2022 Jaybird Awards
So we are basically halfway through 2023 and the 2022 shows I watched have still gone mostly uncommented on. I’m sorry I’m so busy! This has actually been written up for quite some time, it’s just taken me a while to get around to posting. I have to say that I wasn’t super enthusiastic about a lot of the dramas that I watched in 2022- there were a few good ones, but I feel like mostly they just felt average or kinda bad. I think with the limited number of dramas I can watch per year now, I just got mostly unlucky and picked some not-so-great shows to invest my time into. Hopefully my choices this year will be better!
Best RomCom AND Jaybird’s Choice: Business Proposal
I just thoroughly enjoyed this show. Which is quite amazing as it didn’t really deliver anything new or revolutionary in the K-Drama world. This show is solid proof that tropes are tropes for a reason- when they are done well they are so fun, so enjoyable, and so addictive. The cast was absolutely delightful and really brought the characters to life, and the whole show was just so darn FUN. The jokes were funny, the chemistry between the leads was sparky, and we even had a really wonderful, equally sparky second lead couple to fill in time that wasn’t dedicated to the main loveline. Every episode was a good time and it was easy to watch the next episode after each one ended. Just a good time all around.
Runner Up: Shooting Stars
Best Melodrama: Pachinko
I feel a little weird talking about ‘Pachinko’ because unlike a lot of dramas I watch which are light and fluffy and fairly inconsequential, ‘Pachinko’ felt like a big production and an important story. It was really a phenomenal drama. It touched on huge concepts such as identity, isolation from culture, and ostracism and discrimination. It’s a massive, intergenerational story that explores these themes and ideas from various time points and character perspectives. It’s shot so beautifully and the production quality is absolutely through the roof. The storytelling throughout the drama is so incredible and so emotive- you really feel for the characters and their struggles and the writing has this magical way of making you feel so connected to these characters, even though you might have absolutely nothing in common with them. It's an emotional story that has been brought to the screen in a truly brilliant way.
Best Thriller: All of Us Are Dead
What can I say, I like zombie shows. I don’t have much of a stomach for horror, but zombies are something I’m usually able to handle. I wouldn’t say ‘All of Us Are Dead’ did anything ground-breaking in the world of zombies, but it was an interesting watch all the same. I kind of like that in zombie movies and TV shows there’s a certain level of predictability- or maybe consistency is a better word? The show didn’t have to waste time explaining how zombies are infectious or how they work- it’s all common lore/mythos so the show is able to do a bit of character introduction and set up before jumping right into the zombie outbreak. I thought the setting of the school was a great new environment- all the characters are already acquainted and it also served to lower the age of the characters too. It was fascinating to watch the teens struggle between waiting for help from adults or striking out on their own. The young cast also delivered strong performances and made their characters understandable and empathetic. It was a great show with high stakes and high tension in each episode and is a great little addition into the zombie genre.
Least Thrilling Thriller: Through the Darkness
I wanted to like this show. I really, really, really wanted this to just be the absolute best show of the year. Evidently, I didn’t end up thinking it was, but I really tried to like this one. I've studied psychology and I have recently become an avid listener of a true crime podcast during my work commute, so this drama seemed like it should have been right up my alley! It’s literally a show about the psychology behind criminals! But despite the interesting synopsis, I never really found the show that engaging. I appreciated the time it took to show that the idea of a criminal profiler was difficult to introduce to detectives who had been making their way through their careers without it (and honestly, it would sound a bit like bullsh*t if you’d never heard of it before), but it was quite difficult to watch our little team constantly coming up against roadblocks from within the police force itself. And then a huge chunk of this drama focused on how the compiling of the murderers’ stories was negatively impacting Ha Young’s mental health. Which is fair and a great point for the drama to delve into. I just don’t think it did it in a particularly interesting way.
Biggest Disappointment: Bad and Crazy
This is a drama that I have almost completed wiped from my memory. I was so excited for it and just got more and more hyped with every piece of promo material that came out. It was starring Lee Dong Wook who I will always be excited to see in a drama’s lineup. It also had a fabulous second male lead in Wi Ha Joon, fresh of the success of ‘Squid Game’. The drama promised excitement, comedy and best of all BROMANCE! But I am sad to say that it did not end up being very bromatic at all. The two main characters essentially fought all series long, and only came to an understanding in the last few episodes. And even then the cute friendship scenes were pretty minimal. The plot really dragged and I can’t remember finding any of the episodes all that exciting to watch. The ‘twist’ of Wi Ha Joon’s character not being real was pretty obvious and lacked emotional impact, and is probably part of the reason why the bromance suffered- can’t really be doing lots of cute friend things when there’s only one of you. I am also sad to say (trust me, I don’t like saying it) I don’t think the acting was very good. I know that both of these men are great actors so I can only assume that it was the blandness and shallowness of the script that was impacting on the two’s performances. Or maybe they were just having an off drama. Maybe both.
Most Overrated: Extraordinary Attorney Woo
It wasn’t a bad drama, but I certainly wouldn’t label it one of the best K-Drama’s I’ve ever seen. It was pleasantly mediocre. I’m not sure if it’s because it was a Korean drama aired on Netflix (and that it wasn’t dark and depressing like most Korean Netflix shows), or if it was because Park Eun Bin acted amazingly in it (which she did), but I was seeing this show absolutely EVERYWHERE. It was the first time I’d been getting K-drama snippets on my Instagram reels! Everyone was saying the show was insanely cute and insanely ground-breaking and it just…wasn’t really. It was simply fine. But I think after hearing it get talked up so much, I was expecting the drama to deliver more than it did, and I was left feeling a little disappointed.
Runner Up: Yumi’s Cells 2
Best Worldbuilding: Our Blues
It took me a little while to warm up to ‘Our Blues’, but once I fell into the style of storytelling and figured out how the drama was telling it’s story, I really enjoyed it. What the show did was introduce us to this one location in this one snippet of time, and then thoroughly explore the lives of a handful of characters that lived there. It’s not a super common way for a drama to unfold- most shows pick one main storyline and run with it, whereas ‘Our Blues’ had many smaller stories that all interweaved and interconnected. It gave us a really rich and vibrant selection of characters that interacted with each other at varying levels throughout the show’s run. A person that was a background character in one story was the main focus of another story- every background character had their own lives, their own struggles, and their own hopes and dreams. It made this little town feel very real and lived in, and exploring all the different characters in detail had a way of bringing the whole setting to life.
Biggest Disappointment: Love in Contract
Really only one word comes to mind when I think of this drama. Boring. Boring, boring, boring. Nothing was happening in the plot, the characters weren’t interesting, and there was less than zero chemistry between the leads. This show promised a lot of things that I usually enjoy- a contract relationship, Park Min Young, a cute, younger second-male lead, but it just didn’t deliver. The writing was all over the place, the pacing of the show was excruciatingly slow, and the heroine was kind of unlikeable. Looking back it seems that this was this writer’s first ever drama, so it kinda makes sense that it’s not this super clean script, but oh man, I just expected (and wanted) it to be better. I avoided Park Min Young’s last drama ‘Forecasting Love and Weather’ because I’d heard it was pretty bad, and honestly I sort of wish I’d done the same thing here. Is her drama before that ‘I’ll Find You on a Beautiful Day’ any better? Please, someone, anyone… I just want to watch Park Min Young in a drama that isn’t cr*p…
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