My Liberation Notes (2022)

Intriguing but slow and boring

I waited every week eagerly for a new episode of My Liberation Notes and I watched it till very end...The characters were definitely intriguing and unique and were played really well by the actors especially Lee Min Ki and Lee El. Btw Lee Min Ki's character had one of the best character arcs I've seen in kdramas. And that's a win for the writer to create such interesting and realistic characters. Yet overall I found the show to be boring and slow and pretentious at times. MLN has been compared a lot to My Mister, the writer's other show and My Mister was a slower show too, but it was sharper and more engaging. I actually thought some episodes were more similar to Be Melo, in the way the characters talked and random situations occurred. The other common thing with My Mister is that MLN teases the audience when it comes to the romantic relationships. In My Mister there was the age gap issue but here I'm not sure why the director and writer choose to stay away from any romantic scenes. How I think about it is don't show all this tension between the actors if it's not ending up in anything and it also seemed very unnatural and stark for them to have feelings for each other but hardly show any intimacy on screen.
The dialogues though random are well written and thoughtful. But the show overall is very dialogue heavy which can be a disadvantage for non-Korean speakers, but I enjoyed that part to some extent. MLN was going for something interesting but the writer doesn’t do as good of a job to tie things together and make it engaging enough. You may like the show if you like deep philosophical conversations and if you're an introvert you may relate to the FL atleast in the first few episodes. But the show leaves with too many loose ends and the reveals or mystery the show builds on and creates anticipation on are not as interesting in the end.

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