Hospital Playlist 2 (2021)

How Hospital Playlist Became the Most Heartfelt Drama Ever

Video Review (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96f-1158C2I)


Hospital Playlist made me happy while watching it. There’s a lot of praise one could give to a show, like how the story is well constructed, the characters are deep or how the cinematography is done masterfully, however I think the biggest praise I can give this show is its ability to arouse a sense of joy. Incomparable to any other k-drama I’ve watched, in just a couple of episodes, it made me care deeply for the main and side cast along with their relationships with each other.
The show is about many things. It’s about a group of five friends who form a band together for fun and practice every week. It is about a group of five doctors managing their careers along with their friendships. It’s about the life of interns, residents and fellows at hospitals and their struggle to manage extraneous amount of work while maintaining some semblance of a social life. It’s about the patients and the drama that comes in dealing with certain illnesses. It’s about dealing with family, through the good and the bad, the emotions you end up feeling as you get older and the acceptance of them. And of course, it’s also about relationships, which form and develop throughout.
The show manages to juggle all of this with near perfection, utilizing its hour and a half to sometimes two-hour long episode runtimes to their fullest. This is why I truly believe that, Hospital Playlist IS the best k-drama ever made.

The shows appeal I think is perfectly captured in its first episode. While over time, the jokes get better, the drama gets thicker and the characters get more developed, the first episode of this show remains a standout as one of the best first episodes in all of k-drama for me, maybe only surpassed by the first episode of Be Melodramatic. The first episode of this show makes sure you understand from the start that the generic overused plot points and plot devices other shows use relentlessly are not gonna be found here.
This is done beautifully in the first episode by introducing a character which other series would’ve used as an obvious generic villain, and making sure that by the end the viewer realizes that there won’t be characters like that in this show (this is done multiple times throughout the show by the way, introducing a character or concept other shows would use as central generic plot devices, whereas this show treats them as just another part of life that does not in any meaningful way become an overarching struggle for the characters to overcome).

This is a story about real people, who act in real ways, where you never feel frustrated thinking a character is acting incredibly unrealistic. There are flawed characters here, sure but it never feels like irrational things happen, or characters decide to do something very stupid just so that the plot can move.
Instead, the show feels like the people who made it CARED. It’s sad to say that it DOES feel like a very substantial portion of k-drama produced nowadays is soulless. It feels like nobody in the production teams in these shows cared about the quality of the story, with the abundant reliance on frustrating coincidences, and overused plot points and tropes, or the quality of the cinematography with again overused sceneries, horrible slow motion shots, or even the soundtrack which I think almost no other show does quite as masterfully as this one, where in each episode the band has something to perform which in some way or another is used again during the runtime of the episodes to compliment the story.

It’s brilliant and it’s perfect in doing what the show is best at, setting the mood.
Throughout a single episode you WILL feel a wide array of emotions produced by the interactions of a large cast who demonstrate a spectrum of relatable or tragic problems and daily interactions. Seeing the tragic stories of patients is heartbreaking, the overcoming of a difficult illness is relieving, the interactions of the five main cast are both incredibly entertaining and sometimes unbearably heartwarming, and I can go on…
The side cast make you feel restless and anxious for them and proud of them along with making you cheer for any goals they set for themselves. Not to forget the parental characters and their struggles which both give the emotion of joyfulness for life and sometimes the frustrations of it, that end up best ailed with the companionship of peers.

The only criticism I can give to this show is that sometimes the characters feel too perfect of human beings and often times the only character flaws that ARISE are a product of how perfect they are. This is a perfect time to talk about the main cast in order to illustrate this.

Song-Wha, the only female MC, is an extreme workaholic (all of the main cast are to be honest) but she is portrayed on another level. She manages to work her shift, cover for others, help her residents and interns with their papers and problems, spend time with her friends, play bass in the band, have hobbies of her own and…well you get the idea. This leads to expectations being placed upon her by others which she doesn’t know how to deny, in turn this causes her to be swamped when her emotional baggage doesn’t allow her to meet all of these expectations. Other than that, she’s the most perfect character in the series with the only thing really worth mentioning as a flaw being that she is hesitant to get too close to certain characters due to her own inhibitions.

Moving on to the second most perfect character in the series, Ik-Sun. A father, who works tirelessly at his job, and not only has time to hang out with his friends but also being the all-around extrovert, knows everyone at the hospital and knows everything about them. All this while also making sure to spend a lot of time with his kid, the interactions of which are a joy to watch. Without spoiling much, he gets screwed over a couple of times in the show but despite that he is the biggest bundle of joy in the entire series, always trying to help anyone he can, always being the life of the group and to be honest the highlight of the entire show.

Jun-wan is next, and he’s at least at the start the paper tiger architype. Serious and high strung on the outside, the charm of his character comes from how he changes depending on his surroundings. How he treats his patients with rarely seen mixture of coldness and care, how he turns into a goof when he’s with his friends, how he’s embarrassed when saying something cringy in a relationship or how he easily gets lonely.

Jung Won on the other hand is kind of the Jesus archetype. This is one of the characters where I think his perfectness is very well written as it gets to the point where it hinders his happiness. His devotion to his patients becomes so strong that he isn’t able to emotionally detach from them anymore which, as you can imagine, causes issues. Spending most of his money on charity, he is a cheapskate person even with his high salary as a doctor. And combined with all of this, his unhealthy devotion to religion makes him consider repressing his feelings for others. All of this though I think is handled quite well in the first season, and overall, his character is enjoyable to watch and develop over time.

Finally, we have Suk Hyung which is the character closest to my heart. A total introvert avoiding any and all social interaction not already in his friend group. Always preferring comfort over any complications in his personal life. Still, like most others in the cast we see the usual devotion to his patients, friends and family, the latter particularly to a fault due to repressed feelings of guilt. Throughout the series I think this character was handled the best, as his growth over time is an absolute joy to watch. Seeing him understand and confront the flaws in his personality through the help of his friends and try to change and better himself is very inspirational and comforting to watch.

There are a LOT of standout side-characters as well, in fact one of my favorite and most relatable characters Chu Min Ha being one of them due to her very accurate portrayal of stress due to work I (enunciate) certainly felt during college, but going over all of the standout members of the side cast would take way longer than the scope of this video and thus…

To conclude I guess I truly want to thank the creators of this show. Watching something where you can absolutely tell the people making it cared about every little detail, every little character interaction, camera angle, dialogue and sound choice is incredibly gratifying and honestly heartwarming. I truly recommend this show to everyone, even if you don’t personally enjoy k-dramas, this is just a well-made show regardless. In fact, for me, it’s the best Korean Drama ever made.

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