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Pierce Conran

This article contains minor spoilers.
Lead cast: Lee Sung-kyung, Chae Jong-hyeop
Latest Nielsen rating: 3.5 per cent
Wistful romance and post-traumatic healing form the emotional core of In Your Radiant Season, a new drama starring Lee Sung-kyung (Call It Love) and Chae Jong-hyeop (Serendipity’s Embrace) that combines workplace drama and chaebol (family-run conglomerate) dynamics.
The series introduces us to the bright and bubbly Song Ha-ran (Lee), a design student from Seoul in love with her boyfriend, Chan, who is studying in Boston, in the United States. One day, Ha-ran takes a flight to America. During her taxi ride to his university, his lab explodes on the horizon.


Seven years later, Ha-ran is now a top designer at Nana Kim Atelier, but she has lost her former vigour, her eyes now weighed down by the pain of her past.
Chae plays Seonu Chan, a student in Boston whose forlorn eyes peer out from beneath the black hoodie he always wears, a portrait of youthful melancholy. On the day of the explosion he is caught in the blast but survives.
In the present, Chan arrives at Incheon International Airport completely transformed into a happy-go-lucky youth in bright clothing, living life to the fullest. He too is a successful professional and has come to Seoul to pitch a design project to Nana Kim Atelier, not realising that Ha-ran works there.
Chan is shocked to meet Ha-ran but Ha-ran does not seem to recognise him.

This meeting, which occurs nearly halfway through the opening episode, is the first of several head-scratching moments in In Your Radiant Season. Not because the story is especially complex but because writer Jo Sung-hee – known for Still 17 – repeatedly withholds key information.
Omissions can be an effective narrative tool when employed judiciously, but this show encourages viewers to make misleading connections. While this produces surprises in the moment, it also hobbles the show’s dramatic momentum and casts earlier scenes in a new, sometimes illogical, light.
The opening of the series suggests that Chan is Ha-ran’s boyfriend. When she does not recognise him in Seoul, we wonder if she might be suffering from amnesia – a not unreasonable assumption, given the melodramatic leanings of the show. We eventually learn that her boyfriend was Kang Hyeok-chan, Seonu Chan’s university colleague.
The show engineers reasons for Chan to have been affected by Ha-ran – who may have unwittingly saved him from a dark fate – but these don’t satisfactorily explain his behaviour around her.

Playing fast and loose with viewer sympathies, the series makes it hard to trust what is happening on screen. And when you cannot take romance at face value, you have a problem.
As suggested by the title, this series employs the four seasons of the year as a flexible metaphor for the emotional vagaries of its lead characters. Ha-ran’s spring ends with the death of her boyfriend, following which she skips straight to a long winter.
It is the opposite for Chan, who begins the show locked in his lonely winter in Boston, which he has moved past by the time he gets to Seoul.
Chan gets his first glimpse of Ha-ran at an art exhibition about the seasons that they both happen to attend, but the metaphorical power of the seasons does not extend to the story this show depicts.

The metaphors, which are vague to begin with, are not visually reinforced on screen. If anything, the show seems to rely on the emotional associations of seasons in Korean media without properly applying them to the story.
Hazy visuals, attractively pensive leads and classical music give this series a sophisticated sheen but the narrative mechanics are ripped straight from the melodramatic engines that drive soap operas, known locally as “makjang”.
Aside from its striking main couple, the series benefits from a compelling supporting cast, with Ha-ran’s family completed by screen legend Lee Mi-sook as her grandmother Nana Kim – which, in another example of narrative sleight of hand, we do not learn straight away – and Han Ji-hyun (The Penthouse) as Ha-ran’s energetic, raven-haired sister.
There are also other things that work, namely the clean aesthetic that polishes the show’s theatrical flights of fancy with classical cues from Bach’s Goldberg Variations and the warm confines of a cafe with pour-over coffee always on the go.

Some viewers may not be bothered by the narrative obfuscation, opting instead to let the show’s pensive and calming mood wash over them. Even so, one hopes a kernel of genuine emotion will eventually emerge from the gloss.
In Your Radiant Season is streaming on Disney+.


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This romantic K-drama about a woman grieving for her boyfriend has a compelling cast but is beset with misleading omissions


This romantic K-drama about a woman grieving for her boyfriend has a compelling cast but is beset with misleading omissions.


Disney+ K-drama In Your Radiant Season: Lee Sung-kyung, Chae Jong-hyeop in romantic drama

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}This romantic K-drama about a woman grieving for her boyfriend has a compelling cast but is beset with misleading omissions

This romantic K-drama about a woman grieving for her boyfriend has a compelling cast but is beset with misleading omissions