Summary
Love Next Door is full of familiar tropes but finds compelling approaches to them in Episodes 1 & 2 – but does it have anything more to offer?
Sometimes what you want from a TV show is comfort and familiarity. Love Next Door fits the bill. It’s a classic friends-to-lovers tale with all the usual hallmarks – good-looking leads, charm, relatability, and, at least through Episodes 1 & 2, every genre trope you could imagine.
Depending on who you are this will either be everything you want or nowhere near enough. Time will tell in that regard, but if nothing else, it creates an interesting counterpoint to its Netflix weekend stablemate Romance in the House, which isn’t content to just be a single, easily identifiable thing, even to its detriment. Love Next Door doesn’t have that problem, at least.
Seok-ryu and Seung-hyo
Episode 1 of Love Next Door introduces its leads by proxy, through their mothers bragging about their success and accolades. As we promptly learn, Bae Seok-ryu (Jung So-min) is a go-getter working overseas at a U.S.-based company, while Choi Seung-hyo (Jung Hae-in) is a successful architect. Needless to say, they know each other.
In a similarly predictable fashion, Seok-ryu is also back in Seoul suddenly and without warning, and after being picked up by her paramedic best friend Jung Mo-eum, spends the day hiding from her family, who don’t know she has returned. In the process she bumps into Seung-hyo and, lo and behold, there’s one of those time-stopping romantic beats which is just leaden with shared history.
What happened between these two? What might happen in the future? Such is the point of the show, and through a medley of present-day sequences and flashbacks, we explore their relationship across the first two episodes.
Opposites Attract
Love Next Door works on the strength of contrast without, at least as yet, too much conflict. It doesn’t manufacture some kind of years-long rivalry or suggest that there’s some kind of bubbling resentment beneath the surface. This is where the shades of something like Doctor Slump tail off since that show had its leads be a bit more openly antagonistic.
Seok-ryu and Seung-hyo are just different. She’s a messy heart-on-her-sleeve type, he’s an earnest professional with a streak of modesty and seemingly good intentions. He’s thoughtful, she’s… well, not exactly thoughless, but scatty. Chaos follows her.
And she has reason to be worried since it turns out that she has called off her wedding, which her mother isn’t thrilled about when she finally plucks up the courage – with literal and metaphorical shielding, some of it from a slightly unwilling Seung-hyo – to tell her. Love Next Door relishes scenes like this one; big, messy ensemble sequences involving two generations of two families.
I’m calling it now that some viewers won’t take to this. The chaos is impressively staged but can be overwhelming. But, in this case, I do think it works in the context of the characters. Let me explain.
Fake It Until You Make It
It takes most of Episodes 1 & 2 for Love Next Door to finally reveal the truth behind Seok-ryu’s return to Seoul, but it’s obvious to the audience from the moment she gives her false justifications. She claims to have called off the wedding because she cheated on her fiancé and to have quit her job because she was bored. Naturally, the opposite is true – she caught her fiancé cheating and was laid off by her company.
If you’ve seen a few K-Dramas and are familiar with that age-old trope of Korean mothers – and aunts, as it happens – being strict disciplinarians who only care about their family’s reputation and not their wellbeing, then that knowledge pulls double-duty as characterization here. If Seok-ryu is willing to risk her family’s ire by claiming to have blithely quit a great job and cheated on a good man, how emotionally broken must she be?
Seok-ryu is obviously ashamed and embarrassed. She has returned home to her mother like anyone lucky enough to still have a living and loving parent in their life is prone to do. That shows her vulnerability, and it gives the inevitable breakthrough moment with her mother – which comes a little earlier than expected – much more pathos.
A character – especially a woman – being crushed under the weight of familial expectation is as familiar a trope as a parent without much to show for their own life living vicariously through their successful kid. Love Next Door is pretty deft with how it handles these ideas, but we must concede they’re not new ideas, and it remains to be seen whether the show has intentions to explore any of those.
Everyone Is Waiting For Jung So-min and Jung Hae-in To Get Together
But this is a romance, which means that all of this ultimately informs Seok-ryu’s relationship with Seung-hyo. Perspective-wise, the FL gets significantly more focus in Love Next Door Episodes 1 & 2, and I’m unsure if the story will continue to be framed primarily in her perspective or if the balance will even out somewhat. I suspect the latter, but we’ll see.
But this isn’t to say that Seung-hyo is an afterthought. The show applies the same logic of exploring the human nuance underpinning an overly familiar trope to the leads’ dynamic, too. Seok-ryu and Seung-hyo have a lot of geographical and historical closeness, but their longstanding relationship blurs the lines between what is quite clearly a present-day mutual attraction. Seok-ryu doesn’t know how to act around him, so defaults to how she used to act around him when they were kids.
This, I think, creates the bones of a really interesting romantic pairing, because it adds new complexity to mundane details. Living next door to someone is great if you’re a kid; less so if you’re an adult suddenly pining for the neighbor. Two families being extremely close and intermingled is good – unless that closeness radically complicates a burgeoning shift in the status quo. You get the idea.
The long-term success of Love Next Door will obviously depend on how the show navigates these ideas and whether it brings anything new to them. Across Episodes 1 & 2, there’s plenty to like, but also little to be surprised by, so it’ll be interesting to see how things develop.
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