The 2015 Korean drama series Reply 1988 opens with five teenage friends sitting in front of a TV, stuffing their faces with snacks. As they proceed to bicker and banter, the resounding sound of their mothers' yells echo through the street calling them back home for dinner. The neighbours all part ways, and are shown entering into houses all on the same street. It is evident that this is an everyday routine; the loving familiarity, and almost a clockwork precision about how it all unfolds.
There’s something about an opening sequence like this that hits a viewer like a ton of bricks; the heady mix of nostalgia, warmth, and familiarity that envelopes you from the get-go.
Comfort of community
Hollywood rom-coms have for long, taken precedence when it comes to ‘comfort’ watching. For years, we’ve all turned to Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers’ extensive filmography for an array of options. Over the last three years, we’ve probably ignored a lot of the new content available, and picked watching You’ve Got Mail or 10 Things I Hate About You for the tenth time.
This is a genre K-dramas have also excelled at, and these swoon-worthy, frothy romances were in the forefront when they had a massive breakthrough a couple of years ago globally. At present too, Business Proposal, starring the terrific Kim Se-Jeong and Ahn Hyo-Seop remains on Netflix India’s top shows list even a month after its release.
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There’s a whole other genre though, that K-dramas have made their own and excelled at: relatable comfort that goes beyond romance. This comfort revels in the everyday realness of its characters, is unhurried in pace, while exploring friendships, sisterhood, dreams, ambition and so much more.
Five comfort K-Dramas to check out:
Hospital Playlist: Five doctors in their forties who have been friends since medical school, reunite at Yulje hospital where they navigate life, work, and relationships, all while indulging in their love for music on the side
Be Melodramatic: The lives of three best friends in their thirties — a documentary filmmaker, a TV show writer, and a marketing professional — who have each other’s backs as they try to figure out their lives, careers and relationships
Reply 1988: Wholesome comfort with loads of nostalgia, as we follow five friends and their families in the same neighbourhood
Run On: A slow-burn drama where a former track star whose life has been thrown out of gear finds an unlikely source of support in a film subtitler
Navillera: A septuagenarian decides to pursue his lifelong dream of learning ballet and strikes up a friendship with a young dancer as they encourage each other
There are parental relationships, friendships, sporting ambitions and the very relatable teenage indecision about the future that Reply 1988 follows through five friends and their families who reside in the neighbourhood of Ssangmun-Dong, While there is romance, what makes it truly wholesome is how it celebrates community bonding, support, and kindness, harkening back to an era where neighbours felt like a part of the family. “A time when we didn’t have much, but people’s hearts were warm,” muses Lee Hye-Ri, who played the immensely likable Deok-Sun.
The sense of community here is also brought alive by the women; the mothers and homemakers who sit together outside the colony as they gossip and prep for dinner, constantly sending food to each other’s homes, quietly helping out a friend in need financially, and even signing up to compete in a national singing competition.
Comfort of friendships
We seldom see such stories on-screen, that go beyond milking the nostalgia factor and give so much weight to the humans who drive the show forward. It is this slice-of-life perfection that writer director duo Lee Woo-Jung and Shin Won-Ho also drive home in the Hospital Playlist series.
The protagonists here are five doctors in their 40s and much like the Ahjummas or older women in Reply 1988, there’s genuine warmth, camaraderie, and bonding here as they navigate their everyday routine at the hospital, all while bickering over food and coming together to form a garage band. Jung Kyung-Ho in particular, who plays cardiologist Jun Wan, has you ‘relating hard’ as all those memes on adulthood put it especially when he tiredly tells his colleague, "I’m old. I can’t do two different things on the same day."