Elegant Friends

From south korea. It's an asian telenovela! Seventeen episodes. A group of college friends, their spouses, friends, exes, all live and work in the same town, so they interact a little more frequently than is probably healthy. Throw in a couple murders. The cops are taking their time figuring out who dunnem. There's a lot of humor, a lot of serious life. Married couples squabbling, as they do. And throw in some jealousy over ex boyfriends and girlfriends. It didn't need to be this long... could easily have been told in ten episodes. Once or twice per episode, we watch someone stare straight ahead... or look at a photograph, while various long songs play in the background. The subtitles are hit or miss; sometimes its hard to figure out what's going on. It's an adventure. True life situations. Episode eight is the famous wine fight... and no-one gets up and leaves! You'd think after the insults and rude behavior, someone would have said "thank you for a lovely evening, but it's time to go." it's long, but mostly good. That last episode kind of goes off the rails.. Directed by Hyun Wook Song. Written by Kim Kyung-Sun and Park Hyo Yeon.

Drew by the heavy marketing, I have high expectation for this series. Watched until episode 13 and decided it is enough and gave up. Simple and predictable plot, but that is not the problem, simple plot can be sophisticated with good execution and presentation. Which is what this TV show lack. The director wants to produce an aura of suspense but the end product gives the feeling of incompleteness and leads to nowhere.

Characters have no depth and actually irritating and annoying. Dialogue cheesy and boring, at times, hilarious and illogical. It could be more bearable if actors are good. The lead actress - Yun-ah Song is a disaster, void of expression and 90% of time is stony faced. It is always a pain to watch bad lead actors and actresses because they dominated most of the screen time. The villain - Tae-Hwan Lee, overacting and just flat out bad acting. His translation of a bad person is to forcefully open his eyes as if in shock.

Personally I feel it is a waste of time and not recommended.

Don't care about the reviews, you need to watch it to understand.

... if it was not for the last two episodes that really left me with a "so what?" feeling.

Good cast, good story, solid start until at least episode 8. Then it goes downhill somehow as it starts to just drag on with too many repetitions. It made me feel like they just took it up the hill with all the story lines and then just dropped it to tumble down. All of the things that mattered just did not matter anymore and this made no sense. If only they did not drag it on for 17 episodes and maybe wrap it all up in 10 or maybe 12 episodes at most, it would have made justice to all that was going on.

But still it is a good watch, especially if you are over 45 as some things the characters are struggling with hit quite close to home.

I gave this an 8 rating for the mystery and "who done it" value. However, I didn't particularly like the K-drama as a whole. It centers around a group of very close friends that were in college together and now are in their 40s and living in the same town. The series basically has an adult theme centering around unsolved murders, extortion, rape date drugs, obsessive old love, adult film director and actresses, getting duped by underage scammer, paying scammers to convict friend's wives into bed to trick them into getting caught so they can have a chance to get their old girlfriend back, innocent children involved, etc - all the while in college boys protecting boys and later in their 40s men protecting men. Each person has their own personal story as to why they are the way they are and is divulged slowly. The 16th episode you find who the real recent murderer is. The 17th episode is an add on to divulge the final update of each of their personal story ending. I was really disappointed in my favorite character Jo Hyung-Woo's update on his personal story. How ridiculous. I think the script could have been better.