As Welcome to Samdal-ri teaches us straight away, home is the place you start from. But it’s also the place you’re dying to escape from, if you’re anything like our heroine and her two sisters. Even so, when life kicks you in the pants, it’s always good to have a tough-love mom and a family home to return to. With beer. Lots of beer.
EPISODES 1-2
I’ll start by saying that at first, this drama felt like a copy-paste situation where Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha (which I found mostly dull), decided to co-mingle with Forecasting Love and Weather (which was over-directed and not that much fun either). In fact, the whole first episode of Welcome to Samdal-ri felt a bit flat despite lots of plot — and when I feel like I’m watching the script rather than watching the drama, I’m always on high alert for the nearest exit. But good news: things get better as the story settles in, and Episode 2 started to draw out more of this drama’s unique flavor. I’m hopeful that by its second week, it will have settled into its tone nicely, and we’ll have settled in, too.
We start, as I mentioned, with home — home in this case being the lovely Jeju Island. Our two heroes are steadfast childhood friends. CHO YONG-PIL (later played by Ji Chang-wook) is an adorable lad with a great singing voice, who’s touted as the pride of Jeju. His companion is the rather tumultuous JO SAM-DAL (later played by Shin Hye-sun), who is his tween manager, and performs on stage with him while he sings. It’s homegrown and adorable; the drama puts a lot of effort into stuffing its setting with old school charm.
Sam-dal and Yong-pil were “fated” since birth — or so all the ajummas think — and when they’re only a few months old, the babies are already characterized as The Rebel (Yong-pil) and The General (Sam-dal), and the grab each other’s hands.
In a super quick montage, we’re given backstory on the two and their childhood, and this is also bolstered by dialogue from the villagers during the introductory episodes: Sam-dal and Yong-pil grew up as friends, dated as young adults, and then it all went to pot. Sam-dal left for a career in Seoul, Yong-pil stayed on Jeju, and never the twain shall meet…? We don’t know why they broke up, but going based on the tenterhooks their friends and family are on around the issue — and the fact that Yong-pil is clearly not over her after so many years — we know there are Unresolved Feelings lurking around.
Most of our first episode is spent getting to know Sam-dal. Of her three sisters — known in their hometown as The Terrible Sisters — Sam-dal is “the crazy one.” You know the kind. She’ll march into a high-rise office building in designer apparel, find her cheating boyfriend in the lobby, and douse him with rotten water kimchi for maximum humiliation.
Sam-dal has quite the hard shell around her; I personally found her unlikeable, despite enjoying seeing her competence on the job. She’s a famous fashion photographer, you see, and we quickly learn that she’s highly talented, a friend of the stars, and in high demand and already booked through the year. Sam-dal (who now goes by Jo Eun-hye) is used to people fawning over her. And although her arrogance precedes her, we also know how hard she’s worked to get where she is.
Amongst her groupies and mentees is a thoroughly unhappy woman who wants to graduate from assistant to photographer. Sam-dal is rough around the edges, though, and this girl looks like she’s reached her breaking point in dealing with Sam-dal. But rather than quit, or do something reasonable, she seduces Sam-dal’s boyfriend (he of the water kimchi bath), and flaunts it in Sam-dal’s face.
As if that humiliation weren’t enough, when Sam-dal isn’t sufficiently broken, the assistant pulls the victim card. She warps what Sam-dal said in their heated exchange, attempts to jump of a bridge, and somewhere in the middle of that, creates an online scandal that in a matter of hours tanks Sam-dal’s entire career. Years worth of gigs? Canceled. Solo exhibition? Canceled. High-profile celebrity friends? Canceled.
While it’s a little unclear how much this assistant was genuine in her despair — or if she was just straight-up cruel — we’ll get to that later, when Sam-dal does some much-needed self-assessment. But for now, as her starting point, she needs to be abrasive and powerful. And now add to that: utterly broken. It’s at this point that home is the only place to go.
