Review of K-Drama Because This Is My First Life

 

After I watched Squid Game with the rest of the world, Netflix added K-Dramas (South Korean dramas) to my feed.  I was not familiar with the genre and gave Because This Is My First Life a try. The show was a very sweet romcom with insanely good looking actors and  . . . very . . . slow . . . pacing.

The main characters are heroine Yoon Ji-ho, an unemployed TV writer having a crisis of identity, and hero Nam Se-hee, a computer programmer who seems to be mildly autistic but may just be a bit Vulcan-like in his refusal to deal with emotions.  In a meet-cute, Yoon Ji-ho (I'm using complete names in this review because I'm not sure of the appropriate way to refer to them) moves into the spare room in Nam Se-hee's condo without either of them realizing that they are opposite genders.  Yoon Ji-ho would be homeless without the room.  Nam Se-hee desperately wants a good roommate who will help him take care of his cat and make his mortgage payments.  Bowing to family pressures, they enter into a marriage of convenience.  

Naturally. misunderstandings and love follow, but there is more to the story.  Yoon Ji-ho thinks through what she really wants from  a partner and from  life, and decides that she is not willing to settle for less.  Nam Se-hee works through an old trauma involving his parents and a prior love.  Their character development is sweet and well-done. 

There are two other couples the show also follows, all friends of the two main characters.  The standout is Woo Su-ji, a friend of Yoon Ji-ho who absolutely dominates the screen every time she appears on it.  She has a crappy corporate job where she puts up with daily sexual harassment in the hope of professional advancement.  Her love interest, Ma Sang-goo, who is Nam Se-hee's friend and boss, is incredibly supportive and helps her come to believe that she both deserves and can have a better career and a better life.  

As much as I liked the characters, actors, and intertwining plots of Because This Is My First Life, I would have liked the show a lot better if each episode was half the time.  It seemed like each shot was done twice, each piece of dialogue repeated.  I grew so bored with the pacing that it was a struggle to finish watching.