Season 1 (10 stars): Claire, a huge fan of Korean dramas (I had no idea that was a thing, but apparently it is), is magically transported into her favorite Korean soap opera, where she is told that she has a new job; fixing the conventional dramatic path that has somehow gone off target. She is supposed to work from behind the scenes, creating situations for the leads to fall in love as they're supposed to, but things don't go quite the way they're supposed to.
Dramaworld is quite funny, although as the show digs deeper into its silly story the humor sometimes gets toned down in favor of plot or drama. But the story is intriguing, the drama has a light touch, and the comedy manages to both mock Korean conventions while making me eager to watch one of these shows for myself.
Liv Hewson, who plays Claire, is perfectly cast as the red-headed American nerd inexplicably accepted by the Korean principles. She manages to be both dorky and plain enough to seem like someone who would obsessively watch a TV show while being cute and quirky enough to be believable as someone who simply cannot avoid becoming a part of the story she is supposed to influence from the edges.
The series reminds me a lot of Lost in Austen, in which a Jane Austen fan is transported into one of her novels. If you like one of these, I highly recommend watching the other.
I highly recommend binge watching this; episodes are short and end on cliffhangers, so it's frustrating to just watch one. I wound up waiting a month so I could watch the last 4 episodes together.
Beautifully done from beginning to end. I just love this show so much.
Season 2 (8 stars): Wow, that was a long wait!
Season 2 continues the story. The episodes are longer, the plotlines are crazier, the mythology is messier, and there's a goddamn cliffhanger which will never be resolved because the series was cancelled. So I'm pretty aggravated about that.
This second season is still tremendously fun and involving. It's funny and the plot is chockful of twists.
This time around, Joon knows more about his world and Seth has a new scheme clearly patterned after incel culture. And Claire is in a love triangle.
But a lot of this isn't really consistent with dramaworld as we know it. For example, Joon's character in this isn't his previous character, nor the character of his current drama. It's more the character of a perplexed actor who finds Dramaworld peculiar. Which makes no sense. Nor does it make sense that you can derail all the secondary characters.
It's as though at some point the writers thought, hey, is Dramaworld actually some sort of purgatory or metaphorical torment? Which is absolutely not the attitude that made me fall in love with the show.
I binged the second season in one day. At first this was because it was so much fun, but towards the end it was more because I was invested in learning how all this craziness would be resolved. And then ... it wasn't! Instead, we got a really dark cliffhanger. And since I discovered this at 1 a.m. When I was very, very tired, I was very angry. Had I known I would have spaced out my viewing over a few days.
Maybe the writers, depressed by the increase of authoritarianism throughout the world, the rise of incel trolls, and the pandemic, wanted to somehow pack all of that darkness into a cute comedy. I wish they hadn't done that.
Anyway, after I finished with the series I googled the show and found that it had been cancelled. So now all I have is a very unsatisfactory last episode and no idea how they were planning to dig themselves out of that very deep hole.
Don't get me wrong, Season 2 is still good overall. It's just not as perfect as Season 1.
