DAY 69: MECQ

So I finally finished watching the series that everybody was insisting that I catch.

Well, yes.   The World of Married Couple (2020) holds the record of having the highest audience share in a cable network show in South Korea, edging out Sky Castle (2018-19) as the most popular tv drama to grace the highly crowded and competitive world of soap operas.

Unknown to many, The World of Married Couple is an adaptation of the BBC One series Doctor Foster which ran for two seasons starting in 2015 then 2017.  A look at the synopses of the series will reveal that World of the Married Couple follows exactly the same narrative points, deriving the characters from the British original and tweaking this to be credibly adapted in the Korean setting.

Even the basic premise of a happy family with a very successful wife in the medical field with a husband in a less structured profession  (in the British version, he is a property developer while in the Korean counterpart he is a filmmaker) and a young son.  The germ of the series --- the discovery of a husband's infidelity --- is exactly the same: the doctor wife finds a blonde strand of hair on the scarf lent to her by her hubby.

After the wife ( Jo Jun Woo portrayed by Korean veteran actress Kim Hee-Ae) confirms that her husband has been nice but manipulatively naughty, all hell breaks loose.  Her obsession to pin down her hubby Lee Tae-ah (Park Hae-Joon) with his scorching affair with younger, fresher and richer daughter of a financial kingpin, Jo Jun-Woo's entire world now centered on getting her comeuppance.  

All this happens as neighbors-who-were-once friends become witnesses to the spiraling of a marriage to the pits of hell.  The idyllic loving portrait of a marriage has now deteriorated into this exercise in mutual outrage in which husband and wife play a violent game of ping pong of comeuppance, trying to outwit each other and tragically pulverizing their union while remaining in love.

Nakakapagod, ha?  Sa totoo lang.

Oh, wait!  There's more: in the middle of the private world war between Doktora and Direk is their cute little muffin of a son who is on the verge of adulthood --- and is perhaps undergoing the worse possible trauma for any child of any age to experience: to witness Mama and Papa beat the living daylights out of each other. 

Added to that is the gorgeous nymphet of a mistress, Yeo Da-Kyung ( wonderfully played by a Korean actress who looks like the sweetest peach, Han So Hee) who knows what she wants while endless doubting her lover's sense of loyalty and capacity for commitment.  As to why she was obsessed with Direk I am still trying to figure out.  She of great wealth and social status has fallen under the spell of Direk who is about a decade and a half older and is more wimpy than charming.

But let that all be part of the folly of youth, puwede? Even when her family practically disowns her for being ... an adulteress lang naman, the moment Direk became successful, their union was accepted because the little princess was happy.  Anong klaseng pamilya yan? Whatever.

O hindi ba nakakapagod talaga?

This is the series that nudged out what I consider as my personal favorite among the handful of Koreanovelas that I have binged on.  This is Sky Castle.  

in so many ways there are so many similarities and differences between these two best selling Koreanovelas.  But again, we have to revert to the fact that World of the Married in all its sixteen episodes is actually an adapation of  two seasons of a British original whereas Sky Castle has that distinct suburban Seoul feel precisely because the series centers on the Tiger Moms of SoKor, literally cracking the whip to get their kids into the best medical school that side of the planet.

The similarities between the two series are as vital as their differences. Both are glaring.

What is interesting is that even if World of the Married is still your standard fare of the Kabit Series, the choreographed catfights between wife and young mistress ( bitch kung bitch ang labanan at utakan) are so well thought out and never more of the same that you have overdosed since you first learned the word TV Infidelity.  

On the other hand, with a veteran actress like Kim Hae-ee and an up and coming star like Han So Hee, there is still novelty in what you can expect between the asawa versus the querida.  

Here, the wife is made to be the object of sympathy.  Too much sympathy for that matter which I feel tends to work against what I had hoped the material to be. Panginoon kong Lord, purgang-purga na ako sa mga martir na missis in the entire history of Philippine telenovelas that I am waiting for a missus portrayal who does not think that being a doormat is an accessory leading to the Kingdom of God. And this whole bit of true love while being cheated on, maltreated and yes, attempting to ruin one's career, is not unconditional love. It is more of ... uh, stupidity?

