2022 kdramas, ranked by yours truly

A youth drama with a healthy dash of sports, romance, and comedy that keeps you invested until the end.  Twenty-Five, Twenty-One is a drama with something to say about growing up and growing apart, so come in expecting catharsis rather than a happy ending. The journey is so fun and well put together that by the time it’s over, my heart felt full. This show left a lingering bittersweet feeling with me, and I'll never be over it.

My Liberation Notes is all about learning to live in a world that isn’t what you wanted it to be. Four incredibly maladjusted people are trying to figure out how to exist without constant suffering, and by the end they’ve all found some measure of answer. It’s almost always understated and quiet, but the moments where you come to understand a character feel like breakthroughs. I can’t quite define this show as a romance, although love is a huge element, because romantic love itself is only a part of the characters’ journeys. The more important story is their own self-discovery and self-actualization.

A sumptuous and stunning sageuk, centered on our capable and endearing queen as she struggles to keep all of her children, including the children of her king’s other concubines, safe from a villainous mother-in-law and many other palace schemers. Where many palace dramas focus on the king and his council, Under the Queen’s Umbrella lets the queen drive the narrative, and is (to me) much better for it. With a large and enjoyable ensemble cast led by the always excellent Kim Hye-soo, this is absolutely not one to miss.

An extremely loose adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott novel that trades civil war era Massachusetts for modern day Seoul, and much of the book's original plot for corporate embezzlement, serial murder, and hallucinogenic orchids. Little Women (2022) is a masterpiece class struggle thriller, driven to great heights by its stellar female characters and powerful performances.

From Now On, Showtime is a show that subverted my expectations at every step. This show was so expert with its tone, swinging back and forth between slapstick comedy and genuine pathos, that it kept me engaged all the way through. It got off to a slower start, but by the time I hit episodes 5-6 I really understood what the show was about to serve me, and it nailed every moment. A real sleeper hit - its brilliance is subtle, but it’s hard to leave behind!

Cheer Up is an unexpected and sweet coming of age and coming into one’s own story about a cheer team who love and care for each other despite various forces acting against them. A fusion of a breezy campus drama and a mystery thriller, the mystery thriller aspects were more disappointing than the other half, but did add fun tone shifts whenever things got too light in the beginning. Combine all of that with an absolutely excellent FL and a quietly wonderful ML.. it’s a recipe for a drama I love, despite a slightly annoying love triangle arc in the middle!

Imagine a big pile of tropes, lovingly and strategically paced to keep the viewer fully entertained at all times - this is A Business Proposal. It's built on an entirely charming main cast pulling off secret office romance, mistaken/double identity, contract relationship, and more with skill. A true romcom for the ages, this is a comfort watch if I've ever seen one!

Gaus Electronics is a straight workplace comedy, with the added bonus of fun love lines and a surprisingly heartfelt core. It made me cackle regularly, with plenty of fun recurring bits and characters with whom I related more than I expected I would!

An omnibus drama about the interconnected lives of a group of residents of a small town in jeju, Our Blues spends each episode focusing on a handful of characters in turn with the rest as supporting cast. By the end the drama feels fully lived in (added to by its length at 20 episodes) and the characters have come alive. This is a show with a message to impart, and it’ll make sure you understand by the end. Some of the stories verge on groundbreaking while some are more clichéd, but the performances of this monster cast are strong enough to pull the drama through.

Alchemy of Souls is a fully fantasy period fusion romance, with a large ensemble cast and heaps of lore. Everyone pulls their weight here, and though the plot meanders at times it’s always entertaining. It may be a taste of a return to form for the Hong Sisters, although I'm reserving final judgment until Part 2 has ended...

Alchemy of Souls Season 2: Light and Shadow shares part 1’s strengths and its weaknesses, which I suppose makes it a worthy successor. It's an enjoyable ride, more lighthearted than I thought it would be, but in the end suffers from more than a few pacing issues and late-game plotholes. I suspect that as time goes on my frustrations will cool, and I’ll just appreciate this show for what it is: a lovingly built world full of endearing characters, where true love (and ultimate power) can conquer all.

