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Binge-worthy Family saga will make you laugh and cry
The Straits Times
|March 20, 2025
Binge-worthy
WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU TANGERINES Netflix ★★★★★ Looking at the poster for the period K-drama When Life Gives You Tangerines, with its stars — singer-actress IU and actor Park Bo-gum — holding hands in a field of canola flowers, it is perhaps easy to mistake the series for a romance.
While romance is certainly prominent in the 16-parter — separated into four volumes, each representing a season — it would be a disservice to confine a story of such scope and heart into a single category.
The show, which spans three generations and decades from the 1950s onwards, is a series about love, family, survival and trauma.
Here are three reasons to tune in to the lives of spirited Ae-sun (played by IU as a young woman and Moon So-ri in middle age) and her loyal husband Gwan-sik (Park Bo-gum at first and Park Hae-joon in middle age).
1 An epic of the ordinary Set on the island of Jeju, there are neither wars nor monsters to fight. Yet, the series is an epic — albeit one of the ordinary sort.
This story is from the March 20, 2025 edition of The Straits Times.
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