love with at sixteen. (Heck, even at my grown age. OKEY DOKEY, YO.)

The show out of these three that really stuck its thorns into my heart and twisted, though, is D.P., a biting commentary on mandatory military enlistment that pulls zero punches. It had me at the edge of my seat with my heart in my shoes from exposition to denouement. And yet I laughed out loud multiple times. Jung Hae-in reminds me of Jo Seung-woo; he has the same riveting quality of being able to express ten different emotions while barely moving his face. Here, he’s the heart of his reluctant Deserter Pursuit team, doing a bad job with so much excellence that occasionally he even saves the people he’s meant to catch. This one messed me up good. I’ll definitely be waiting for Season 2.

Begin Again

Some shows weren’t about a perfect beginning, but a chance to start anew. Imitation is about a failed group of idol trainees getting a second chance at stardom—this time, with a CEO who treats them with respect and (shockingly) even pays them for their work. The love story was fluffy, the music was catchy, but in the end this idol drama was about seizing the means of production and toppling the status quo of exploitative agencies and sleazy “sponsors.” Best do-over ever. (Speaking of failed idols getting a second chance, I haven’t been able to finish IDOL: The Coup yet but halfway through, I love it, so here’s an honorable mention.) I didn’t love Move to Heaven as much as others did, but it’s a moving portrait of a boy applying his father’s lessons about respecting and remembering the dead to his own bereavement, and starting a new journey with his delinquent, secret softy of an uncle.

The protagonists of Hello? It’s Me! and Mr. Queen magically got a new lease on life, or at least a new perspective on it. Ha-ni’s reunion with her 19-year-old self twenty years later was a moving rediscovery of who she wanted to be. Despite its hokey premise and somewhat silly tone, the core of sincerity and grounded emotion made this a warm, healing watch. For Bong-hwan in Mr. Queen, taking up the life of a sad Joseon queen wasn’t exactly the escape he was looking for, but it did transform him and everyone he met in the past. I can’t say I loved the ending, but the first nineteen episodes were gut-bustingly hilarious, deeply smart, and incredibly moving. (If you haven’t seen it yet, I’d recommend skipping the finale; you’ll be happier than I was.) The one thing that matters above all else, though, is that this show gave us actual queen Shin Hye-sun in her most glorious incarnation(s) yet.

Vincenzo is a sort of do-over as well: for its eponymous hero, who returns to his homeland for a con that should set him up for life, but instead finds for the first time a cause and people he’s willing to fight for; for its heroine, who rethinks her jaded laissez-faire attitude about justice; for the wildly funny and lovable residents of Geumga Plaza, who moved in because they were running away but won’t stand to see their home threatened. Vincenzo is about the birth of a community, and their discovery of what they’re willing to kill and die for. Probably the best ensemble drama of the year, brilliantly, gorgeously, hilariously led by Song Joong-ki and Jeon Yeo-bin. I loved everything about the show—I still can’t decide if this or Run On is my favorite of the year, so I brattily refuse to choose—but Kim Hee-won totally should have won Best Director at the Baeksangs.

Let the Right One In

Sometimes you meet someone, and that’s the beginning of a story. These dramas are rich, complex, and layered in the way they develop their central relationships. Mad for Each Other is perfect for about nine episodes and then starts a slow slide into actual madness, with an ending that both enraged and baffled me—but while it was good, I absolutely loved this wacky story of a cop put on leave to deal with his anger issues and his neighbor who’s bravely battling her PTSD. Even if the drama later undermines this, the first half is spot-on in its portrayal of mental illness, therapy, trauma and healing. And it’s also funny as hell, with fantastic performances from its leads.

Sell Your Haunted House is a satisfying tale about a jaded exorcist meeting her perfect medium. I loved everything about Jang Nara’s portrayal of Ji-ah; her all-black wardrobe, her tough but kind demeanor, the vulnerability and exhaustion that always lies just under her expertise at her job. The sadness, strength, or humor that Jang is able to express with a single look. Ji-ah and In-bum (Jung Yong-hwa) not only learn to lean on each other, but to move on from the past that’s held them hostage for too long.

Yumi’s Cells, meanwhile, isn’t just about letting the right one in, but about loving yourself enough to let the wrong one go. Yumi’s growth from the beginning of the show to the end is one of the most satisfying protagonist arcs I’ve seen for a while, perhaps because the cells allow us to see and understand her on a level that’s truly rare for a television character. (God do I love those cells.) The show contains the most realistic portrayals of the beginnings and endings of relationships I’ve seen this year. I think my favorite line from the entire drama is when Yumi goes to her internal village in her dreams, wanting a happy ending with the person she considers the male lead of her life. Her cell essentially tells her that she’s the only lead in her life. And doesn’t that just sum up her whole journey in such a lovely way.

Speaking of happy endings, I saved my favorite romance of the year for last. You’ve probably already guessed it from my section headings, because like Run On, I can’t resist a good movie reference. I’ve already spent thousands of words gushing about how much I love this funny, complex, beautiful, profound drama. In its finale, the four main characters, each of whom I feel an alarming devotion for even all these months later, discuss what makes a happy ending. Mi-joo, woman of my heart, says that happy endings in movies are always lies—for who is to define what a happy ending is? And that’s the beauty of this show that at its heart is about storytelling, in fiction and real life. It’s about how the stories we tell about ourselves change as we grow, and about the harm that befalls us when we fall for others’ fictions about us. It gives us a world that lives on beyond its ending, and allows us to imagine these people who feel so real, as they continue to (ahem) run on.

On a more personal note, another reason I chose this theme for my year-end review is that it’s been a year of endings and beginnings for me, too. I finally had my belated 2020 masters’ graduation ceremony in September; in November, I started a full-time job as a producer that I love—and never would’ve ended up doing if I hadn’t started watching and writing about Korean dramas. But it also means I’ll no longer have time to write for Dramabeans.

So I wanted to wrap the year with a few words of appreciation for this incredible community of Beanies. Some of us met all the way back in 2009, when I first discovered this magical medium and vowed never to leave the K-drama fandom. I’ll keep that promise, but I’m hanging up my Dramabeans hat. From that beginning to this ending, you all have made writing for this site such a pleasure. Stay safe, happy holidays, and please keep in touch. To new beginnings. 💛

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1 KimDewdrop

December 23, 2021 at 11:46 PM

I'll miss you a lot. What can I say except I love you? You'll always remain in our hearts.

Have fun producing masterpiece and do come say Hi once in a while. I'm sincerely happy you're on what you love.

Love you ❤️❤️

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