A new romantic drama from South Korea spans 25 years, but the characters from the past aren’t the same as the ones from the present. But they look exactly like the ones from the present. But they can’t be because the ages are all wrong. Oh, and did we mention there will be some time travel… eventually?
Opening Shot: “1998.” We pan down on a small record store. A woman is putting a cassette in a window display.
The Gist: The shy girl who is working in the record store is listening to a love song on the stereo. A boy from her class admires her from the window, so his friend decides they should go in. The friend tries every way he can to bring the girl and his buddy In-gyu (Kang Hoon) together, but his friend is pretty shy himself.
Twenty-five years later, in 2023, Han Jun-hee (Jeon Yeo-been) works at a marketing company. It’s her birthday, but one of her officemates needs to remind her that it’s coming up, and it’s her first one alone. The officemate immediately kicks herself for mentioning that fact. Another officemate, who’s been there less than a year, thinks that Jun-hee is going on a date.
What she is actually doing after work is going to a church service honoring the first anniversary of the death of her boyfriend, Gu Yeon-jun (Ahn Hyo-seop). He’s one of over 180 people that died in a plane crash in 2022, and as much as Jun-hee seems to be handling it well on the outside, she’s torn up on the inside. His body was one of the ones that was never recovered, and she just can’t accept the fact that he’s truly gone.
She thinks back to the good memories she had with Yeon-jun, but also the fact that she was going to spend a year working in New York, and he wanted to drop everything and join her. She didn’t want him to do that, and it caused tension. When his mother asks her if she ever found the ring he hid in a jewelry box he made for her before she left for the states, she goes back to look in it, finds the secret compartment and sees it’s empty.
Back in 1998, the shy girl misses the bus to school, and In-gyu, still crushing on her, and his friend come by in scooters. She rides on the back of In-gyu’s scooter, and when she hangs on to him, he smiles. They’re late and have to do strange laps on the field as a punishment.
On her birthday, Jun-hee recalls when Yeon-jun brought an expensive meal to her office, because she was working late as usual. She’s surprised, though, when a bouquet of peonies, her favorite flower, show up at her office. She tries to run down the person who left them for her, but can’t find him. She then gets a DM from a mysterious Instagram account, showing a picture of a girl who looks like her with two boys, neither of whom is Yeon-jun.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? A Time Called You is based on a Taiwanese series called Someday Or One Day; a movie version of that series can be streamed on the Rakuten Viki service.
Our Take: A Time Called You has a bit of a complex premise, with a woman from the present time traveling into a person from the past who looks just like her, who has a crush on a boy who looks just like her dead boyfriend. But you wouldn’t really know that from the first episode. What you think you’re seeing is the present-day couple’s meet cute back in high school.
But then as you’re watching, things don’t add up. If Jun-hee and Yeon-jun met and fell for each other in high school, their relationship would have been further along when he died. And they’d both be over 40. But because the shy girl looks like Yeon-jun and In-gyu’s buddy looks like Yeon-jun, you buy into the story.
We’re also redirected by the fact that In-gyu has a big crush on the girl, whom we find out is named Kwon Min-ju (also played by Jeon). She seems to be overly shy because she’s really in love with In-gyu’s friend Nam Si-heon (also played by Ahn). So there’s a love triangle of sorts going on in 1998, but these aren’t the same people as who we’re seeing in the present day.
You get that yet? And we haven’t even gotten to the time travel aspect. It’s a recipe for mass confusion, and it seems that the show is in no hurry for Jun-hee to cosmically connect with Min-ju. Maybe the show will set that up in a way that feels organic, but it can also be a maddening slog that won’t really satisfy anyone but hardcore K-drama fans.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Back in the record store, Si-heon comes back in to ask the girl her name, and she says her name is Kwon Min-ju.
Sleeper Star: What role will Kang Hoon play as In-gyu? Probably a significant one, but we’re not sure.
Most Pilot-y Line: When the co-worker who thought Jun-hee was going on a date asks what happened to her previous boyfriend, another officemate says, “You’re better off not knowing.” Why? So she can continue saying embarrassing things?
Our Call: STREAM IT. While confusing at first, it feels like A Time Called You will reward patient viewers with a satisfying story that’s less hokey than it seems from the first episode.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.