Dramas like
At a Distance, Spring Is Green

Male friendship as the actual love story, under much worse pressure. Same subject of a boy who cannot ask for help and the one person who works out that he needs it, and the same interest in what a school does to somebody it has decided about. Difference: violence is the engine rather than the backdrop, the pressure never lets up, and it is far harder to watch.

Hooks early Episode 1. Eight episodes, zero filler, and the first fight tells you exactly what kind of show this is.

A young man and the guardian who will not perform sympathy at him. Same treatment of trauma as a fact to be lived with rather than a plot to be resolved, same quiet camera. Difference: ten episodes structured around the dead at heavy 5, so it is gentler in tone and much sadder in effect.

Hooks early Episode 1 already tells you exactly what the show is.

Depression treated with actual procedure instead of atmosphere. Same insistence that this is an illness rather than a mood, and the same care not to make anybody's suffering picturesque. Difference: it is set in a psychiatric ward with a patient per episode, so treatment is on screen where here it is a decision made in the final hour.

Hooks early Episode 1, which sets the format: one patient, one nurse, one small mercy, repeated for twelve hours.

Two survivors behaving badly before they behave well. Same patience with people who push help away, same reading of grief as something physical. Difference: it is a full romance and it commits to recovery, so the love story does the work the romance here never manages.

Slow start Episode 3, once the shared history behind the collapse becomes clear.

The campus, and a male lead you cannot settle on. Same unease about somebody charming whose kindness might be management, and the same university setting rendered with real social detail. Difference: unease is the whole flavour and the back half comes apart, so it offers no equivalent of the care this one puts underneath it.

Hooks early Episode 1. The dynamic between them is unsettling from the first scene.

Damaged kids raised into each other's lives. Same tenderness toward young people covering for absent parents, and the same reliance on a trio rather than a couple. Difference: the childhood half is the good half and the adult half becomes a love triangle, which is the mistake this show makes in miniature.

Hooks early Episode 1. The three kids and the makeshift household are established beautifully in the first two hours.