What do we do with the grief the dead leave us? How do you find the strength to carry on again when someone you loved is gone? May I Help You is at its strongest when it’s musing over death’s effects on the living. Despite a few story fumbles, and some parts I wish I could tweak, overall it’s a really strong piece, with a truly lovely romance at its core.

A musical adaptation of a very well-known webcomic, The Sound of Magic tackles a lot of deep societal problems, especially those that relate to the education system and parents’ failings towards children. Is it okay to exist outside of the system, or will it only beat you down in the end? While it’s a little disjointed, I found most of the show pretty effective, especially when it took a strong lean into a horror angle that I wasn’t expecting. For me, the main flaw is that I didn't find myself engaging with the musical aspect of this musical drama.

A sequel to Yumi’s Cells (2021) that continues the story of Yumi, her cells, and her various friends and love interests. A charming comedy that focuses more on our heroine’s personal journey than the romance that accompanies it - Yumi's Cells 2 is a worthy successor, in that it really does just about everything the same as season one. It has all the same problems, though, and I found the balance between the plot and the comedic cell-based interludes to be off.

A lighthearted procedural courtroom drama about a genius rookie lawyer who is autistic. Though Extraordinary Attorney Woo verges towards the saccharine, and some of the later cases failed to hold my interest, the heartfelt performances of the cast made this a bright spot in every week. The hopeful messages can get a little overwrought, but to me, that's better that than doom and gloom (at least most of the time.) The romance stood out, and was one of my favorite aspects of the whole experience.

Link: Eat, Love, Kill is a whodunit village murder mystery with a touch of fantasy romance. It features a mostly solid creepy story about a whole street full of suspicious people, with a slightly lackluster conclusion and villain. However, the leads and most of the side characters pull through and kept my energy up through the end.

An office romcom with a dash of the supernatural. In the beginning Kiss Sixth Sense is a pretty well executed romance between two adults, but by the final stretch it suddenly switches genre to very typical romance thriller. It comes back around by the end though, and left an overall satisfying taste in my mouth.

Dear X Who Doesn't Love Me is a character study and a coming-of-age drama about a young woman who believes herself to be completely unloveable and takes mystical means to acquire affection. It's definitely not a traditional romance or in any way a comedy - it's a story about the traumas we carry and the reckoning we must have with them. Some of the connective tissue is lacking - the story proceeds as it needs to, for little reason at times. I think more attention could have been paid to making sure the character motivations come through clearly at all times.

A crisp, stylish, and effective revenge thriller, The Glory hits all the key notes with panache. the villains are just hateable enough, and the protagonist has gone through such a gauntlet of suffering that her cold affect made me feel sympathy more than frustration. It’s not that anything is being done in a particularly new or refreshing way, at least in part one, but the high rating’s allowance for graphic violence makes everything feel a little sharper than network shows can usually achieve. Full judgment is reserved for the release of part 2!

A bite-size romance that hits every note pitch perfect! At only four episodes, Fanletter, Please moves at top speed through fairly run of the mill drama tropes, but without feeling repetitive or frustrating. It helps that the show looks very pretty, and that both Sooyoung and Yoon Park do very well in their roles (even if they’re both wholly unbelievable as high school students!). I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this... I thought they had great chemistry and I appreciated how quickly conflicts were resolved!

Ghost Doctor is mercifully light on actual medical drama, and much heavier on supernatural ghostly drama. The villain plot is only half-thought out and very underbaked, but also easily ignorable for most of the show. The ending is somewhat nonsensical but still pretty fun. The female leads (both Uee and Naeun) are criminally underutilized, but Rain and Kim Bum are in fine form, in both their individual charisma and their combined chemistry. Add in the fleet of ghosts that only they can interact with, and Sung Dong Il, who is always, always good, and you've got a surprisingly enjoyable end product.

