Taking a step in the wrong direction, though, or at least remaining stubbornly rooted in the conservative past, is the prime-time soap My Happy Ending with Jang Na-ra.
My Happy Ending: Jang Na-ra leads intriguing K-drama with plot holes
My Happy Ending: Jang Na-ra leads intriguing K-drama with plot holes
Jang plays a successful furniture company chief executive, Seo Jae-won, whose picture-perfect family life comes crumbling down around her when she discovers that her caring husband, Heo Soon-young (Son Ho-jun), doting father to their cute-as-a-button daughter, is having an affair with her back-stabbing best friend Kwon Yoon-jin (So E-hyun).
Naturally, there is more to the story than meets the eye, as Jae-won has a complicated background involving her gambling-addict mother, who died years earlier, and her kind stepfather, Seo Chang-seok (Kim Hong-pa).
One of the complicating factors is that she has bipolar disorder and has been secretly taking medication for it for years, unbeknown to most people around her, including her husband.
However, the mental disorder Jae-won exhibits during the show has nothing to do with bipolar disorder.
Given her spells of dissociative amnesia, during which she essentially turns into a different person, and her imaginary psychiatrist friend – an episode 10 twist that had been painfully obvious since early in the season – her symptoms seem closer to schizophrenia.
Soap operas, which are expected to take gigantic liberties with logic to entertain us, should not be seen as life lessons. Yet there is something faintly hypocritical about this show.
My Happy Ending shows us a young girl – Jae-won in her youth – being persecuted because of her mental health struggles and forced to move and change her name, only to aggressively portray a common ailment like bipolar disorder as an outrageously debilitating and dangerous disease.
Leaving aside its wonky representation of mental health, the series has been consistently entertaining viewing. It is unapologetically melodramatic and is happy to lean into soapy clichés before tossing them out of the window as it moves on to the next one.
This includes the early suggestion that the man sleeping with Yoon-jin may have been husband Soon-young’s long-lost brother. The show fans this flame for a while until we learn that, while Jae-won’s husband did indeed have a lookalike brother, he died a few years earlier – a fact that Soon-young curiously neglected to mention to Jae-won, given that he arranged the funeral.
Jae-won and Soon-young decide to get a divorce, which sets up a vicious custody battle for their daughter.
Although Soon-young may be an adulterer, there is no denying that he has been by far the better parent. This gives him an advantage in court – until he discovers that he is not his daughter’s biological father.
Not only is this news to him, it is also news to Jae-won, who does not realise that the man she slept with after getting drunk during the launch of her company seven years ago was not her husband – another spell of dissociative amnesia.
5 of the best new Korean drama series to watch in February 2024
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If that were not enough to put the brakes on the custody battle, the next shocking twist definitely is: Soon-young’s unexpected murder by poisoning.
Jae-won is arrested on suspicion of being the murderer, only to be freed thanks to a lack of evidence. However, the scandal is enough to have her removed as chief executive by the chairman of the board, Kwon Young-ik (Kim Myung-soo).
While he is Yoon-jin’s father, Young-ik has always treated Jae-won like his own daughter, and yet he has been behind some other mysterious happenings around Jae-won.
Another person hiding a secret is Jae-won’s colleague and protector Yoon Te-o (Lee Ki-taek), who knew Jae-won in school.
Following her many setbacks and deteriorating mental condition, Jae-won admits herself to a mental hospital. But for how long?
While My Happy Ending offers tawdry thrills aplenty, it would all be for nothing were it not for Jang Na-ra’s steely-eyed performance. She sells the drama, as well as the show’s over-the-top theatrics. It is hard to imagine anyone else being able to wear a white dress with huge shoulders sharp enough to gore someone and still be taken seriously.
My Happy Ending is streaming on Viu.