This review may contain spoilers
All the Ingredients Were There, but I Never Felt It
I really wanted to love Twinkling Watermelon. It has so many of the ingredients I usually respond to in a K-drama: likeable characters, family, friendship, music, nostalgia and a story with plenty of opportunities to hit emotionally. Shin Eun-soo was also one of the main reasons I watched it, and I thought she was great.
But somehow, the show just never moved me.
I think part of the problem was the pacing. Whenever the story created tension or a potentially interesting conflict, it often seemed to resolve it almost immediately. Things that felt like they should have been allowed to breathe rarely did, so I never developed that desperate need to find out what happened next.
The reveal between the two time travellers particularly bothered me. We’d only recently been shown that they both still had their phones from 2023, and then those same phones were used for the big moment where they discover each other’s identities. Instead of being a satisfying reveal, it felt like the show had shown me the answer immediately before asking me to be surprised by it.
There were also threads that seemed to disappear along the way. Early on, the challenge to play a Nirvana song felt like it was setting something up, but unless I missed something, it never really went anywhere.
None of this made Twinkling Watermelon bad. The performances are good, the characters are charming and I can understand why so many people absolutely love it. But for a drama built around relationships, youth, family and second chances, I expected it to hit me much harder emotionally than it did.
Sometimes a show can do almost everything right on paper and still leave you strangely untouched.
And that’s probably my biggest criticism: I finished it, and then almost immediately forgot about it.
But somehow, the show just never moved me.
I think part of the problem was the pacing. Whenever the story created tension or a potentially interesting conflict, it often seemed to resolve it almost immediately. Things that felt like they should have been allowed to breathe rarely did, so I never developed that desperate need to find out what happened next.
The reveal between the two time travellers particularly bothered me. We’d only recently been shown that they both still had their phones from 2023, and then those same phones were used for the big moment where they discover each other’s identities. Instead of being a satisfying reveal, it felt like the show had shown me the answer immediately before asking me to be surprised by it.
There were also threads that seemed to disappear along the way. Early on, the challenge to play a Nirvana song felt like it was setting something up, but unless I missed something, it never really went anywhere.
None of this made Twinkling Watermelon bad. The performances are good, the characters are charming and I can understand why so many people absolutely love it. But for a drama built around relationships, youth, family and second chances, I expected it to hit me much harder emotionally than it did.
Sometimes a show can do almost everything right on paper and still leave you strangely untouched.
And that’s probably my biggest criticism: I finished it, and then almost immediately forgot about it.
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