2022 Jaybird Awards

 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…

Our Blues

 Our Blues

8/10

Our Blues

Genre:                                        Episodes: 20                     Year: 2022

Melodrama

Synopsis:

Interweaving and interconnected stories following a tight knit community of friends and families living on Jeju Island.

Cast:

Lee Byung Hoon (Lee Dong Seok)

Shin Min Ah (Min Seon Ah)

Han Ji Min (Lee Young Ok)

Kim Woo Bin (Park Jong Joon)

Lee Jung Eun (Jung Eun Hee)

Choi Young Joon (Bang Ho Shik)

Park Ji Hwan (Jung In Gwon)

Roh Yoon Seo (Bang Young Joo)

Bae Hyun Sung (Jung Hyeon)

Cha Seung Won (Choi Han Soo)

Ki So Yoo (Son Eun Gi)

Jung Eun Hye (Lee Young Hee)

Go Doo Shim (Hyung Chun Hee)

Kim Hye Ja (Kang Ok Dong)

General Thoughts:

This has been a drama I have been anticipating since the casting news was announced. Kim Woo Bin has returned! After having not seeing him in anything since ‘Uncontrollably Fond’ in 2016 after his health issues, I have been very excited for his return.

Guyysss, it's Kim Woo Bin!

There were a lot of big names pulling together for this drama, which also gave me quite high hopes for the script- I know big manes don’t really equal a good drama, but I hoped with so many high profile actors signing on that this would mean the script sounded pretty darn good. And it was! There weren’t really any episodes where I felt like the story was dragging or I was super disengaged from the plot or the characters.

Big emotions can come from small moments

While it wasn’t a fast paced show, the story continually had forward momentum, taking its time to go a bit deeper into each character in turn. Which is another thing I liked about how the plot moved- the same characters were always present giving the show a feeling of continuity as if it was just telling one big story. But what it was really doing was telling lots of smaller, shorter stories using the same characters present. It flowed really well and was always a gradual shift from one character to the next. It didn’t feel like we finished Eun Hee’s story and then launched right into Jong Joon and Young Ok- Jong Joon and Young Ok had their chemistry and moments building in the background while the show focused on Eun Hee, and Eun Hee was still very present in island life as the focus shifted slowly to Young Ok. Another thing I liked about the writing in ‘Our Blues’ is that it didn’t try too hard to be too dramatic. The plot was still engaging without murder and betrayal and Big Dramatic Moments. The show focused instead on the emotions in smaller moments- many of which were relatable to the viewers. We don’t all know how it feels for you father’s hidden son to shoot your mother, but we do all know about small regrets, and loving your children even when you don’t understand them, and feeling nostalgic. The show used relatable characters to portray relatable emotions in a constantly interesting way, and I think that in a nutshell is why the show was so successful.

This drama knew how to punch you in the heart

If you can make your audience feel something while watching, then you're 3/4 on the way to a great drama. Despite the fact that this show is called ‘Our Blues’, going in I kind of didn’t think that it would be a sad drama. In hindsight that feels like a silly assumption to make, but I kind of always associated Jeju with fishing and holidays and good times, so it did take me a little by surprise how sad a lot of the episodes were. The show wasn’t as lighthearted as I’d thought it would be, but I do still think it hit a nice balance. It never became too overwhelmingly depressing that it wasn’t enjoyable to watch. It hit that sweet spot in between fun and emotion so it wasn’t too heavy or too light as to be easily forgotten.

A great blend of sweet and sad

Everything pulled together really nicely in this show and really gave it a cohesive feel. The characters, acting, plot, pace and directing all contributed towards forming the show into what it was, and it never felt like any of those aspects were outperforming the others. This show is well balanced and easy to watch- I was never really not in the mood for an episode of ‘Our Blues’, and I enjoyed every episode that I watched.

What Was Great:

The People:

Both the cast and the characters. There were such a large range of characters to have in the show and it really felt like all of those had been cast perfectly. Though I will admit to being ever so slightly disappointed that Kim Woo Bin and Shin Min Ah were not paired together in the story.

I enjoyed seeing a more serious side to Shin Min Ah too

The characters all felt very real and lived in, and the writer provided each character with such rich and detailed backstory that it was easy for the viewers to feel like they understood the people they were seeing on screen. The journey in this drama was really in slowly revealing the different layers to each of the characters so that we could see what moments and relationships forged them into the people they were in the present day. I surprisingly enjoyed the way the show would present a character a certain way, and would then slowly work to show why these characters were behaving the way they did. The prime example of this is Young Ok- I really didn’t like her at first as she was presented as flippant and manipulative. I found it hard to cheer for her relationship with Jong Joon to work out when it was so obvious that she was hiding something important. Yet when it was revealed that she was the sole family for a disabled sister all her actions suddenly made sense, and she became a character that was understandable and sympathetic. Young Ok only wanted to have fun because she was trying to distance herself from something that was already so emotionally grinding. She didn’t want to commit to a future with Jong Joon because she didn’t want to rope him into a caring role he didn’t want, and she also didn’t want to expose herself to a situation where she was very likely to be hurt- a situation she had experienced multiple times before with previous partners leaving.

I went from wishing Jong Joon would leave her alone to really rooting for them to work out

There were similar revelations for each of the charters that the show focused on, which made the village where the stories were set in feel so real and easy to connect to. The drama seemed to focus on this idea that it’s difficult to actually know people, even people you see everyday, as we are all made up of so many experiences and emotions and memories that shape who we are.

What Wasn’t:

Some Stories:

While there are lots of perks to a drama that is set out the way ‘Our Blues’ is with lots of smaller stories building a bigger, more whole picture of a community of people, there are undoubtably going to be some stories that don’t resonate as well as others. There was no section of story that I was vehemently against, but the last two stories of the show didn’t draw me in quite the way the others had.

Ki So Yoo was cute as but this storyline was so so

There were aspects I liked to each of them- the resolution of the fishermen of Jeju coming together to give Eun Gi and her Grandmother 100 moons to wish on really hit the emotional spot it was aiming for. But a lot of that story just felt like Chun Hee not even trying to connect with or comfort her granddaughter- in fact it often felt like she went out of her way to say antagonising things to upset Eun Gi. I understand that the show was trying to depict a generational difference between Chun Hee and Eun Gi, but I also felt like I was experiencing a bit of a cultural gap as well. I found Chun Hee quite difficult to relate to, and rather than coming to understand her character more, there were times where I just felt like the show made her feel more unlikeable by giving her this storyline. It was a similar thing with the story between Dong Seok and his Mum- all the emotional beats were there, and it was a wonderfully emotional way to end the show. But even at the resolution of the story I never felt like I fully understood Ok Dong or her actions. I understood the emotions between the characters and the emotions that lead to the opening up of their communication and their reconnection, but I honestly never fully grasped why she had felt she needed to do the things that hurt Dong Seok in the first place. None of these complaints are that big, but next to a whole bunch of stories that felt so complete where you felt like you deeply knew all of the characters, these small lapses in understanding felt a little disconnecting.   

Recommend?

Yes- if you like dramas that feel quite slice-of-life rather than having one overarching story then I think you would enjoy ‘Our Blues’.

I feel like you'd have to be trying really hard to not like this drama