This review may contain spoilers
A Love Letter to Life, Written in Wrinkles and Laughter
Some dramas entertain. A few stick around. And then there are the rare ones that gently — and sometimes not so gently — rearrange you. Dear My Friends did that to me. It didn’t just hit close to home; it sat me down, poured me tea, and quietly dismantled my defenses.
What I thought I was signing up for was a slow burn about old friends reminiscing their way into retirement. What I got was something else entirely — a raw, defiant, exquisitely crafted story about being alive. The women at the heart of this series aren’t supporting characters in someone else’s journey — they’re the protagonists of their own, and they demand your full attention.
Kim Hye-ja, Na Moon-hee, Youn Yuh-jung, Go Doo-shim… calling them legends feels too small. They don’t act — they inhabit. They bring these roles to life with a kind of fearless vulnerability that you don’t often get to see on screen, let alone from characters society usually shuffles into the background. These women fight, lie, forgive, fall apart, grieve, flirt, cook, break things, say cruel things, and then show up the next day anyway. It’s chaos. It’s truth. It’s friendship.
Go Hyun-jung as Park Wan — our emotional compass — couldn’t have been more perfectly cast. She’s the connective tissue between generations, pulled taut between the exhaustion of caretaking and the guilt of not being enough for everyone. Her evolving relationship with her mother (played with blistering complexity by Go Doo-shim) is one of the most honest and painful portrayals of a parent-child bond I’ve ever seen. It never flattens into clichés — it breathes. It hurts. It heals in fits and starts.
And then there’s the writing. Noh Hee-kyung doesn’t write dialogue; she writes confessions. Every conversation feels like it’s happening in a room you weren’t supposed to be in, and yet you can’t leave. There’s no filler here. Even the silences hum with meaning. And the show doesn’t tidy itself up for your comfort — it lets its characters be difficult, contradictory, full of regrets and still somehow brave enough to keep going.
The supporting cast — Jo In-sung as Wan’s on-again-off-again love, Park Won-sook as the chain-smoking divorcee with sass and sorrow to spare, Joo Hyun as the grumpy old husband who doesn’t quite know how to say “I’m sorry” until it’s almost too late — they’re not just background noise. They’re vital threads in this lived-in tapestry. Everyone’s carrying something, and the show never forgets that.
The final arc — the RV trip to the sea — could have so easily been schmaltz. But it isn’t. It’s transcendently human. It’s one last wild, beautiful, defiant ride toward the end, not with fear but with arms wide open. I wept, not because it was sad, but because it was true. That kind of truth doesn’t come along often.
Dear My Friends isn’t just a drama. It’s a quiet revolution. A reclamation of voices too often softened or silenced. A reminder that life doesn’t stop being messy and meaningful just because you’ve turned 60. Or 70. Or 80.
It left me gentler. Braver. More grateful. And if I could rate it higher than 10, I’d scribble it across the sky.
What I thought I was signing up for was a slow burn about old friends reminiscing their way into retirement. What I got was something else entirely — a raw, defiant, exquisitely crafted story about being alive. The women at the heart of this series aren’t supporting characters in someone else’s journey — they’re the protagonists of their own, and they demand your full attention.
Kim Hye-ja, Na Moon-hee, Youn Yuh-jung, Go Doo-shim… calling them legends feels too small. They don’t act — they inhabit. They bring these roles to life with a kind of fearless vulnerability that you don’t often get to see on screen, let alone from characters society usually shuffles into the background. These women fight, lie, forgive, fall apart, grieve, flirt, cook, break things, say cruel things, and then show up the next day anyway. It’s chaos. It’s truth. It’s friendship.
Go Hyun-jung as Park Wan — our emotional compass — couldn’t have been more perfectly cast. She’s the connective tissue between generations, pulled taut between the exhaustion of caretaking and the guilt of not being enough for everyone. Her evolving relationship with her mother (played with blistering complexity by Go Doo-shim) is one of the most honest and painful portrayals of a parent-child bond I’ve ever seen. It never flattens into clichés — it breathes. It hurts. It heals in fits and starts.
And then there’s the writing. Noh Hee-kyung doesn’t write dialogue; she writes confessions. Every conversation feels like it’s happening in a room you weren’t supposed to be in, and yet you can’t leave. There’s no filler here. Even the silences hum with meaning. And the show doesn’t tidy itself up for your comfort — it lets its characters be difficult, contradictory, full of regrets and still somehow brave enough to keep going.
The supporting cast — Jo In-sung as Wan’s on-again-off-again love, Park Won-sook as the chain-smoking divorcee with sass and sorrow to spare, Joo Hyun as the grumpy old husband who doesn’t quite know how to say “I’m sorry” until it’s almost too late — they’re not just background noise. They’re vital threads in this lived-in tapestry. Everyone’s carrying something, and the show never forgets that.
The final arc — the RV trip to the sea — could have so easily been schmaltz. But it isn’t. It’s transcendently human. It’s one last wild, beautiful, defiant ride toward the end, not with fear but with arms wide open. I wept, not because it was sad, but because it was true. That kind of truth doesn’t come along often.
Dear My Friends isn’t just a drama. It’s a quiet revolution. A reclamation of voices too often softened or silenced. A reminder that life doesn’t stop being messy and meaningful just because you’ve turned 60. Or 70. Or 80.
It left me gentler. Braver. More grateful. And if I could rate it higher than 10, I’d scribble it across the sky.
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