While You Were Sleeping (Korean Drama)

Genre: Romance, Thriller, Comedy, Fantasy

Episodes: 32 Half Episodes (16 full episodes)

Main Cast:

Lee Jong-Suk as Jung Jae Chan

Bae Suzy as Nam Hong Joo

Jung Hae-In as Han Woo Tak

Lee Sang-Yeob as Lee Yoo Beom

Synopsis:

Hong-Joo lives with her mother and helps her run a pork restaurant. Hong-Joo is haunted by seeing the future deaths of others in her dreams. What's worse is that she does not know when the deaths will happen, but she tries to stop her dreams from becoming reality. One night, Hong-Joo dreams about the death of her own mother.

Meanwhile, Jae-Chan is a rookie prosecutor. He meets Yoo-Beom at the prosecutors’ office. Yoo-Beom was Jae-Chan’s private tutor when Jae-Chan was a student, but an incident caused Jae-Chan to dislike him. Yoo-Beom was a prosecutor, but he now works as a lawyer. He takes on any case that brings him money.

Jae-Chan and his younger brother move to new house and they become neighbors with Hong-Joo. One night, Jae-Chan dreams that Yoo-Beom drives Hong-Joo's car and this leads to a chain of events including the death of Hong-Joo's mother and then Hong-Joo. When Jae-Chan senses that his dream is about to become real, he takes extreme action to stop it. Yoo-Beom becomes furious at Jae-Chan, but Hong-Joo hugs him and thanks him. Jae-Chan and Hong-Joo later work together to solve other cases.

(Review) My Thoughts:

This was the first Korean drama I watched after the big companies in Korea started making moves to salvage their profits so at first I was confused at the arrangement. Like was it 2 half episodes per week or 4 half episodes per week? I was completely blur until the weeks went by and I understood that it's still the same 2 full episodes per week with just a few tweaks... Anyways, of course this drama is awesome and still ongoing.

Lee Jong Suk is super awesome as always. I like the way he portrays his characters and how he brings them to life and not just plain boring characters. Suzy, to me, has improved by leaps and bounds compared to last I saw her. I mean, comparing her to when she was in Dream High, she is so much better. She seems much more natural in here and delivers her character with so much sass. Together, these two has such an amazing chemistry on-screeen. I absolutely love it and moreover, this story is not petty to include ridiculous love triangles to lengthen the story. To me, I feel that this shows a certain degree of confidence in the writers and concept maker, that they are able to engage the audience with a wide variety of cases that is winding the thread into an impactful plot which definitely requires an amount of episodes to unfold. I hate dramas where the plot gets heavy and I'm like turning to the couples for support and yet they have drama created by obnoxious exes. Here, their interactions are a breath of fresh air.

On to the story, this drama feels like it brings life to 2017 again after many dramas that looks not so interesting, the plot was cliche in the sense that using superpowers to prevent crisis. But, the writer who wrote this story was amazing because they were able to put forth so many variables in the story and also look at things in so many different angles that it makes me as a viewer really get my brain going to thinking mode on understanding the variables and the angles to better understand what the writer is trying to convey. The writer is even genius in the fact that she was able to use these known variables against us viewers, developing the variables into something much more powerful to keep us on edge, clueless as to what might occur after the development of the variable. The way she arrange her plots and hints is so deep that cliffhangers are so common. Cliffhangers here as in as a viewer, I seriously don't know how something shall unfold. And that's what makes this drama so great. You don't know what's going to happen and the build-up of excitement makes you desire for more. 

All I can do at the moment while watching the drama, is gathering whatever clue I can see in the story to somehow predict what could the character decide on doing. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong. Being wrong sometimes also is what again makes the writer so damn good. She is able to put the viewers off the track that they think is right by putting forth new substances. When the dots are connected, she could just put in a new path. She/They must have thought very far into this drama, thinking what else they could expose to engage the audience attention. There are so many cases and many are so unique in their own way. The research put forth into writing this drama is worthy of immense praise.

I won't really mention the actual plot and story, You should check it out yourself. All I'm doing here is to build up excitement for this drama which is sometimes bad for I am making you have high expectations for the drama but I believe that this drama has the confidence to not disappoint ever. If that's not enough, this drama also casted pretty interesting casts that made me felt nostalgic of past dramas and also made me sick to the stomach from laughter. Surely, they light up the drama even more and some are even scene-stealer hahaha...

This drama is just wow, wow, wow. I feel that it is on pretty much the same level as W~ Two Worlds that Jong Suk also starred in but this is from what I've seen less dark and much more mystery than W itself. Get ready to rack your brains on understanding the multitudes of variables and clues given by the writer. But also, prepare your heart for the cute romantic interactions of the couples hahaha and also the amazing wide variety of soundtracks for this drama. All are amazing and sound so perfect for the scenes they were placed in. I've been hearing them on a playlist for the past couple of days because they are just so intense, angelic, impactful and all the other descriptive words you can say. ANYWAYS, what are you waiting for if you have not heard of this drama yet? Go and watch the first episode, and get hooked on the ride until the final episode!! XD