Love Next Door: Everyone, It's Healing Season

This Netflix kdrama tells the story of Bae Seok-ryu (Jung So-min) who returns to South Korea after a decade abroad and becomes entangled once again with her childhood best friend, Choi Seung-hyo (Jung Hae-in), a man she shares a tumultuous history with. They navigate the complexities of adulthood together, their friendship eventually transforming into romance.

This was a great show, I can understand why it blew up the kdrama section of the internet earlier this year. The core of this show is about healing, both relationships with the people around you, but primarily with yourself. The acting was phenomenal; there was so much chemistry between all the characters in different relationships (parents to children, friends to friends, lovers to lovers). Jung So-min and Jung Hae-in did an amazing job portraying adults who had to carefully navigate their constantly changing dynamic. These characters had experienced so much together, and their synergy was great when showing the intimate transition from friends to lovers. Their bickering with each other and personal past traumas were so believable.

Something I really loved about this show was all the different types of friendships that were shown, regardless of age or gender. The writers normalized a platonic friendship between a man and a woman in Seung-hyo and Jeong Mo-eum (Kim Ji-eun), something not often seen in kdramas. We see a hilarious friendship between the older women of the neighborhood, including Seok-ryu's mother Na Mi-sook (Park Ji-young) and Seung-hyo's mother Seo Hye-suk (Jang Young-nam). It was so heartwarming to watch all of these friendships fluorish in such a tight-knit area; it really highlighted the importance of those close relationships in someone's life.

Speaking of the mothers, the families had such an incredible connection with each other. It was always so comedic to see the chaos unfold between these parents and their children. They all provide support to each other, fueling such amazing healing journeys. My favorite relationship had to be between Seung-hyo's parents; as the series unfolds, we see them transform from indifferent strangers to affectionate lovers and I adored watching them fall in love with each other again. It warmed my cold, dead heart. The characters' maturity was really refreshing to see, especially when "misunderstanding" tropes are so overused in kdramas; I think it's a tool used by writers to elongate episode lengths, but it can get so annoying. Funny enough, my only real qualm with the show WAS the episode lengths. I thought they were really long and could've been shortened immensely. Sometimes, I got bored because I felt they were lagging a lot. However, I am disproportionately used to action-packed melodramas, so that issue could be entirely personal with my short attention span.