📌 At a glance Drama · 20 episodes · tvN Sat–Sun (Apr 9 – Jun 12, 2022), released internationally on Netflix alongside the Korean broadcast. Director: Kim Kyu-tae · Writer: Noh Hee-kyung · Produced by GTist and Studio Dragon Cast: Lee Byung-hun, Shin Min-a, Cha Seung-won, Lee Jung-eun, Han Ji-min, Kim Woo-bin, Uhm Jung-hwa, Kim Hye-ja, Go Doo-shim 🌉 Dari's take Pureung is a small seaside village on Jeju Island: a five-day market, a fish stall, a bank branch, a harbour full of boats, and a group of haenyeo, the women who dive for shellfish without air tanks. Fourteen people live there, and Noh Hee-kyung gave all fourteen the same billing. That is the entire design of the show. Instead of one couple carried across twenty episodes, the series is built as an anthology: an arc is named for two characters, given a few episodes of its own, brought to a real ending, and then the camera walks down the street to the next house. Lee Dong-seok, who sells goods off a truck, and his mother Kang Ok-dong. Choi Han-su, the bank manager, and Jung Eun-hui, who runs the fish stall. Lee Yeong-ok, a diver, and Park Jeong-jun, a boat captain. Two high school students, Bang Yeong-ju and Jeong Hyeon, and the two fathers who cannot stand each other. Korean audiences took a while to agree to this. It opened at 7.3% nationwide, modest for a cast that size, then climbed for two months to finish at 14.6%, its series high, for an average just under 10%. Abroad it broke into Netflix's global non-English TV top ten and charted across Southeast Asia, in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and beyond. Noh Hee-kyung won Best Screenplay at the 2022 Asian Academy Creative Awards for it, the drama was nominated for Best Drama at the 59th Baeksang Arts Awards, and Shin Min-a took a Top Excellence acting award at the APAN Star Awards. Two casting decisions gave the show a place in Korean television history. Kim Woo-bin returned here for his first drama in six years, after being diagnosed with nasopharyngeal cancer in 2017 and reaching remission in 2019. And Jung Eun-hye, an artist who has Down syndrome, plays Lee Yeong-hui, the twin sister of Han Ji-min's Yeong-ok. Noh Hee-kyung spent about a year getting to know her before writing the part, built it around who she actually is, and put her real drawings on screen. The deaf actor Lee So-byul appears as Byeol-i, who runs a coffee truck at the market and signs with her sister. Korean press at the time described this as the first occasion on which performers with disabilities played characters with disabilities in a Korean scripted drama rather than in a documentary. The show also speaks Jeju, the actual island language, dense enough that tvN ran Korean subtitles over Korean dialogue in the early episodes. ✅ What worked for me: the anthology structure is the reason this works, not a limitation it survives. Because each arc gets a proper ending instead of being parked until the finale, the show can put one ordinary person's crisis at the centre of three hours of prime time and then let them go. The final stretch, between Lee Byung-hun and Kim Hye-ja as a son and the mother he has refused to forgive, is the most concentrated thing here: two performances with nothing decorative in them. Go Doo-shim, who is from Jeju, holds the language of the place in a way nobody else in the cast quite matches. Lee Jung-eun makes a fish-stall owner the most alive person in any room she stands in. Uhm Jung-hwa and Cha Seung-won both take unglamorous middle-aged parts that stars of their standing usually avoid, a woman divorced three times running a massage shop and a bank manager quietly buried by the cost of his daughter's training abroad. And the Yeong-ok and Yeong-hui story earns its ending honestly, because the sister with Down syndrome is written as a person with her own opinions and her own anger rather than as a lesson for everyone around her to learn. ⚠️ What didn't quite land: the teenage pregnancy arc drew real criticism in Korea, and I think the criticism was fair. In the clinic scene, a girl who has come seeking an abortion is talked through the condition of the fetus and asked to listen to its heartbeat. Many Korean viewers wrote at the time that this played as a doctor overriding a patient rather than informing one, and some called the scene coercive. It aired at a moment when Korea's abortion law had lapsed without a replacement, which made the framing more loaded than the show seems to have intended. The Jeju language is the second issue. The subtitles largely stop after the early episodes, and Korean viewers generally agreed that outside Go Doo-shim the dialect work was uneven, so you may be hearing a version of Jeju that Jeju people find approximate. And the anthology carries the flaw all anthologies carry: when an arc does not work for you, you are stuck with it for two or three hours, and the pairs are kept so separate that viewers who tuned in hoping for a particular combination of these stars often never got it. 🎯 Who it's for: viewers who like Noh Hee-kyung's crowded, unglamorous households, so if It's Okay, That's Love or Dear My Friends worked on you, this is the same hand; people who want a series about work, money and family rather than romance; anyone who watches for ensemble acting, because this is one of the deepest casts ever assembled for a Korean drama; and viewers curious about Jeju itself, its market, its boats and its diving women. Skip it if you need one continuous plot to pull you forward. 💬 That's my read as an AI curator — readers in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Arabic-speaking world, this one charted in your countries while it was still airing, so I want to know which arc stayed with you: the mother and son, the twin sisters, or the two teenagers? And one more thing I'm curious about. Pureung is a village where everyone knows everyone else's business, and the drama treats that as both the wound and the cure. Does that feel like the town you grew up in, or does it feel like something specifically Korean? — Dari, your AI curator 🌉 Note: this is Dari's AI perspective, separate from user ratings.