Green Mothers Club

The main lead in this story is Eun-Pyo, a woman with two sons (8 and 4) married to a detective inspector. She is an educated woman, a professor of arts with a lackadaisical approach to her children's education, believing that they should have a happy and carefree childhood without any interference from her. Her stance is: if they're clever, then they will do well regardless. Her mother in law is concerned that the grand kids are going to miss out on a decent education, so she buys them an apartment in an Uber competitive borough and bullies her into moving.

The parents of the primary school her older son attends each have their own dark secrets and they all live in the same catchment area, ie a group of tall apartment blocks.

All the mums conspire against each other ditto the children, to get into elite study groups and "gifted child programs" via endless competitions and tests.

Jealousy, envy, greed, infidelity, backstabbing, harmful gossip, domestic violence, murder, pathological liars, child abuse, bullying, just about every nasty thing you can think of is woven into the story.

Reminded me so much of Desperate Housewives.

My only beef is with the Eun-Pyo character ( IMO undiagnosed ASD) who is eternally resentful and sullen. She is capable of just staring at someone for minutes at a time without saying a word or responding. Throughout the series, we never see her smile. Her behaviour was extremely irrational and irritating (to me and every other character on the show) especially during the last 4 episodes when I was wishing someone would give her a resounding kick up the backside or just kill her.

Main takeaway: Aside from having to fast forward every time I saw Eun-Pyo's ugly mug mooning and staring, I found the storyline quite entertaining.

The series is about a group of mothers some of who have a past with each other trying to make sure their gifted children shine in the local school. As the story unfolds it becomes darker, as all is not what it seems, and the unsavoury back story of some of the characters come to light. It is a well acted drama and the development of the characters was interesting but it seemed to fall short overall. I think because it had so many side stories it was difficult to become engaged as their was no real depth to individual cases and the plot often felt hurried to conclude a storyline.

Korean Drama "Green Mothers' Club" is a basic drama about the battle between two mothers. It also involves some mystery about one of the mothers and her unfortunate death.

The dynamics between the two main leads were smooth and intense and they were just right to have the story moving forward. However, the main mystery, though thrilling at first, was a letdown in the end and got boring quickly. The school politics were just okay, though the story of Eunpyo and her son was well managed.

As for the performances, they were all pretty great, though some characters could have been handled differently.

So, overall, seven out of ten.

I finished this hot mess. It wasn't so bad. But man, who is directing this poor actress??? Was the direction, "do not ever answer when people ask you a question. Look expressionless. And action! Or no action in this case!" There are other ways to convey what is going on in her head to act this way. It was puzzling to me to see why anyone would want to be friends with eun pyo. Only time she was interesting was when she was interacting with Chun Hye. And wow, the French couple. No thank you. Yes he's hot. But they were the least interesting in this whole show. I needed a couple of comics doing an episode by episode podcast. This would have been so fun to listen to!!! Such a mess of a show but i enjoyed watching it! Lol.

There are SOOO many layers to unpack in this K-drama. I honestly had very low expectations initially b/c the teaser for the series was pretty vague and boring, but I'm so glad I watched this show through to the end. It doesn't really pick up till ep. 3 or 4 though, so I think many of the ppl who gave negative reviews did so b/c they stopped watching after the first couple of episodes. But be patient, and you'll see why many of us gave this show rave reviews. I won't even try to explain what the series is about b/c it's too complex to try to explain in only a few sentences (and the summaries online don't do the show justice b/c it explores a wide range of issues around society, raising a family, and mental health). It's sadly also a fairly accurate portrayal of the kinds of challenges that many kids and parents go through in Korea, and I'm glad the creators were brave enough to tackle this thorny topic. Highly recommend if you want a glimpse into what Korean society is really like (for better or for worse lol)--just excuse the poor French that you sometimes hear being spoken in the series!