TOPFIVE Korean Dramas of 2019

Hello, everyone! I haven't blogged here in months, but I just took my last uni final exam yesterday (as in yes, I am done with college forever!), and am super psyched to talk about my top five favorite Korean dramas of the year! I will note that all but one of these dramas are from the second half of 2019 — not quite sure if that's because they're more fresh in my head and so I think I love them more, or because these five are all so brilliant that there's no room for the other early 2019 dramas I already talked about in this post. But either way they're brilliant and you must watch them immediately if you haven't already, so let's just get straight into it!

Catch the Ghost

This is hands down my favorite drama of the year, and also the one I watched most recently. Ever since I watched and adored Mystery Queen, I've been looking for a similar drama in terms of brilliant detective/crime cases and two leads with absolutely breathtaking chemistry who have such fun together. I found that earlier this year with Voice 2 - a darker take on the genre, but just as addicting, if not more so - and of course, that just left me wanting more such dramas but not finding any. But then came Catch the Ghost. The leads are brilliant and I have never loved either of them more, and every episode is the finest delight. This drama made me laugh, it made me cry, and I swear just talking about it makes me want to go watch it again. It's perfect in all ways. The drama is about a young woman trying to find her sister's killer (a serial killer dubbed the Subway Ghost), and as part of this attempt, she tries to get a job on the subway police team. There she meets the male lead, a "by the rules" kind of guy who is really not ready to handle this new hurricane of a person who's just blasted her way into the team and thinks rules are suggestions.

I am absolutely in love with this entire cast.

Extraordinary You

Did I swoon or did I swoon? I didn't get around to watching this until it finished airing - and thank goodness, because it would've been a pain to wait for new episodes each week - but I binged the heck out of it and perhaps disregarded my homework more than I should have. The premise pulled me in immediately: a young girl with a heart disease finds out that she's a character in a comic book — and not even the female lead but the supporting character. When she finds out she's expected to die soon, she rebels against the comic, determined to make her own decisions and chase her own love instead of blindly following the author's decisions. The drama ended up being just as amazing and unique as the premise sounds, and it was also so beautifully filmed? I love the actress (who may not be the lead of the comic, but she's definitely the lead of our drama), and of course one of the main draws was Lee Jae-wook who I'm sure we all fell in love with when he played the struggling actor in Search: WWW. I love him when he's playing a cute, nice boy, but even more so when he's an arrogant asshole with daddy issues (he brought back Kim Woo-bin feels from Heirs lol). This is truly a drama that's not to be missed!

This dude made the entire drama for me.

I swear he's angry for like 95% of the drama.

Love Alarm

Another brilliant story setup, this time by a Netflix drama: an app that tells you when someone in your near vicinity is in love with you. I did not think I would adore this drama as much as I did - especially considering how meh Netflix's My First First Love turned out to be - but errrr I binged all eight episodes in a single night and the cliffhanger definitely destroyed me. Classic Netflix love triangle, but gah, I definitely love one guy more than the other. The most unique aspect of the drama is that it traverses both the characters' high school years as well as their adult years, and they did it pretty well too. There's drama, feels and so much misunderstanding because duh the app is a terrible idea, but like, I need season two right now. I'm really hoping the show gets renewed and we get the second season in early 2020 because the three main characters are great and I'm really invested in their relationships and undoing the misunderstanding between a certain two characters.

Search: WWW

Search: WWW is an unforgettable drama, and certainly one of the best of the year. It's a women-centric kdrama with a beautiful, talented cast, amazing writers, gorgeous cinematography and directing, and literally anything you could want in an intelligent, contemporary drama (including man candy LOL). I fell in love with all three of the lead women, and I love how they're all so different and how the drama doesn't present "good" and "bad" as a simple dichotomy. Search: WWW is a character-centered drama that explores relationships, marriage, business, and marketing (the latter through a search engine company that I would love to work for if it was a real company), and each episode is like...well, dessert.  Women supporting women is seriously my favorite thing.

I started watching this for Jang Ki-yong and stayed for the women. And also Jang Ki-yong.

Literally one of my favorite friendships — I adore these two.

Voice 3

I know Voice 3 isn't perfect - I had a whole rant about it when it finished airing - but apparently I just can't stop myself from adding it to this list regardless. I just love the characters and the drama so much that even a major mishap like that not-so-great ending can't put me off too much. I already discussed my love of Voice 2 earlier in this post, and it's for those same reasons that I was super thrilled to sit down and enjoy Voice 3 week after week while it aired — it was one of the highlights of that uni semester. If you want to give this drama a go, you have to watch Voice 2 first because Voice 3 is a direct continuation of the plot. I'd also highly recommend you start with Voice before watching the second or third season because it comes first and Voice 2 begins from where it leaves off, even though Voice is more stand-alone and isn't as relevant to the rest of the series. TL;DR: you can skip Voice if you're a mega Lee Jin-wook fan, but otherwise you'll get the most out of the drama by watching the seasons in order.