“Love Next Door” – Friends, Enemies, or Frenemies?

“Love Next Door” is a Netflix Original 2024 Korean drama TV series, with 16 episodes, categorized as Romance and Comedy (Rom-Com).

SUMMARY: Two people who grew up together separated as adults to pursue their own career goals. One remained in South Korea and the other accepted employment working abroad in Europe. One day the working in Europe stopped her world because she wanted to get off and returned home to live with her parents. WHY??

♦ Mothers Love to Brag

In “Love Next Door”, Choi Seung-Hyo‘s mother loves to brag about her successful son. He is the Number 1 architect in South Korea, runs his own business, has received numerous awards, and many people from prestigious families want their daughters to marry him. He is every mother’s perfect son and every woman’s dream husband. But … he’s not interested. Choi Seung-Hyo has dreams but they are all related to architecture.

Bae Seok-Ryu is her mother’s dreams and hopes. Her daughter is everything her mother wanted to be but never had the opportunity. Her mother is in a bragging competition with Choi Seung-Hyo’s mother. Anything her son can do her daughter can do better. It’s that kind of competition. She brags to her friends about her successful daughter working abroad. Also, she is about to marry a successful man who is an international lawyer. She’s already passing out wedding invitations. This time she won in her competition against Choi Seung-Hyo’s mother. Her daughter is getting married. Choi Seung-Hyo is still single. At this rate, she will probably be a grandmother before Choi Seung-Hyo’s mother has any grandchildren. Take that!

But one day, without warning, Bae Seok-Ryu returned home, completely dashing her mother’s dreams and hopes. For some reason or reasons, that she is not willing to share with her family or her friends, Bae Seok-Ryu quit her job and called off her wedding. When she returned home to live with her parents in South Korea, they asked her about her plans. She said: To remain unemployed, not get married, and just live at home because she was exhausted. WHAT? Her mother went into the basement and started beating the drums. Oh yeah. It seems that whenever Bae Seok-Ryu’s mother was angry or upset she would beat the drums like Ringo Starr had possessed her until she calmed down.

One of the things Bae Seok-Ryu told her mother was that she was tired of living her life to accomplish her mother’s dreams. Bae Seok-Ryu’s mother was very smart but did not have the means to attend university and pursue a profession. So she poured her blood, sweat, and tears into her daughter, hoping that her daughter would be who she never could be.

After getting over the initial shock and accepting that there must be a reasonable reason why her daughter dropped everything and moved back home, her mother decided to be patient and wait for Bae Seok-Ryu to work through whatever was troubling her. Bae Seok-Ryu’s bedroom had been converted into a storage room. Her mother turned it into her bedroom again and welcomed her back home.

♦ You Moved Back In WIth Your Parents. I Did Too!

Choi Seung-Hyo and Bae Seok-Ryu had been friends since childhood. Uuhh? Maybe sometimes they were enemies. She sure beat him up a lot! Or maybe they were frenemies? Not sure what they were when they were kids. But now they are both young adults trying to walk the path in life they have chosen for themselves. They are the ones choosing and not their parents. Bae Seok-Ryu was happy to have her old bedroom back but was very surprised when she looked out the window. Choi Seung-Hyo was also looking out of his bedroom window, which is directly across from her room in the house next door. He mentioned something about her bedroom and she asked him why was he concerned. He said that he had moved back home with his parents and was staying in his old bedroom. Huh?  WHY?

It was obvious why Bae Seok-Ryu was in her old bedroom in her parents’ home. She was unmarried, unemployed, and broke! But Choi Seung-Hyo was an eligible bachelor, the CEO of “the Architecture Atelier In” ~ his own successful business, and had been living on his own. Why did he move back into his parents’ home which is next door to Bae Seok-Ryu’s parents’ home?

Main Characters:

• Choi Seung-Hyo (played by Jung Hae-In, “White Nights”, “D.P. 1 and 2”, “Snowdrop”, “Connect”, “The Three Musketeers”)
• Bae Seok-Ryu (played by Jung So-Min, “Alchemy of Souls”)
• Jung Mo-Eum (played by Kim Ji-Eun, “Longing For You”)
• Kang Dan-Ho (played by Yun Ji-On, “Tomorrow”)

Where to Watch

Viewership and Rating:

• IMDb: 7.8 out of 10 stars
• My Drama List: 8.4 out of 10 stars
• CommonSenseMedia: 3 out of 5 stars
• Google users shared a public rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars

My personal rating is the same as My Drama List.

There is indeed no shortage of rom-com K-dramas. That’s because romantic comedies almost always put you in that life-feels-so-good comfort zone. It’s kind of like “silly love songs”. The world just can’t seem to get enough of silly love songs and Korean rom-coms.  LOL.

LINKS OF INTEREST:

What to Know About: Love Next Door: Cast, Episodes, Plot, Trailer | Netflix Tudum

Love Next Door TV Review | Common Sense Media

‘Love Next Door’: 12 Things You May Have Missed In Episodes 5-8 | Forbes

TRAILER/TEASER:

Netflix K-Content. “Love Next Door.” YouTube, 11 Aug. 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3TpiZndAOo.

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