You can only pick one, and boy the pressure is on. The DB team will answer a new prompt in each post, and you’re invited to do the same in the comments. Ready to play?
You can only pick one short-form or web drama
missvictrix: Okay, brace yourselves! I’m going to pick the disastrous, metarific Lotte Duty Free Shop PPL web drama thingy that is commonly called Seven First Kisses. Truly, it is the best worst thing you’ll ever see! Our heroine gets magically dropped into seven equally and fantastically ridiculous K-drama romance scenarios and is oh-so-briefly pursued by — get ready — Lee Jun-ki, Park Hae-jin, Ji Chang-wook, Kai, Taecyeon, Lee Jong-seok, and Lee Min-ho. That is the power of the Lotte conglomerate imagination, when you watch this mini drama. And if you’ve just had a terrible day, trust me, watch this and you’ll be feeling loads better afterwards, even if it’s just from all the chortling you’ll do!
mistyisles: I deliberated between a few choices for this one, but my final pick is White Christmas! It’s very dark and heavy, and I remember concluding after my first viewing that its ending (intentionally) left me with more questions than answers and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. But it did hold up to a rewatch later (though it has now been years since then), and it gave me an undying love for its entire young cast. Unlike some K-dramas that I watched early on and am scared to go back to now for fear of tainting good memories, this is one that I do want to re-watch again, because I think there are a lot of aspects to it that I’ll appreciate more now that I have a different perspective on K-dramas in general (and on life, for that matter).
DaebakGrits: I didn’t even have to think about this one because Splish Splash Love is the standard by which I compare all other web dramas. The isekai genre is my all-time favorite, and Splish Splash Love is a cute little example of what happens when the heroine is magically transported to another world or — as is the case with this web drama — the past, and uses her skills (a.k.a. her limited knowledge of Hangul, history, and mathematics) to survive and thrive in her new reality. This web drama single-handedly made me a forever fan of Kim Seul-gi, and I’m still sad that we haven’t seen her in more leading roles. Overall, this was a fun story, and if the K-drama gods wanted to remake it as a full-length drama, I wouldn’t complain — so long as the ending gives us ample time to see Dan-bi reunite in the present with the reincarnated versions of all the historical figures she met while in the past. (My one complaint about the web drama is that there wasn’t enough modern day Yi-do (Sejong the Great).
Dramaddictally: I’m going with the recently aired drama One Day Off. This thing blew my mind. At only eight episodes (roughly a half hour each), it made a big impression with everything from its genre-hopping to its narrative, themes, and visual storytelling. Focusing on the everyday life of a teacher who takes one-day trips to escape the monotony, it manages to address love, politics, family, aging, death, and other eternal questions in bite-sized chunks that feel very current and of the times. Lee Na-young is masterful in this role as she interacts with all the one-day characters she meets along the way. Generally, I find that short-form dramas have a hard time developing a full story and leave me feeling like something is missing. But this drama understands the short-form medium and exploits it in the best way possible. Rather than a drama, it feels like an extended independent film — but even that is not giving it enough credit for how artfully it pulls off what it’s trying to do.