Not the easiest review to write, but I’ll try my best. First of all, I was a huge fan of Love by Chance, I even gave it a 10/10 back then. So, this director’s style is definitely something I highly appreciate. Consequently, my expectations from UWMA were rather high. The series lived up to my expectations, yes, but there are definitely more aspects I have to criticise here compared to LBC.

Let’s start with what I didn’t like or what I felt could have been improved (they are all closely related, actually):
- The number of episodes was unnecessarily high. The story felt like it could have easily been told in the usual 12 or uttermost in 14 episodes, definitely not 17! I think it could easily be shortened down to that number of episodes without losing relevant parts of the stories.
- The film editing was not great. It felt as if they just left in everything they had filmed, while the job of a film editor should be to extract only the relevant parts of the scenes, so as to tell a coherent story. Scenes just went on and on, filled with meaningless phrases and awkward stares; I wanted to shout “Cut, please!” very often.
- There was absolutely no balance between the screen time of the main couple and the supporting cast. I get that by showing them in two incarnations you need to give them a lot of screen time, but I had the impression that the director was indecisive about whether to actually tell the side stories or to keep them out of this series/season. Like this it’s none of the two options, they just threw in some scenes without any sense of timing and inconsistent storytelling.

Anyway, I can’t think of any more negatives! What I liked:
- Great soundtrack: touching music that fits the scenes very well.
- Great story: Romeo and Juliet (Julian, actually) with a happy ending, that’s exactly what I needed! The concept of reincarnation isn’t really my cup of tea, but here it basically “saved” such a beautiful, but tragic love story. The pain felt so real (still don’t understand why Korn did what he did), and Pharm’s doubts at the end were very much understandable. The whole family entanglement (at least in my view) made clear that the tragedy in the past needed to be “resolved” by the same families ultimately responsible for it, very impressive.
- Great actors, I have nothing to criticise. Well, some felt wasted with such little screen time, but that’s a different problem. Also, no over-the-top comedic sidekick ruining the mood, big plus.
- High production value, no doubt. As I already mentioned, I really like this director’s style. Of course the aggressive product placement is very annoying, but it’s just how it works …
- The double suicide as a consequence of parents and society not accepting their children’s homosexuality gave the series a very dark theme; it wasn’t fully exploited imo, but still very present until the end.

I could continue the list of positives, but I’ll stop here. Compared to LBC, I think that UWMA has a better story and slightly better actors, but the lengthy and overly slow storytelling and the badly balanced screen times of different characters made it a little less enjoyable to watch for me. Still, I can highly recommend watching it!