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Pierce Conran

This article contains spoilers.
2/5 stars
Lead cast: Jung So-min, Jung Hae-in, Kim Ji-eun, Yoon Ji-on
Latest Nielsen rating: 8.45 per cent
The romantic family drama Love Next Door, starring Jung So-min and Jung Hae-in, wound up this past weekend, with its wide and meandering dramatic tangent coming full circle.
With its disappointed parents learning to embrace their children’s decisions, the series espoused a message about not needing to be special. Rather than pressure loved ones to succeed, we should accept them for who they are and let them blossom in the ways that they choose.


This may seem like positive messaging, but in this deeply insular story it winds up meaning something else. The leads achieve their personal and professional desires, but their freedom is illusory, as all their decisions are predicated on the idea of returning to and recreating an idealised past.
After excelling in school, landing a job at an illustrious company in America and getting engaged, Baek Seok-ryu (Jung So-min) returned home without her job or her fiancé after experiencing burnout.
She has consistently enraged her exasperated mother Na Mi-sook (Park Ji-young), first by coming home hat in hand at the beginning of the series, then by throwing away her career and deciding to become a chef, and finally by starting a relationship with her childhood friend and next-door neighbour Choi Seung-hyo (Jung Hae-in).
Seok-ryu should be free to make her own decisions, but ultimately they amount to coming home and retreating deeper and deeper into a fantasy of nostalgia and familial bliss. She does not spread her wings and fly; instead, she curls up into a ball and snuggles up in the nest, never to leave.

Not only does she marry the boy next door from her childhood who still lives right across from her, Seok-ryu also starts her own restaurant in the renovated spicy rice cake shop that was run by her father all her life.
Circular and disappointing though it may be, at least Seok-ryu has a clear character arc. The same cannot be said for the bright and brilliant Seung-hyo, one of the most undercooked romantic drama male leads in recent memory.
Seung-hyo loves Seok-ryu and seeks to do good with his work as an architect, but this desire is not enough to make him a fully rounded character.
His behaviour changes rather sharply from aloof to tender during the series, but there isn’t enough meat on his character to understand who he was before and who he is now, let alone what prompted the change.

Granted, this trajectory is the destiny of almost every romantic drama male lead, but character work trumps formula. You have to earn the right for your characters to take on the tried-and-true conventions of the genre.
Just like No Gain No Love, which also recently concluded its run, the secondary romantic leads of Love Next Door threatened to outshine the headliners with richer character work.
Their desires force them to put themselves out into the world and try to achieve them, in spite of the traumatic incidents that have marked them.
Seok-ryu and Seung-hyo’s childhood friend Jeong Mo-eum (Kim Ji-eun) is a firefighter who slowly falls in love with reporter Kang Dan-ho (Yoon Ji-on). The pair fall for one another as they steadily learn about each other’s personalities and pasts.

Compared to the leads, the potential romance between Mo-eum and Dan-ho offers more adult themes about choices and responsibility.
Dan-ho takes care of his orphaned niece and, while Mo-eum quickly warms to her, engaging in a relationship with Dan-ho essentially means they would have to be a family from the very start.
Further complicating their relationship is Mo-eum’s desire to win a special assignment that would mean moving to the South Pole for a year. She wins the assignment, then struggles to tell Dan-ho about it.
Yet she need not have worried. Both Dan-ho and his niece are happy for her and will wait for her return while she pursues her dreams.

With 16 episodes averaging 80 minutes apiece, Love Next Door had plenty of time to pack in themes and ideas, and pack them in it did, although many of these ingredients were haphazardly tossed in and summarily abandoned.
This included the potential dementia of Seung-hyo’s mother, Seo Hye-sook (Jang Young-nam), and the gotcha reveal that Hye-sook’s colleague, suspected of being her lover is in fact gay.
In the end, Seok-ryu and Seung-hyo get married and she achieves her sudden ambition of becoming a chef. One imagines the first dish she serves up will be a nothing burger, just like the show has turned out to be.
Love Next Door is streaming on Netflix.


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High-flyer Baek Seok-ryu (Jung So-min) disappoints her parents by becoming a chef and falling for the boy next door in this meandering tale


High-flyer Baek Seok-ryu (Jung So-min) disappoints her parents by becoming a chef and falling for the boy next door in this meandering tale.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}High-flyer Baek Seok-ryu (Jung So-min) disappoints her parents by becoming a chef and falling for the boy next door in this meandering tale

High-flyer Baek Seok-ryu (Jung So-min) disappoints her parents by becoming a chef and falling for the boy next door in this meandering tale