Friendships are just like the rest of life; they change and morph as the years go along. For longtime friends, there are periods where they’re close, and periods where they rarely speak to each other. But each person in that friendship knows they can depend on the other when things go sideways. That aspect of friendship is examined in a time-jumping South Korean drama.
Opening Shot: A woman is vacuuming her apartment when her phone rings.
The Gist: Ryu Eun-jung (Kim Go-eun), who writes plays and screenplays for a living, gets a call from a colleague asking her if she heard a speech the previous night from Cheon Sang-yeon (Park Ji-hyun), a famous film producer and head of Swallow Pictures. She was accepting an award, and she thanked Eun-jung for being the biggest influence in her life.
The colleague, Choi Kyung (Joo Min-kyung), comes over to Eun-jung’s apartment to look through story ideas, and Eun-jung talks about how she and Sang-yeon used to be best friends but she “cut ties” some time ago. At first she didn’t specify why, but then she reveals that Sang-yeon took full credit for the film that put her production company on the map, when Eun-jung had developed the story for it. Kyung wants Eun-jung to write a play about that, but Eun-jung tells her colleague she’s written something else.
It takes place in 1992, when both Eun-jung (Do Young-seo) and Sang-yeon (Park Seo-kyung) were in fourth grade. Sang-yeon is among a large number of students who transferred into the school between semesters, and she immediately becomes class president, due to her grades and her government minister grandfather. In that capacity, where she supervises the class when the teacher is out of the room, she ends up smacking Eun-jung’s hand with a stick as a disciplinary measure, something Eun-jung holds against Sang-yeon. It comes to a head (literally) the next year, when Eun-jung subconsciously whips a dodgeball at Sang-yeon’s noggin.
What she comes to find out, though, is that Sang-yeon is the daughter of her favorite teacher, Yoon Hyun-sook (Seo Jung-yeon), and that Sang-yeon’s older brother Sang-hak (Moon Woo-jin) will become her “first true love.”
In the present day, Eun-jung gets a surprise call from Sang-yeon, and they meet. Sang-yeon has shocking news: She’s dying of cancer. And she wants Eun-jung to help her end her life when she decides it’s time to end it.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The plot of You And Everything Else is reminiscent of the 2019 film Paddleton, though the friend dynamic in that film is quite a bit different than in this series. It’s also reminiscent of A Million Little Things.
Our Take: The story of You And Everything Else is going to explore the friendship between Eun-jung and Sang-yeon as it enters this new chapter. We saw the beginning of the friendship in Episode 1, and it was interesting to see that the one-time close friendship started with the two of them really disliking each other when they were kids.
The dynamic between the two women is certainly complicated, as we’ll see throughout the first season of the series. But there were also very deep feelings at some point, because those feelings remained even after Eun-jung decided to “cut ties,” in her words. It wasn’t the first time that the friends decided to remove themselves from each other’s lives, and we’re sure we’re going to see all of that play out as the present-day versions of the women negotiate Sang-yeon’s final months.
There will be complicating factors, like their disparate family situations and the fact that Sang-yeon grew up relatively comfortably compared to Eun-jung, who slept in the same bed with her mother and little brother due to the lack of space. Also, Eun-jung’s love of Sang-yeon’s brother will likely bring the two of them together and tear them apart. But it will certainly be interesting to watch the two of them negotiate these ups and downs over 30+ years and see how it informs this seemingly final phase of their relationship.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Sang-yeong asks Eun-jung to go with her when the time comes to help her die.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Seo Jung-yeon as Yoon Hyun-sook, Sang-yeong’s mother and Eun-jung’s very wise and empathetic writing teacher.
Most Pilot-y Line: For some reason, Eun-jung’s teacher publicly asks the new kids if they grew up without a father, which leads a classmate of hers to mention Eun-jung having no father to the entire class.
Our Call: STREAM IT. You And Everything Else is an emotionally affecting story about the ups and downs of a decades-long friendship, now taken to a new level.
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.