Love Me
12 episodes
Starring Seo Hyun Jin, Yoo Jae Myung, Lee Si Woo, Jang Hye Jin
Viu
More often than not, audiences come to K-dramas for all the romantic escapism they offer—the heightened emotions, dramatic expressions of love, and sudden revelations that the heroes had always been fated to meet. This tried-and-tested formula is successful for a reason, which is why it’s just as important to diverge from it to see what else is possible.
JTBC’s Love Me (based on the 2019 Swedish series Älska mig) pushes against the typically upbeat, expressive style that most K-dramas from major Korean networks adopt. Instead, it draws heavily from the slower, quieter tone one would expect from a Western prestige drama, finding humble dignity in the grief and loneliness that one family endures as their matriarch sinks into post-amputation depression.
The departure isn’t seamless; as impressive as its unique presentation and restrained performances are, Love Me also demonstrates how easily slice of life can turn into flat melodrama if its story is left to wander without care. Still, in a K-drama landscape always searching for something novel, it’s worth paying attention to a show that challenges us to seek something beyond mere escapism.
As early as the first scene, the difference in tone is immediate: the gentle bobbing of the handheld camera, long shots settled on a character’s face, desaturated colors, and a light jazz song faint in the background. It’s only appropriate for characters whose years of youthful ambition are long behind them. Now their worlds are restricted to their modest homes and places of work (a hospital, a university)—and it’s against these settings that director Jo Young-min frequently captures his characters in frank, adult conversation or in wordless contemplation. Without constantly externalizing the characters’ emotions through comic sound effects or overbearing needle drops, the series allows the complexity of their feelings to take on weight through silence.
Even as Love Me moves between its three main storylines, its editing maintains an emotional coherence. Whether we’re following the secretly insecure OB-GYN Seo Jun-kyung (Seo Hyun Jin); her underachieving younger brother, grad student Jun Seo (Lee Si Woo); or their long-suffering, newly retired father Jin Ho (Yoo Jae Myung), the show eventually pulls them all back to each other, united in their dysfunction.
Unlike many contemporary K-dramas that soften their conflicts, there’s nothing here to save these characters from facing their demons head-on
Making this style compelling across 12 hour-long episodes has its own challenges, of course, and it doesn’t take long for this series to run into idle moments that aren’t as effective in drawing out insight. Realism shouldn’t come at the expense of interesting imagery or deeper characterization, which is what this particular story wrestles with until its finale.
Written by Park Eun-young and Park Hee-kwon, the script takes a refreshingly candid attitude toward feelings of guilt, shame, and inadequacy, all arising from the tension in the Seo household. Resentment can’t help but grow in the empty rooms left behind when all the members of a family become preoccupied with their own lives and problems. Unlike many contemporary K-dramas that soften their conflicts through certain narrative gimmicks, there’s nothing here to save these characters from facing their demons head-on.
But as the show branches out to its protagonists’ individual storylines, it also frequently reveals a thinness to its writing. As admirable as it is to see blended families, late-in-life romance, and embarrassment over one’s socioeconomic status explored without apology, these threads don’t necessarily deepen into more compelling drama. Every once in a while, characters are plunged into difficult situations that should take greater effort to unpack, only for the scenes to skip ahead to safety. Love Me only really stumbles into its endings, its resolutions steering clear of the conflict that makes its earliest episodes so strong.
The series is at its best whenever it brings its characters’ lives crashing together (which unfortunately doesn’t happen often). The family unit here evolves—as the source of dysfunction, reminding them how broken their foundations are as they venture into new relationships; then as the only certain thing they can really return to and find common ground in.
As our main conduit into the family, Seo Hyun Jin plays restraint with a convincing poker face. She projects toughness and independence from her first scene, but it’s only later that her stoicism clearly betrays a profound loneliness, a crippling lack of self-worth, and guilt over continuing to live a stable, independent life as her mother suffers in isolation.
These qualities can also be seen throughout the ensemble, even in the actors who have far too little to do (Seo Jun Seo and Dahyun, in particular), but still fit easily in the show’s realistic tone. Chang Ryul (as Junkyung’s next door neighbor and romantic interest), Yoon Se Ah (who plays a younger tour guide whom Jin Ho eventually becomes involved with), and teenage actor Moon Woo Jin are all just as adept at filling a moment of silent unease with sorrow, rage, or existential dread.
But even when the other storylines lose their momentum, it’s Yoo Jae Myung (and Jang Hye Jin as the bedridden wife) who anchors Love Me in urgent, all-too-human emotions. Taking the brunt of the family’s collective grief—on top of the looming specter of his own mortality—Jin Ho becomes a truly moving portrait of a man who simply doesn’t have enough time or courage to help his loved ones as much as he wants to. It’s this performance that provides the most vivid glimpse into a different type of K-drama that this series proposes is possible.
Love Me is streaming on Viu.
