#2021RoundUp
Day 5 – The drama that will always live in your memory

Yeah, 2021 is just not that kind of drama year.
And I have thoughts on this, thoughts that I am mostly saving for my end of year poll wrap-up post. But it goes something like this – 2021 was a good drama year. It was. The fact that there are so many contenders for Best Drama and not that many for Worst Drama says that it was a good drama year. But it wasn’t a great drama year.
It wasn’t a year where we can name several iconic, groundbreaking dramas that will stay with us. There’s no My Ajusshi or Forest of Secrets or even a Sky Castle. Even the amazing Beyond Evil didn’t quite nail it (and if you haven’t watched it, you absolutely need to. For Shin Ha-kyun’s performance alone).
There are dramas that we enjoyed and dramas that we even thought were good but will we remember and revisit 2021 dramas lovingly for years to come? I don’t think we will.
But if, for the sake of the activity I had to name one that could and should have a lasting impact (definitely not Squid Game and its Tiger King-ish late stage pandemic success). Well, that drama would be D.P.
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    I agree. It was a stunner. How about Move to Heaven too?

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      I’m watching Move to Heaven now and it’s a nice drama. But my, possibly controversial, opinion is that it isn’t anything more than that.

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        Cannot agree. Not for one minute. See how you go with it. I wrote about it, so if you’re interested I can send a link when you finish. But I’ll be surprised if you don’t change your mind.

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          It’s too heavy handed for me, to the point where parts of it feel manipulative.
          Don’t get me wrong, it’s good. But this is the same reason I usually don’t like hospital dramas. I would love to read what you’ve written about it.

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            I’m not so sure how to capture the link without my other stuff. I’ll put it in the comment below.

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            Move to Heaven is based on a simple premise: when people die, they leave things behind, and those things tell us about them. There is nothing as heart-breaking as seeing the clothes that a loved one has worn hanging in the cupboard, still there, after they have gone forever. It is contrary to everything we know that a shirt can outlive the person who wore it. Like Han Geu-ru, I can bury my nose in the cloth and still smell the person I love. The shirt is still there. The smell lingers. But they are gone and they won’t be coming back. Move to Heaven gets this simple but profound paradox and turns it into a wonderful drama. I’m astonished that a drama based on the deaths of ordinary people and the things they leave behind could be so moving that it made me cry, and yet it was not at all depressing. Facing up to death is a big deal. Our society does everything it can to shield us from the inevitability of our mortality. And yet for entertainment on a daily basis, we can choose to see people being killed in the most gruesome and horrifying ways. Move to Heaven isn’t like that. It shows us ordinary, unglamorous deaths, often undeserved, sometimes abrupt and unexpected, frequently messy and undignified, very often lonely. Then it shows how all those things that so poignantly speak of the person, are left behind. Move to Heaven assembles the detritus of ordinary lives and reverently and respectfully pieces them together into a coherent and often unfinished story, thanks to the brilliance and sensitivity of the trauma cleaners, who take it upon themselves to provide whatever closure they can. It’s so modest and yet so profound. It touches on something that we will all experience.

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            Comment was deleted

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            I already told you. I didn’t like the drama. It’s good, it’s touching, but to me it felt like Michael Landon’s Highway to Heaven.

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            See this THIS (replying to LT’s comment) THIS IS WHY I’ve kept putting it off! Because multiple people say it’s GOOD! But it’s emotionally manipulative– and I just know if that is the case it will annoy the shit out of me!

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    Personally I really liked this year and D.P. was definitely the standout for me. I think Vincenzo was iconic (lighters, corn salad and all) but I did not approve of the extreme violence in the show’s latter episodes.

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    I agree it was not a *great* drama year, and very little was I able to emotionally connect or be moved by… but it is also not a good drama year for me either, as you know … alas.

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