Stuff You Should Be Watching: Her Private Life

This post is not so much about the series, well, it is about the series, but it is also about how I use foreign language shows as one tool in my mental health toolkit. So, please bear with me during the preamble…

Reading is my usual method of escapism, but sometimes my brain won’t be still long enough to get into a book. I’ll be pulled out of it with thoughts and reflections I’d rather not have. If I truly want to disengage from the world around me, then I need to keep my brain engaged with something other than itself/me. Enter Netflix and Fibre. Either while knitting or while spinning, I can watch/read a foreign language TV series. For those glorious minutes/hours, I am suspended from the world around me. My fingers move automatically – be it with needles or stretches of unspun wool – and I can disappear into another world. Usually, I emerge with a skein of wool and a renewed sense of calm and/or purpose.

In this endeavour, I have ventured through Russia (Silver Spoon), Mexico (La Casa de la Flores), France (Black Spot) and Brazil (Nobody’s Looking), all of which I would highly recommend, but South Korea has given me something infinitely precious: a sixteen hour long romantic comedy.

Bitchery, I present for your consideration: Her Private Life.

First, the premise: an indulged self-defined trophy wife runs an art museum her husband established for her, but when he is found guilty of embezzlement, she is forced to step down as director.

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Enter Ryan Gold, a retired Korean artist, now art critic. He is based in New York, but lured to South Korea to serve as the Director of the Cheum Museum of Art.

Our heroine , Sung Duk-mi, has been the Head Curator at the museum and is expecting to get the Directorship so Ryan’s appearance at the museum is a spanner in her works. So far, so standard, right? But wait, there’s more!

This is not the first time that Ryan and Duk-mi have met. They met at the airport when Duk-mi, in her secret identity as a fan girl, is there taking photos of Si-an, the most popular member of epic K-Pop group, White Ocean. She was standing on a ladder to get a better shot of Si-an, when Ryan bumped into her and she fell off her ladder and onto him.

Sung Duk-mi is a professional curator AND a fangirl. This is where my lack of general knowledge on all matters South Korean lets me down a bit. I’m not sure why she has to keep her fangirl status a secret, but I know that she does.

Added to our gorgeous (literally) leads, we have a really strong supporting cast. Duk-mi’s parents (an obsessive knitter and a ‘viewing rock’ collector) and their sort-of adopted son, Eun-gi. There’s also Duk-mi’s best friend and fellow fangirl, Seon-ju.

Plus, the connection between Si-an and Ryan is more than a simultaneous departure from the airport: they end up living in the same building and being admirers of the same artist, Lee Sol, whose work – incidentally – prompted Ryan to give up painting.

Plot-wise, it is pitch-perfect. It never lags, it never skips. It is a perfectly balanced piece of life-affirming television. With each episode, there are new revelations and twists and my love and appreciation for the two leads grows constantly. What is initially professional rivalry between Ryan and Duk-mi becomes a personal rivalry too, but not in the ways that you might expect. Sadly, the parts that I love most about this series would be serious spoilers. I will say this… Reader, I SWOONED.

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I actually SWOONED at some points during this series. Duk-mi’s warmth and chutzpah make her irresistible. The supporting characters have their own rich journeys and they never feel ‘less than’ the leads. During the first episode, I was a little turned off by Ryan’s cold-fish-ness. Layer, by precious layer, the real Ryan is revealed beneath the layers of grump and indifference.

Romantic comedies are formulaic, which is something that I usually appreciate, but in this case, nothing happens as I assumed it would. Being surprised by people’s actions and reactions is a real treat for Skeptic-Lara. But it goes beyond this. I feel as though I’ve watched something truly unique and thoroughly original. The last time I had this feeling was when I read Jennifer Crusie and Tessa Dare for the first time. My eyes have been opened to a whole new glorious world.

This, dear Bitchery, is where my limitations as a viewer come in. I have watched the grand total of three South Korean TV shows, so first, there might be nuances and things that I’m missing in Her Private Life, and second – and infinitely more exciting – there are so many more shows for me to watch! If you’ve watched a South Korean romance, please drop it in the comments, because I’m hungering for more! My Netflix list thanks you in advance.

Side note: I found multiple spellings for the characters’ names. I went with the spelling my Netflix subtitles gave me…