Dramas like
Dear My Friends

The same writer, the same conviction, twenty episodes on Jeju. Noh Hee Kyung again handing whole chapters to middle-aged and older characters and writing their wants at full size, with an ensemble that includes the best work Lee Byung Hun has done on television. Same structure of separate lives touching at the edges. Difference: it is an anthology, so each story gets a clean shape, where Dear My Friends lets everything overlap and stay unresolved.

Slow start Episode 3 closes the first chapter and sells the anthology format.

One old person, one want, twelve episodes. A seventy year old retired postman decides to learn ballet and the show treats the decision with total seriousness, never once using him as a lesson for a younger character. Same refusal of sentimentality about aging. Difference: it is a two-hander rather than an ensemble, and the sadness is one specific medical fact rather than the general weather.

Hooks early Episode 2, the first proper lesson. It is a two-hander from there.

Kim Hye Ja again, and the same question from the other end. A young woman who can bend time and ages decades in an instant, so she has to live as the person Dear My Friends is about. Both are ultimately about how it feels to be looked past. Difference: it is built on a fantasy device this one would never reach for, and it is a much stranger watch.

Slow start Episode 4. Sit with the confusion, it is doing work.

Same writer, working life instead of late life. A patrol division staffed by people who took the job because nothing else was available, written with Noh Hee Kyung's usual attention to what people say when nothing is happening. Same faith that ordinary competence is dramatic. Difference: the register is procedural and the jeopardy is physical, so it is far less interior.

Slow start Episode 3, after the training arc ends.

Sixty years of one family, told at the same patient speed. Four seasons, one Jeju household, and a script that treats ordinary lives as worth sixteen hours because they are. Same argument about parents having been people first. Difference: it is a life told forward from youth, so it gives you the reward of watching somebody grow up, which Dear My Friends deliberately denies you.

Hooks early Episode 2, where the childhood section pays off.

The same writer's other subject. A novelist, a psychiatrist and a shared house, with mental illness written as something to live with rather than a plot device, and the dialogue rhythms are unmistakably hers. Difference: it is a romance with young leads at the centre, so the generational subject is background rather than the point.

Slow start Episode 3, once the housemates are all under one roof and the household becomes the setting.