ENA’s new mother-daughter comedy Not Others starts in unusual territory mixing heartfelt and raunchy in equal measure. At its core, the drama gives us an examination of a unique relationship — an adult daughter and her single mother — but it’s also setting us up for a crime comedy, with a central cop character and various cases its first week. If this seems like a strange blend, the fact that it’s all sex jokes and coarse humor only adds to the curiosity.
EPISODES 1-2
The first episode of Not Others hooked me in right away with two characters I felt instant empathy for as we peeked into their all-to-realistic daily lives. I was prepared for a slice-of-life comedy with quirky interactions and mother-daughter moments and I couldn’t wait for Episode 2. But by the end of the second episode, I felt my excitement wane as the realism was overshadowed by plot threads about newsworthy crimes and our leads’ involvement in them.
But, let’s start with the strong stuff. We open in the past with a little girl and her young mother sitting on a beach. The mom is there to scope out the scantily clad men but can’t get a date with her daughter glued to her side. She tries to get the little girl to go into the water and play, but the daughter already knows her mom too well — if she leaves, Mom might take up with some random dude. Finally, the mom gives in and the two just sit there on the sand, eating fried chicken together. And this short sequence tells us everything we need to know: these two are stuck with each other.
It’s really a brilliant and heart-wrenching intro that sets the tone for the whole relationship between our main characters. We come to learn that the mom, KIM EUN-MI (Jeon Hye-jin), got pregnant in high school by her friend’s brother, who then transferred schools never to be heard from again. The daughter, KIM JIN-HEE (played by Sooyoung with a distractingly pretty bob), was raised by her single mother in an environment where the two felt more like friends and roommates than parent and child.
And the dynamic between these two — now that Jin-hee is 29 and Eun-mi is somewhere in her mid-40s — is brutally and endearingly realistic. They seem to be in a perpetual argument about everything from laundry and housekeeping to movie choices and banchan preferences. But the tensions are never resolved, in part, because there’s also love here — they both know the other isn’t going anywhere and it results in a lot of bad behavior, easily brushed off.
When we meet Jin-hee she’s a lieutenant at police headquarters who’s about to be demoted. It’s not that she’s done anything wrong, but as her boss explains, they need a scapegoat “to satisfy the press” as the police take heat for their overall poor job (and something to do with nepotism and the commissioner’s son). So, Jin-hee is moved from her desk job at headquarters to a street beat at the local police precinct in her neighborhood.
At her new job, she’s partnered with a sunbae, EUN JAE-WON (Park Sung-hoon), who was one of her training officers when she joined the police academy. The two have never gotten along, and Jin-hee goes out of her way to try to avoid working with him. But, as circumstance would have it, she ends up not only in the same office, but right beside him in the police cruiser.
Their first call together happens to come from Jin-hee’s own apartment, when Eun-mi calls for help after a burglary. She’s come home to find the door ajar with the contents of her panty drawer missing. The leadup to this is that the two women keep blaming each other for missing underwear, and here we learn that someone has been coming into their apartment to steal them. Although, we also find out that Eun-mi did in fact hide Jin-hee’s underwear out of spite when she was angry.
When the police arrive, Eun-mi immediately hits on Jae-won — as her personality hasn’t changed much since that early scene on the beach — and Jin-hee is left to interrogate the neighbors about the panty thief. She finds the culprit quickly, when the man she’s questioning bends down and a red thong sticks out the back of his shorts. She grabs him by her mother’s underwear as he tries to run away and — rather than call Jae-won for backup — she yells for her mom. It’s another revelatory moment about the relationship between these two where, as much as they fight, they’re also an unbreakable duo.
Much of these episodes is an introduction to the personalities of our leads and also their relationship to each other. Eun-mi is a spitfire who acts out when she doesn’t know how to get what she wants. At the same time, it’s easy to see how her passive-aggressive (sometimes manipulative) behavior is her only real source of power. Like, when the panty thief is let off the hook as a first time offender, Eun-mi harasses him by shipping box after box of lacy underwear to his apartment until he decides to move out.
The thing is, she uses similar tactics with her daughter as well, and Jin-hee is usually the one who ends up feeling guilty and apologizing, rather than both women taking responsibility for their actions. Eun-mi repeatedly gives her the silent treatment and calls her a bitch (or hides her underwear) when she doesn’t like something Jin-hee has done. And Jin-hee apologizes not only because she’s more mature than her mother, but because there’s an unavoidable hierarchy here. Eun-mi may act immature, but she’s still the mother.
And this is the central tension, and central joke, of the drama. Eun-mi is only in her mid-40s and she feels and acts differently than she’s treated by the people around her — who think she should act older because she has a 29-year-old kid. Of course, this isn’t how it works; these two women have essentially grown up together. But it leads to a ton of misunderstandings of each other’s feelings. Jin-hee thinks she’s completely obedient to her mom, to the point of being a pushover, but Eun-mi thinks her daughter does whatever she wants. They’re struggling to see each other’s perspectives, and in a show with enough honesty to tell it like it is, I wonder if or how we’ll see them change.
We end our premiere week far out of slice-of-life territory when we learn that a “brave citizen” who stopped a street crime is being asked to come forward and claim a reward for their good deed. It turns out Eun-mi is the brave citizen and she tells Jin-hee she wants to go get her prize. But Jin-hee counters that the criminal hasn’t been caught yet and if Eun-mi makes her identity known, she could put herself in danger. In the epilogue, we see the CCTV footage with Eun-mi’s face scrambled as it appears on the news, but someone is unscrambling it to reveal who she is.
I’m worried about how much this story is going to revolve around crime. After two episodes, we’ve been introduced to four cases, and they’re not just there to serve as a backdrop because Jin-hee is a cop. All of the cases have involved our leads’ personal lives somehow and appear to be pushing the plot. I’d argue that this show hardly needs a plot with these two actresses playing these two characters. There’s tons of likability here just watching the psychology of the whole thing unfold. It’s got some smart writing, a couple of well-observed characters, and enough tension between them to fill all twelve episodes with no problem. Add in the side conflicts with bosses (and likely some romance) and we’ve got a lot of drama without any criminals going after Mom.
I really want to like this show. I love the setup and its microscope lens on the mother-daughter dynamic, but I’m having a hard time finding it funny. I laughed out loud only once — when Jin-hee searches the internet for what to do when you walk in on your mom watching porn and doing the things that go along with said activity. It’s funny because Jin-hee understands even before hitting search that there’s no advice to be had. The awkwardness ends up being a running issue in the first episode and the drama resolves it by having Jin-hee take Eun-mi to a women’s sex toy shop to pick out whatever she wants. And, as strange as it may sound, I’d say that really sums up the tone of the show. It’s a bit cringey, but it sure does have its heart in the right place.