Dear friend,
Last month, I was belatedly converted to the joys of TV. I watched the first fifteen or sixteen hours of Reply 1988 with a deep and enchanted attention that I have never given to any show in my adult life. I have tried describing this as a kind of ‘Korean Wonder Years’ as an elevator pitch to friends. But in fact, that phrase describes exactly why pre-September 2019 Supriya would have been completely uninterested in it.
I trust I don’t need to explain what makes The Wonder Years so flat and unappetising in retrospect. I will explain about the Korean thing. Many years ago, inaugurating my life as a responsible grown-up by spending all my time on Tolkien fan forums, I had friends who were mid-wave Hallyu obsessives. They disappeared on discussions about the fate of the Entwives or the shibboleth of Fëanor because they had suddenly discovered Coffee Prince, or Super Rookie. Those were the days when downloading a giant piece of data in multiple low-res torrents over the day, then finding an additional torrent with a matching subtitle file to seed into the video, felt like child’s play. But I never got around to doing it, and at last, when streaming made it possible to go back and revisit these sources of second-hand excitement, it was too late for me to enjoy them.
Then in August, I idly clicked on the title of a new Netflix show called Rookie Historian Goo Hae-ryung - who wouldn’t? - and underwent a transformation. Within a fortnight, I knew what differentiated The Moon Embracing the Sun from Descendants of the Sun. I could recite the filmography of Park Ki-woong chapter and verse, although I can’t any more; too much has happened since then. I got a Dramabeans account and a Viki pass. I became a Redditor so that I would have people to talk to about K-drama.
For the last two weeks I have been in a state of total surrender to a show named Reply 1988, during which I went from a strict hour-a-day ration of TV to watching for 3 or 4 hours a day. I watched it in taxis, at restaurants, in my accountant’s office, and, regrettably, while walking on the street. I cannot have slept more than 5 hours a night over the last fortnight. Before you start worrying, it’s over. I watched the last half-hour after sending in my column this evening, then locked myself in my room and had a therapeutic little cry. Goodbye, Ssangmun-dong!
It would be pointless to say anything descriptive about a show that became a world blockbuster circa early 2016 in this, a self-promotional monthly email. Reply 1988’s English reviews, at least those emerging from outside Asia, can tell you the price of everything in it, in the Oscar Wilde sense. Modern TV is made to be all-consuming and attention-seeking, so it would be merely autobiographical to say that I woke up one morning mid-thought about who Deok Seon was going to marry; or that I must not have stopped smiling for a minute over the first four episodes — having started smiling because it opens with the face of Chow Yun-fat, an actor for whom I have downloaded videos at 30/kbps, and separate subtitle files.
That makes the appeal of the show sound nostalgic, and Reply 1988 is inescapably about nostalgia. The very premise of the Reply series is adults looking back at their younger selves. I duly went into hysterics at the sight of an AIWA walkman. But it’s not a celebration of nostalgia. It’s the opposite. It’s a lively, sweet comedy about a rare stroke of good luck: having a childhood that you can forget. The face Hyeri makes in this clip is iconically funny — you’ll know it when you see it — but to me it also exemplifies this forgettability, the ability to recover from the thousand small boredoms and betrayals of youth, and to embrace, forgive and move on from it.
I’ll leave the sociological aspects of this to be explored by someone else who grew up in a time and place when it seemed things would keep getting better for us (where better, I suppose, than middle-class Seoul in the 1980s?). Now, I will say no more. Please don’t send thoughts and prayers. I am only going to be busy and productive, and make up a sleep deficit with exceptional success.
The columns I wrote for Mumbai Mirror are here.
I’ll write again next month.
Supriya
Go-stop