Wah, I’ve missed your face, Lee Jong-seok! We’re a little under three weeks out from the premiere of SBS’s upcoming drama While You Were Sleeping, which has recently released its first teaser. My first thought watching it was, “This is so beautiful,” and then I remembered that the director is PD Oh Choong-hwan, whose last drama Doctors might’ve been light on plot but was gorgeously filmed. This time around, he’ll have writer Park Hye-ryun to hopefully bring a more substantive story.
Lee Jong-seok (W–Two Worlds) and Suzy (Uncontrollably Fond) will star in the fantasy legal drama revolving around a woman who dreams of future tragedies and a prosecutor who struggles to prevent them from happening. The teaser starts with a chyron reading, “I saw you in my dreams,” and our two leads facing each other on a snowy night, both sporting injuries. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to foresee unfortunate events that will befall others and be helpless to stop them. Suzy’s character voices, “The fact that I saw you in my dreams, that you should do exactly as I say if you want to live. Why would anyone believe such nonsense? You can’t change it, the future.” Lee Jong-seok, glaring over Suzy’s shoulder as she holds onto him, thinks, “No one will believe it. The future that I changed.”
Suzy wakes up startled, and Lee Jong-seok asks her offscreen whether her dreams have ever been wrong, or whether she’s tried to change it, to which she replies, “No, I haven’t.” We see her in hospital garb on the wrong side of a rooftop railing, looking gaunt, while Lee Jong-seok tries to stop her from letting go. There’s a flash of a handwritten note reading, “my death,” and then she does let go as he fails to grab her.
Even if Lee Jong-seok does believe her dreams, it doesn’t mean he comes ‘round to helping her right away. He says that his job as a prosecutor is to mete out punishment after a crime has happened, not to prevent them from occurring altogether. He purposefully walks past her in a train station as he continues that no matter how much she goes on about her dreams, he can’t help her: “Whether or not someone dies in your dreams has nothing to do with me. It’s not my responsibility to care, either.” Suzy replies, “There’s no one else, except you.” Hmm, I wonder whether his intervention in her suicide attempt will be the reason why she goes to him for help.
The teaser asks, “If you could see the future in your dreams—that future, that time, that fate—could you change it?” Lee Jong-seok asks what happens next, and she thinks that time will flow differently. There are brief flashes of cherry blossoms, our couple on the beach, and Suzy desperately trying to help someone with a stab wound as he continues, “Differently, where? For better, or worse?” The teaser ends as they go in for a kiss and she says, “Only you.”
I feel like it’s been forever since reports first came out about Lee Jong-seok reuniting with writer Park Hye-ryun for the third time, so it’s exciting to finally see a glimpse of what the show will look and feel like. And I was surprised by how close the premiere date is as well: While You Were Sleeping will follow currently airing Reunited Worlds in SBS’s Wednesday-Thursday slot starting September 27.
