Elegant Friends

I have always been a film person and would see like a dozen on an average weekend. Always paying attention to the cast, cinematography, screenplay, film editing and direction. Some years ago I was introduced to the South-Korean series. At the beginning I had some difficulty of dealing with that whole new dynamic. Once I understood how it worked I became a huge fan of K-dramas and spend most of my free time watching them. The characters here are so real and intense that young people may not understand what is happening. The cast wonderfully chosen show remarkable performances. A conclusion totally unexpected and the impassivity of the female lead character puts this drama on a upper level. I laughed, I cried and I shivered. Certainly, a must-watch drama.

A group of students who are members of an amateur dramatic group are linked with the murder of a teacher. Twenty years later they are still friends but history seems to be repeating itself as there is another murder in which they will all fall under suspicion. All of them have dark secrets which will be exposed as the series evolves and some may not be such close friends as they thought. A very well acted story where each character is developed gradually as the story leads you in different directions until the truth is exposed. My only criticism is that it could have condensed the story by about 2 episodes but even without that it is still entertaining.

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.

... 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.

Unlike most K-drama titles on Netflix, this isn't for people under 40 and have mostly single friends. Some topics and conversation, I don't see them be able to relate to at the same level.

While most K-dramas suffer from overly drawn out pacing after first few episodes e.g. Karaoke, drinking, bantering/argument, and solo introspection scenes, this show's pacing has been very good.

I'm into episode 7 and it's still tightly scripted. You don't really want to skip through any scenes. Considering the age of the characters, they're all played by veteran actors with 20+ years under their belt.

I don't want to spoil the show too much, so all I would say is, I'm a middle age guy with very short attention span, but this is one of the few K-drama shows on Netflix that had me binging.