3 Mind-Bending Korean Time Travel Dramas You’ll Obsess Over
Korean dramas are know for their well, drama, and no one has done it this well since the Ancient Greeks.
Preferring a longer sixteen episode arc than their American counterparts and gravitating towards limited series that deliver a satisfying conclusion to each story, K-Dramas have the perfect palette for weaving high-concept plots that twist the very fabric of time. Here are three series that completely changed the way I see television, and I’ll never stop recommending to everyone I meet.
Family By Choice
Family By Choice draws you in with all the playful, feel-good elements of favorites like The Parent Trap, Full House, and Clueless and then blindsides you with a freight train of emotional complexity, depth, and self-awareness that makes you feel like you went through years of therapy with each character.
After a blind date takes an unbelievable twist, widower Yoon Jeong-jae takes in Kang Hae-jun, the son of the woman he just met and knows hardly anything about. Meanwhile his own daughter, Ju-won, is obsessed with the new neighbor boy who just moved in above them, Kim San-ha. San-ha is the son of a police chief and a mother who blames him for the death of his younger sister.
When San-ha’s mother abandons the family, the two neighbors and single fathers, Yoon Jeong-jae and Kim Dae-wook, decide to share the burden of raising all three children together, forming an unconventional family structure that neighbors, classmates, and bystanders don’t fully comprehend.
The series examines how shared trauma affects each member of the family over a span of several years and the steps they must take to communicate and overcome their insecurities and grief.
Lovely Runner
Lovely Runner combines time travel with the alternate realities of The Butterfly Effect and the unsettling suspense of watching a true crime documentary where you already know what’s going to happen to the victim. The premise is sturdy enough to hold up against even the astutest viewers’ attempts to unravel its mysteries, but never overcomplicates itself by venturing into convoluted territory.
Im Sol is idol Ryu Sun-Jae’s biggest fan, but her life is turned upside down when they meet after his concert, before his suicide is reported later that evening. Devastated, Sol learns the watch she bought in an online auction, which used to belong to Sun-jae, possesses the power of time travel as it sends her back to 2008, where her and Sun-jae are high school students and neighbors, and the accident that left her in a wheelchair has yet to occur.
Im Sol begins a mission to change Sun-jae’s fate, but discovers in the process just how closely their lives are really connected through a series of time hops where one small change to one of their lives can greatly impact the other’s. A strong cast of supporting characters makes their journey all the more memorable in this nail-biting romance you’ll be glued to til the end.
Reborn Rich
Trying to put this plot into words will make me sound crazy, at best, but trust me when I say this is one of the best pieces of television I have ever seen. Yoon Hyun-woo is a trusted employee of the Soonyang Group, a prestigious family owned conglomerate.
In Korean, the word chaebol can be used to describe both the company and the people who own it, and Hyun-woo learns first hand just how ruthless the business of family can be when his employers sacrifice Hyun-woo as a scapegoat in slush fund scheme, after which he is retroactively reborn, a sort of “reverse reincarnation”, as one of the grandchildren of the founder of Soonyang in the 1980s.
Hyun-woo must use his knowledge of company history to play all the members of his new family as well as the stock market, in the hopes of amassing a fortune large enough to take them all down, but in the process he realizes just how far he’s distanced himself from his original life. As cutthroat as Succession, Reborn Rich contains a plot-twist in the end that will leave you reeling long after the credits roll.