Sae-beom and Yi-hyeon are antiheroes of an unusual character. They’re not aggressively unpleasant, nor are they of dubious competence. What they are is just indifferent. Sae-beom has already mostly forgotten about her unsettling experience at the zombie treatment facility to instead get back to fantasizing about her nice new house. Yi-hyeon wants to fantasize about Sae-beom inside their nice house- and is only reluctantly dragged back into the investigation by Colonel Han.
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Until we finally get to that point “Happiness – Drama” really is just about, well, just about the happiness of the main characters. As disinterested as Sae-beom may be in romance, she really loves the idea of domesticity. I liked her just grabbing the rice cakes and running off to make friends with the neighbors, robbing Yi-hyeon of this cheerful social interaction. Sae-beom even makes a friend, the adorable Seo-yoon (played by Song Ji-woo-I), a little girl who’s often left alone by her busy parents.
What makes “Happiness – Drama” exciting, if not exactly dynamic, is just how mundane the drama is in expositing what life is like during a big disease outbreak- and noting that outbreaks take time, so for most people, even those closely affected, there’s no real sense of urgency. For Colonel Han, limiting the number of people who even know about the outbreak is important to preventing a panic. And it’s difficult to tell whether he’s right.
We get a subplot here of another viewpoint, where a journalist attempts to bribe Sae-beom’s cop friend Seung-yeong (played by Lee Kyu-hyung) into getting an inside look at the situation. On one end, maybe people do have the right to know. On the other end, even if the plan worked, salacious imagery doesn’t really do much except emphasize that the situation is bad. And this is already well-known. Although an operation loose enough to let Seung-yeong in around at all seems ill-equipped to deal with serious disease containment.
The metaphor for COVID-19 is unsubtle, particularly as the worldbuilding explicitly places “Happiness – Drama” in a mostly post-COVID world. Some people, as expected, still insist on masks, while others have moved on. In either case it’s still not clear whether anyone should be putting faith in Colonel Han. We still don’t know whether he knows the disease was originally sourced to the pills, even as Colonel Han briefly reveals that he had a personal relationship to their introduction in South Korea.
Review by William Schwartz
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“Happiness – Drama” is directed by Ahn Gil-ho, written by Han Sang-woon, and features Han Hyo-joo, Park Hyung-sik, Jo Woo-jin, Kang Ji-eun-I, Lee Joon-hyuk-I, Park Joo-hee. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2021/11/05~Now airing, Fri, Sat 22:40 on tvN.
[HanCinema’s Drama Review] “Happiness – Drama” Episode 2 (2021/11/08)
Source: Laban Lang Philippines
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