[Kdrama review] The World of the Married (부부의 세계)

The World of the Married (부부의 세계) – Wikipedia

My rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

This drama, which is the adaptation of BBC One’s drama series Doctor Foster, achieved great success in Korea. As of now, it’s the highest rating Kdrama in cable TV, with #2 being Sky Castle.

Hearing the rave reviews, I had a great expectation before starting to watch it. And it did ‘wow’ me during the first few episodes. Such an intriguing premise and a captivating acting (as expected) by Kim Hee-ae.

However, it started to go downhill from the point where Tae Oh was confronted about the affair by Sun Woo and he had the audacity to shout “What’s wrong with falling in love?!” I couldn’t comprehend that. This doesn’t feel like a normal reaction of a guy caught cheating. Oh well, it’s not like I have a deep knowledge about the cheating issue, but it just doesn’t feel apt. No guilty conscience. Not even pretending to feel sorry just to salvage the situation or to win custody of the son. Even weirder, he continued to say that Sun Woo was the one destroying their marriage by exposing his affair. And that he would have ‘taken care’ of it had she not exposed the affair in front of Da Kyung’s family. What on earth did he mean by ‘taking care of it’? Was it even possible to take care of such a mess?

Many parts of the story felt incoherent as it was not properly explained. Like why would Tae Oh’s bunch of friends (Ye Rim, Je Hyuk, Myung Sook) went all out to help him hide the affair? Nobody even hinted at Sun Woo about Da Kyung being present in their Jeju trip. At first I thought that maybe because they don’t really like Sun Woo. But it that was the case, how could the 3 ladies (Sun Woo, Ye Rim, Myung Sook) be such close girl buddies after Sun Woo’s divorce? They even had honest conversations over drinks and also defended each other in front of the nosy neighbors. It seemed too easy for Sun Woo to forgive their betrayal in a short period of time.

Another unexplained point was the reason for Tae Oh to openly go for the Jeju trip with Da Kyung and his friends. Why would he want to do that while trying to hide the affair from his wife? It felt like that was incorporated into the drama just to create the dramatic effect.

It was also never explained how the affair started. How did Tae Oh meet and fall in love with Da Kyung? Did I fall asleep while watching this drama and miss out some parts? I mean, how could he, having a loving wife and son, suddenly jump into this affair bandwagon? He was not portrayed as the womanizer type like Je Hyuk.

Some of the characters’ actions were also hard to comprehend as the motive was not explained properly. We could only rely on our own deduction skills, but no guarantee that it was indeed what the writer meant. For example, why did Sun Woo decide to defend Tae Oh at the police station? Was it just such that his son wouldn’t be labelled a murderer’s son? Or was it because she still had a lingering feeling towards him? Did I really not catch the meaning between the lines?

By the way, who really killed In Kyu? Was it a suicide? What was the motive? Again, I could only rely on my own deduction skill to give a closure to that case.

The way the story line unfolded were choppy on some parts. We only learned afterwards that Yoon Ki had been giving consultation to Joon Young for a few months without Sun Woo knowing. But how and where? If it’s at the hospital, wouldn’t she know it? How did Joon Young manage to squeeze in the consultation time in between his highly packed (and closely monitored by Sun Woo) tuition schedules? And who paid for it? Would Yoon Ki be so nice as to give free consultation to a stranger? Why would Joon Young, the close-guarded soul, even agree to receive such consultation?

The pacing of the drama was nicely fast at the beginning, but felt too fast towards the end. The time frame gets a little weird. Sun Woo and Joon Young moved out of Gosan for a week then went back like nothing happened? How could their behaviour be drastically different in just a week? Joon Young said he wanted to go to any school other than his current one, but within a week he decided otherwise and said “to take the bull by its horns”? It came across as unconvincing to me.

At some point of the drama, I felt like the title should have been something like ‘The Cheating Husbands and Their Suffering Wives”. Almost every husbands in this drama cheated on their wives, and the drama seems to only focus on the suffering of the wives.

The ending was also not satisfying. How could Joon Young just disappear in front of his parents on a broad daylight like that? Couldn’t they run after him? They saw him clearly running away with a disturbed facial expression. That particular scene where they lost Joon Young just doesn’t feel that believable.

Overall, I felt that the drama didn’t match its buzz. The only thing saving the drama was the exceptional acting and a deep emotional portrayal of Sun Woo by Kim Hee-ae. You should only watch this drama if you are simply in for an emotional roller coaster ride without much reasoning.