With more free time on my hands over the holidays, I was finally able to deep-dive into my Netflix watchlist and especially into a TV genre that I had been wanting to delve into for quite a while, at the recommendation of my friends and much of the internet: K-dramas. Netflix’s It’s Okay to Not Be Okay was my first K-drama experience and it absolutely lived up to the hype, drawing an almost embarrassing amount of tears and laughter from me across the show’s long 16 episodes. Before diving headfirst into the show and binge-watching to my heart’s content, I had my expectations as I was well aware that the K-drama genre is known for, well, drama. Such a label is not taken lightly, and it’s safe to say that It’s Okay to Not Be Okay had me glued to my TV practically nonstop, desperate to know what else could possibly happen next.
Two elements of the show stood out to me as significantly well-crafted: the wonderfully colourful and original array of characters and the way in which the overarching theme of the show, which is fairy tales, is incorporated throughout the story. The show’s three main characters are 30-year-old hospital care-worker Gang-Tae, his older brother Sang-Tae who has autism and a talent for illustration, and famous children’s writer Mun-Yeong who has antisocial personality disorder, all of whom have a complicated history with each other that emerges slowly across the series, to both them and the engrossed viewer. But even beyond these main characters, the show has an unforgettable supporting cast, intertwining the lives of Gang-Tae, Sang-Tae and Mun-Yeong with the patients and staff at the key setting at OK Psychiatric Hospital. Through these characters, the show sensitively explores the various troubles that the characters are coping with, including depressive psychosis, abuse, alcoholism, and multiple forms of PTSD.
All 16 episodes are named after a fairy tale with themes integral to the show’s plot, from well-known stories such as ‘Beauty and the Beast’, alongside original fairy tales written for the show itself that include titles such as ‘The Boy Who Fed on Nightmares’. Though the premise of fairy tales was already enough to entice me, what I truly loved about the show was the way, through the character of Mun-Yeong, it subverted the fairy tale genre, turning the morals on their heads. For example, most people may know the moral behind ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ as being along the lines of: you shouldn’t tell lies because one day, when you are telling the truth, no one will believe you anymore. However, Mun-Yeong teaches the other characters a different point of view, explaining that the moral is instead: you should continue to have faith in people because, if even one person in the village had believed the boy when he cried wolf for the final time, then he would not have been eaten.
The show quickly draws you in with an intense plotline and eccentric characters, weaving pasts and futures together with a number of mysteries, including an unsolved murder, emerging across the series, and eventually culminates in a shocking plot twist. But the show does not stop there, and, as I watched the show’s final few episodes, I realised that I was wholly unused to films or shows whose plotlines unwaveringly continued past the final reveal. A whole two episodes (which is a long time, considering each episode is over an hour) were left after the final plot twist, but they each felt necessary and cathartic and I continued to enjoy them thoroughly as the characters dealt with the residual trauma of the twist and each emerged stronger. The finale of It’s Okay to Not Be Okay probably drew more (joyful, thankfully) tears than any other TV series has from me as it was so gratifying to finally watch all the characters I had come to love get the happy endings that they all deserved.