And that is what I loved (and hated) about the lead in Sky Castle. Han Seo-Jin (an award-winning performance by Yung Jung-ah) was this obsessive mother wanting her daughter Kang Ye Seo (Kim Hye Yoon) to be on top of the game, to be able to become that superstar student to enter the best medical school in the country and to carry the family tradition of her flaky father Kang Joon San (Jung Joon Ho).  She would do anything  and everything to insure her daughter's success in her not so subtle way of projecting fulfillment and achievement in life which she never had.

There is that dark secret in Han Seo-Jin that she hides from that uppity circle in the exclusive enclave called Sky Castle and she would sacrifice everything for her daughter to be the Queen Bee that she never was.  Even the dynamics of her so-called friends and co-residents of Sky Castle is a satiric look at the Korean middle class, treated as a black comedy.

Both lead characters in World of the Married and Sky Castle are middle aged women trying to find affirmation in their choices in life.

For the Doctora of World, it is all about preserving what she has --- ( "my house, my son, my life") and making sure that she does not lose all that defines her existence,.  For the Senyora of Sky Castle, it is about revising the past by creating a more perfect future than her already better present.  She, bitter of the past, is completely clueless of how she is ruining her present by trying to constantly manipulate people around her to follow the script she has written for the way her future will go.

Doctora, deep in her heart of hearts, still wants Direk to come back to her loving arms despite all her resolutions and inner dialogue about it is time to move on. (Weh!)  Yet at the slightest provocation, she literally whimpers back to the territory of that salacious, money-leeching womanizer offering her hand as help.  

Nakakainit talaga ng ulo si Doktora. 

There came a point when I wanted to pick up the remote and throw it at my TV just to bonk some sense in the head of this imaginary character I am watching come to life.

Ano ba naman yan? Nabugbog ka na nga, nasipa ka na nga sa trabaho ... and you still sing what I did for love?  

That was why I had to exercise maximum self control when she was still behaving sympathetically to his baboon of a husband ... while we have this son who developed a psychological aberration who is worming his way, emotionally blackmailing his parents in his call for a family reunion that was never meant to be.

Nakakapagod talaga ang palabas na yan. Despite all its high drama and intense twists and turns of the plot, there is not a single sympathetic character you would root for dahil gusto mong sampalin silang lahat. Period,.

Maybe that is why I prefer Sky Castle not because of the clarity of its narrative arc but because it was less exhaustive with the depiction of strong, scheming and manipulative women given enough humanity as well as toxicity.  If there is one thing I loved about Sky Castle is the way Han Seo Jin was humbled by the very machinations that defined her ambitions.  With the case of Ji Sun Woo of World of the Married, it was her ambiguity, her namby-pamby character that degenerated her will and strength into textbook obsession.

But I guess I was so involved, so engrossed and so outraged by World of the Married that proved how effective it was a series. Kahit ngitngit na ngitngit ako while watching, I was still addicted to the series.

The fact that even while I was seething with anger and frustration I was still hooked and wanted to see the very end of this long and twisted tale.  World of the Married adapted two seasons of Doctor Foster in sixteen episodes ... and if audience members felt shortchanged or cheated by the ending, I did not.  Spoiler alert: some resolutions are not necessarily happy endings.

Life, either in Gowon (where World of the Married) takes place or Sky Castle was never meant to be perfect.  Topsy-turvey, convoluted, twisted ... and even perverse but never perfect. 

And this is why it is such a delicious guilty pleasure indulging in these Korean telenovelas.

That is why I love Han Seo Jin more because she may not be the sharpest pencil in the box, but she is still sharp.  She gets herself into trouble because she wants the best for herself and her loved ones but she will never succumb to senseless martyrdom in the name of love.  And that is why, in so many ways, I will not forget Ji Sun Woo as she has become the personification of that saying that intelligence and education has got nothing to do with how one handles personal relationships.

OK. Onto the next Korean series.  I tried Reply 1988 (Promise!) but I found it too hyper and over-the-top and ... uh, noisy ... that I decided to take friends' advice and move onto a 2016 series called Remember.  

Hayan, hooked na naman ako. At umiiyak. Look what COVID19 and self-imprisonment have done to me.