Happy Battle

Korean Drama "Happiness Battle" is a melodrama about a woman who takes in her two nieces after her estranged sister is murdered, something that brings her face to face with some dark truths.

The drama starts out by presenting an intense battle between the mothers as they take up social media to either bring down each other or become celebrities and hide their unhappy lives under an image of perfection online. However, it soon forgets all about that and focuses on the main lead who discovers uncomfortable truths.

What the drama does well is dealing with women who try to get back on their feet, or break free from a miserable life. Their stories and character development were nicely handled and original.

The action scenes were, in addition, pretty entertaining and intense. However, the melodrama was boring after a while, and many cases were easily resolved.

Also, the main female lead didn't execute all her emotional scenes well, though the rest of the cast did a good job with their characters.

So, overall, five out of ten.

Having a plot around mothers competing on social media over whose life is the happiest is such a dystopian sad present we currently live in. The concept itself was limit testing my cringe-o-meter really hard but luckily the mystery plot took over after 2 episodes. This drama was very similar to Green Mothers' Club (2022), it started with a group of housewives/residents living in their fancy neighborhood until it turns into a mystery plot after a few episodes. The mystery itself here was limited, swinging between who's the killer and digging up the past, however, it wasn't enough to fill 16 episodes and was often stretching each event really thin. Most of the characters were trashy which made it hard to sympathize with when they were given a turn over and a resolution. For a plot around who done it mystery, usually we get a handful of suspects with good motives but in this drama most of the suspects had a weak motivation and their attempt to play innocent was rather unconvincing. One thing that bothered me was how the drama never addressed the big daughter properly after her initial introduction and purpose, which was kinda important for the narrative. In fact, most relationships between the characters were given a half-arsed follow up and resolution, leading to an unacceptable wrap up.