[REVIEW] MBC TV series "Home Sweet Home" - 1st Episode

Published on 2010/10/28 | Source

Kim Hye-soo from a scene in MBC TV series "Home Sweet Home" [MBC]

Psychiatrist Jin-suh (Kim Hye-soo) has written a book called "My Husband that Only I'm Unfamiliar With". She probably wrote it after she found out six years ago about Sang-hyun (Shin Sung-woo) having an affair with another woman. From that point on, the two try to stay a 'happy' family that occasionally goes on picnics but it is too late to mend their broken relationship. Sang-hyun is having another affair, this time with Yoon-hee (Hwang Shin-hye) who used to love him and Jin-suh is already going crazy over the fact that Sang-hyun and Yoon-hee still keep in touch because Yoon-hee loved Sang-hyun in the past and she is also the one that made sure Jin-suh witnessed Sang-hyun having an affair six years ago.

Like a psychiatrist's counseling session, "Home Sweet Home" delves deeper and deeper into its characters' pasts to show the uneasiness and hysteria felt by people whose relationships have been broken. Jin-suh and Yoon-hee are already on the verge of blowing up while Sang-hyun feels an inferiority complex over being nothing more than a part-time instructor compared to his wife who is a successful career woman. It is also difficult to figure out what Sang-hyun's older sister (Youn Yuh-jung) means by saying she regarded him as "a younger brother, a son and a husband".

So-called 'trashy dramas' usually show how a family falls by starting with an affair and someone dying. But "Home Sweet Home" digs into why a family has fallen after an affairs and a death, Thanks to that, in just a single episode, "Home Sweet Home" has made room for Jin-suh, Sang-hyun and Yoon-hee's emotions to explode no matter what they do. What is important now is the density of those emotions. While 'trashy dramas' usually make an effort to form relationships amongst its characters in the beginning through affairs, with the same issues, "Home Sweet Home" digs into the fundamental of those relationships. What more "Home Sweet Home" will be able to show on relationships is questionable with the relationships having fully emerged but the drama may be able to change the structure of 'trashy dramas' in a higher-dimensional way.