Not only does Sam-dal get doxed during the scandal, but her two sisters do as well – they all live together in Seoul, and these three are probably the highlight of the drama for me so far. We haven’t dug into the other two yet, but I loved how the three of them make decisions as a family unit, and how they’re all equally unhinged and delightful in their own way. The eldest is JO JIN-DAL (Shin Dong-mi), “the strong one” who took down the corruption in her chaebol husband’s family and is now divorced. The middle child is Sam-dal. And the youngest is JO HAE-DAL (Kang Mina), a 29-year-old with a precocious 9-year-old daughter. What all four of them have in common are minds of their own.
They decide to get the heck out of dodge, and they wind up in their parents’ Jeju yard surrounded by massive suitcases. It’s a great ending to the first episode, and then we pick up in Episode 2 with more context from the Jeju side of things. Their mom (Kim Mi-kyung) is a haenyeo and a hardass — she knows all too well that when the girls come home it’s because they’ve left blood, mayhem, and burning bridges behind them. Which one got into trouble this time? she wonders. The girls (and their father) spend most of their time trying to protect existential-crisis-mode Sam-dal, but it doesn’t last long.
On the other side of our story is the delicious bumpkin Yong-pil. Just like when he was a boy, he has a heart of gold. And that heart is still set on Sam-dal, though he’d never admit it. He’s a meteorologist so good they’re clamoring for him to go to HQ in Seoul, but he refuses repeatedly. This friends know it’s because it doesn’t even want to be in the same city as Sam-dal — but also, he’s always loved his hometown and the life there suits him. He’s very happy to sing at local events, drive a derpy van around, and hangout with his weird friends. I love Ji Chang-wook, but this role is ultimately very boring at the start. We’re not given much to go on except his heart of gold, but when he finally crosses paths with Sam-dal — which the entire village is dreading — his character starts to come out a bit more.
Indeed, it’s when these two run into each other that the drama starts to click. The humor, the two leads, and the emotional landscape that we’ve spent so much time setting up finally come together — and it gets a lot more interesting.
Sam-dal is loafing and miserable at home, spared from working in the tangerine grove because Mom doesn’t want her to meet Yong-pil either. But Yong-pil’s happy-go-lucky self not only lives across the street, and addresses the girls’ mom like his own, but he also pops into their house like it’s his own.
In a pretty hilarious chain of events, he thinks the person locked silently in a room of their house is a thief. Meanwhile, we’re on both sides of the door, and we know that inside the room is a sloppy and distraught Sam-dal who’d rather die than be seen by him at her nadir. Well, they might be on other sides of the door, but the drawstring to her sweatpants is caught in the door, and after a lot of comical foibles (they play off each other really well), the truth comes out.
I don’t know who is more shocked to see who, but the takeaway from this scene is really Yong-pil’s compassion for her. After a charged moment of recognition, Sam-dal crumbles to the floor, not wanting to be seen by Yong-pil and his incoming friends in her current state. So what does Yong-pil do? Uses the nearby cloth (meant for her mother’s buoy) to cover her. Sam-dal hides under the blanket, and it’s so adorably childlike, capturing the compulsion to hide from the world, and the whole “if I can’t see you, you can’t see me” dynamic.
It’s at this point in the drama that I thought perhaps it did have something fresh to offer after all, and that its unique story would be told through these ridiculous, comedic, but also very palpable emotional moments.
As the premiere week wraps up, we also see Sam-dal, in her misery, willing to do some self-appraisal. She sits at the edge of a pier with yet more beer, and wonders if she truly did push someone to suicide. As we all know, copious amounts of alcohol and ginormous bodies of dramaland water aren’t a great combination, and in a moment of stupor, Sam-dal nearly falls into the water. She’s push-saved by Yong-pil, and the inertia has him being the one who falls into the water. Seems he can’t swim, though (really?!), and Sam-dal has a flashback to a prior accident.
As the episode wraps, I’m feeling hopeful about things. There’s a lot of space for the story to grow from here. The family dynamics are a huge strength of the drama, and add a bunch of color; I’m hoping we’ll spend time with the sisters and their interesting stories, and not too much time on past water traumas. And though I didn’t fall in love with our heroes yet, I’m interested in their story together enough to look forward to more of their interactions, and to see how they grow and change. And until then, I’ll just be enjoying this epic Healer reunion with Ajumma and Healer in an ultra-cute relationship. This alone was worth the price of admission.