I first discovered this K-Drama in the winter of 2016 when YouTube recommended a song called “소녀” by a singer named Oh Hyuk. Oh Hyuk is the lead behind the band Hyukoh, and one of the band’s songs has been in the top five of my Spotify Wrapped since 2017.
The song by Oh Hyuk sounded different from what his band does. It was older, and the music video certainly portrayed an older Korea with boombox cassette players, plastic wired dial phones, and TVs with knobs. This was clearly a show, but what was it?
It was, I discovered, called 응댭하라 1988, or Reply 1988. I found out a website called Viki would stream it for free (with ads, of course), and I binged it in less than a month.
This show quickly became a comfort show while I sat in limbo between high school and college in a city I had never lived in before. The twenty-episode run made me connected to people at a time that I wasn’t.
Three and a half years later, I introduced the show to my girlfriend. We were close to a month into lockdown, and we needed a show to watch over Facetime. With nothing else to do in the evenings, especially on weekends, we’d countdown over the phone to make sure we started at the same time and sometimes watch two or even three episodes (this time on Netflix), which were an hour and a half long, together.
More recently, we’ve introduced two of my housemates to the show, one in 2021 and one this year. This time, thankfully, the circumstances haven’t been as isolating.
Reply 1988 is a wonderful show, but is it worth coming back to semi-annually (or more at this point)? As someone who doesn’t return to shows often, even twenty-minute sitcoms, what brings me back to Reply 1988 and its hour-and-a-half episodes so frequently?
I guess now would be a good time to tell you what the show is even about. 1988 is the third installment of Reply, a Korean drama series that focuses on a group of friends, moving back and forth between present and past as viewers guess which characters end up together.
At least, that’s how the first two installments of Reply worked. While 1988 has the elements of love-interest mystery, those storylines are secondary. As the 1988 storyline progresses, we see into the present (2015) less and less.
This is because the third and final installment of Reply focuses far more on friendship and family instead. A teenaged Sun Woo helps his widowed mother take care of his four-year-old sister, a widowed father supports his professional Go-playing son (it’s not all widows, I promise), a dorkily energetic but sometimes absent minded Deok Sun (our main character) quarrels with her siblings in a way middle children do to survive. These are just a few elements of the show that take precedence over the romantic interests.
It seems Korea fell in love with this aspect of the show just as much as I would less than a year later. During the initial airing of the show, viewership exploded as the season progressed. When the first episode aired on November 6, 2015, it captured only 6.5% of nationwide cable TV audiences. When the final episode aired just two months later, on January 16, it captured 19.4% of audiences. This was a record at the time, and is still the fifth-highest viewership for a cable TV show.
The show plays on nostalgia. From the anachronistic dial-up noise in the intro to the white and black bomber jacket Deok Sun always wears that I wish I could find somewhere. It also makes you very hungry, as the characters are eating fried chicken, tteokbokki, or ramen in nearly every other scene.
But there are plenty of shows that are heavy on nostalgia and there are plenty of shows that make you hungry. I’m not finding myself going back to WandaVision or any of the thousands of food shows year after year.
What brings me back to this show, and what will probably keep bringing me back, is the authenticity of the characters. Each one has layers. The jokester is also the one weighted down by his family not being there. The alcoholic father has too big of a heart and is constantly giving to those less fortunate than others. Each time I watch the show, I notice something new about one or more of the characters.
They’re the friends you learn more about every time you see them. There are highs and lows, but I look forward to the times I get to watch it.
Photo credit: CJ E&M
Mitchell Barbee graduated from Calvin University with a B.A. in writing in 2021. Originally from Boone, North Carolina, he is currently residing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He enjoys hanging out with the few friends who stayed, wearing grey hoodies, and hoping that he doesn’t get sucked into the nightly wormhole of watching a baseball game.