After Temerity Jane AND my sister-in-law Anna (the one married to my brother) both said they loved K-dramas, I tried one.

Wait. Do you know what a K-drama is? I don’t want to be all, “Now, a moving picture, or ‘movie,’ is…,” but I didn’t know at all what a K-drama was before I watched one. Even after watching two of them, I used Wikipedia to make sure I knew what I was talking about. K-drama stands for Korean drama, and it’s like a miniseries: it’s generally a series of a dozen or two episodes of an hour each, so it doesn’t go on season after season. The children keep asking me things like, “Why KOREAN? Why not FRENCH dramas?,” and I don’t know. I just know that K-dramas suddenly got popular, and I don’t like when I don’t know what other people are talking about, so I tried them.

I started with Boys Over Flowers, which Temerity Jane and Anna both say is a very good sampling of K-drama things, but on the over-the-top side of the spectrum (tons of kidnappings and make-overs and big crazy misunderstandings and wild coincidences and astonishing outfits). One thing I was glad my sister-in-law prepared me for: the kissing is terrible. TERRIBLE. When two characters kiss, they just rest their lips together and then hold perfectly still.

Looking back on Boys Over Flowers after watching another series, I’d say Boys Over Flowers is young-adult K-drama: if you like YA, I think you’d be more likely to like BOF. I don’t tend to like young adult fiction, but I still liked Boys Over Flowers enough to try another K-drama.

The next one I tried was It’s Okay, It’s Love. I loved this one SO MUCH MORE, it was like…I don’t know. It’s hard to describe, because anything I say at THIS point sounds like I didn’t like Boys Over Flowers. But I DID! I DID like Boys Over Flowers! It’s just that I liked It’s Okay, It’s Love SO MUCH MORE, it was AS IF I didn’t like Boys Over Flowers. Like when your first relationship seems good but it was someone you weren’t in love with but you didn’t know what love was yet so you thought that was normal and the way all relationships were, and then your NEXT relationship you ARE in love and you’re like “OHHHHhhhhhhhhh, I get it now!” Anyway. I loved it. My throat feels a little funny even thinking about it.

And the kissing is much, much better. The characters in Boys Over Flowers are high school students, but the characters in It’s Okay, It’s Love are in their 30s, and they do regular kissing.

Also, the stories apart from the romance are so good. Several of the characters work in a psychiatric hospital, so there are lots of interesting psychiatric cases, and I loved all the storylines with the characters’ roommates and co-workers and so forth. I just loved it. This is such a mistake to oversell it like this, but I JUST LOVED IT. Tons of the good kind of crying, tons of good romance, tons of loveable characters. I wanted it to go on forever. When I saw there were only two episodes left (I’d thought there were more like eight), I actually gave a little SOB.