A sugar sweet legal procedural based out of a cafe, with an ensemble cast of goofy, easy-to-love characters. The Law Cafe occasionally falls over itself to make its points, which only gets annoying at the end. Overall, it's candy! By the end you might be a little sick of it, but the initial rush is enough to carry you through. Lee Seung-gi and Lee Se-young are so good here, and it was refreshing to have a legal drama that almost never took us to court!

A throwback in more than subject matter, Curtain Call is a ponderous examination of death and family that pulled at my heartstrings in ways that surprised me. I won’t pretend it’s flawless, or that it’s one of the best I’ve watched this year, but it was really peaceful to watch, and a little cathartic. With a soundtrack made up almost entirely of ballads and a cast made up almost entirely of strong character actors, this felt like a drama from a bygone era.

Sh**ting Stars is a fizzy celebrity enemies(ish) to lovers romance that shines more when it’s focused less on the plot. The more slice of life here, the better! It's filled with good performances and approximately one million fun cameos, but its plot's mediocrity regularly lets itself down.

Eve is a pretty bog standard revenge makjang. The romance angle is pretty meh, but I enjoyed the various twists and turns, even if it wasn’t particularly unpredictable. Both female leads have their share of fully unhinged moments, and these always stood out to me. It's certainly not the worst makjang you could watch, and I can't say I didn't enjoy it, but I did not find the ending satisfying.

Crazy Love starts off with a very interesting enemies to fake lovers to real lovers storyline, with a dash of (also fake) amnesia in the mix. However, by the end of the drama most of that has fallen away, which leaves us with nothing but a few last minute villain introductions (like, REALLY last minute) and fluff. The middle is pretty fun, but the end of this show is aggressively mediocre.

Love is for Suckers is a refreshing friends-to-lovers romance, which ended up taking a long, weird, and winding road to the happy ending it sort of earned. I ended up liking some of the side characters much more than I liked the leads - once we reached the reality show portion of the program, things started to really derail for me.

A legal drama with a romance element that transforms slowly but surely into a half-assed revenge makjang.. a bombastic beginning that leads to a weak finale, Why Her? is one of my bigger disappointments from this year. It's full of good elements, but flounders in connecting them, and none of the characters got enough to do. By the end, the drama just felt like a collection of tropes.

A slice of life workplace mostly comedy that focuses on a team of webtoon editors and the artists they worked with, Today's Webtoon started off much stronger than it ended. It has a fun group of characters that slowly flattened into less fun versions of themselves or disappeared entirely. The conflict pretty much dissipates by episode 15. There’s an abuse storyline that goes to some pretty dark places and does not conclude satisfactorily in my opinion. The love lines almost exist but don’t do enough to be fun, just enough to be kind of confusing. It's such a waste of Kim Se-jeong and Choi Daniel!

Once Upon a Small Town is a very simple, barebones concept (genderswap Hometown Chachacha + Stardew Valley?) is executed in a very simple and barebones way. The acting is not great! But it’s largely inoffensive, and honestly it has a pretty good OST! It is absolutely not worth wasting time on.

This one hurt. We were promised secret office romance with a touch of forecasting, and instead Forecasting Love and Weather gave us a main course of weather metaphors with a side of unnecessarily overblown angst. By the end, you almost sympathize more with the main leads’ terrible exes - which i think was the intent, but really shouldn’t have been, given their unforgivable actions at the beginning of the drama.

A comedy-mystery-romance that crumbles under the weight of its multiple genres, Cafe Minamdang gets slowly less and less fun until you force yourself to turn your brain off in order to get any enjoyment out if it. For at least the entire second half of this show (why was it 18 episodes? it barely had enough plot for 12!) all I could think about were ways it could have been a different show that I would have actually enjoyed. Seo In-guk is good, the OST is good, and everything else is massively irritating by the end.

A kdrama remake of Jane the Virgin. Woori the Virgin has a lot of the same problems that Jane does - mostly, a deeply annoying love triangle that this show worsens by having Woori choose the lesser guy! Yes, I will die on this hill. This show had a weak beginning, an okay middle, and then an annoying and dragged out ending. The love triangle is not good and the character dynamics crumble under scrutiny! Do not watch this!!