Reply 1988

I felt camaraderie with people I never knew, if not nostalgia for a time I never lived. I've heard Reply praised as being a nice callback to the time period in Korea, and it might be, but that didn't really matter for me. I guess they didn't have cell phones. What did matter for me was how instead of being about some big conflict, it was just daily life. It wasn't undramatic exactly, but it didn't have the same sort of drama as other kdramas.

And I really enjoyed the quotidian struggles and satisfactions they go through. Food scenes are the meat of kdramas anyways; why not give me more of them? Scenes like eating together work because the families and personalities are fleshed out well.

The kids in particular were each their own characters in tons of detail. The fathers were each unique as well. The mothers were differentiated by relationships with their own families, but it was funny how they shared the same curly hair and gossipy style.

On the romance, one of the main things I felt was frustration with Jung-hwan for never doing anything. Deok-sun and Choi Taek were open about their feelings, and in the end Jung-hwan recognized he had his chances to do that too, but still it's frustrating. I also felt like Choi Taek was surprisingly good looking and cute. I liked that because I kind of expected the "genius go prodigy nerd" character to be portrayed as seriously weird, but he's a funny and nice part of the group.

Like I said, I liked the moments of ordinary life. It was also nice that it was more chill since I was watching with someone else (which is why I have no screenshots or notes and am writing this long after the fact). I actually lost interest at the end when it deviated from the ordinary ups and downs to give people huge happy endings, because the best parts of reply are those ordinary meals or dances or whatever rather than monumental ones at a wedding or something.