We reunite to give you a review of the newest hot topic drama Fanletter, Please starring SNSD’s Sooyoung and Yoon Park who finally gets his main role in this lovely slice of life.
It’s the drama that cured my drama slump and maybe a bit of my seasonal depression? Kidding on that last one that’s what I go to therapy for. However, this drama was just four episodes long but the two weeks it did air it had me at the edge of my seat wanting to know what happens next and how much it will make me cry in the end. You all also know that I would probably die for Sooyoung alone and will watch anything she does and stars in even if it is just for a tiny, tiny second. I am just lucky that she usually picks such deep and meaningful dramas and they always end up being some of my favorites of that year. Well, without further gaying about Sooyoung let me get into the review.
Summary via MDL: Han Kang Hee is a top star actress who started acting ever since childhood. Because of the pressure as a top star, her self-esteem begins to drop and bad comments about her drama increase. The stress caused by those comments keeps her away from fanletters as well. In this crisis, she coincidentally runs into her first love, Jung Seok. He was a popular kid back in school but is now a single father of a sick child. His daughter Yu Na writes a fanletter to Kang Hee as her huge fan. However, as her letter doesn’t make it to Kang Hee, Jung Seok writes back instead. Kang Hee’s story with a beloved fan and her first love begins with a special fanletter.
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Una and I decided to watch this drama together, maybe not in the same space and time but around the same days in order to write this review together. I always love when we get to do this and Fanletter, Please seemed to be the perfect option for this kind of double review. It was soft, meaningful, family focused and made us cry. The perfect mix for a winter drama. I gotta say though when I first hear about Fanletter, Please I thought it would be a full length drama, when I found out it would only have 4 episodes I was a bit disappointed at first as I needed more of this duo. However, the four episodes were more than enough and I can see that more episodes in this drama would have been dragged on unnecessarily. With four episodes Fanletter, Please had really great writing, plot and character development and pacing, so I would only say give us more episodes in order to get more cute Sooyoung and Yoon Park action.
This brings to the best part about this review, I can gush about the characters and the plot. I loved our main leads of this drama. They were just so utterly likable from the first moment on. I was invested in their stories their history and their relationship. I loved that we get to see Yoon Park portrait such a loving and caring single dad, which is something we don’t get to see too much in Kdrama land. His relationship with Yuna is the best thing ever. She had me wrapped around her little finger and their interactions made this drama so special. One thing is thought that I would have loved to find out a bit more about Yuna’s mom and that entire backstory. I think Fanletter, Please falls a bit short here.
Kanghee though is such a wonderful character and Sooyoung absolutely killed this role with her depiction of a young actress. Fanletter, Please deals with so many topics and Kanghee is on the receiving end of the most of the current scandal trends. That doesn’t mean Jungseok didn’t have it hard, this man deserves a nice meal and a lot of money for the amount of shit he had to go through so far. But I love how Fanletter, Please tackles so many, current and dark, important topics and issues in such a short span of episodes. This is your warning, this drama isn’t just cute and fluffy. It is heavy and it will make you cry. I cried probably every episode but the entire vibe and the characters are worth the pain. It goes to say without much fanfare that Sooyoung’s and Yoon park’s chemistry was amazing in this drama. I didn’t expect it all to be so, so good but they were selling the heck out of this combo and now I need more of it.
That’s about as much I can say though when it comes to remaining spoiler free. Fanletter, Please is worth every minute of it and I wish we could have gotten a bit more but I also accept it being as short as it is. Fanletter, Please was a fantastic watch and remains one of my favorite dramas of 2022.
P.S: can someone tell me why the children hospital was entirely pink?
Fanletter, Please is a short and sweet mini series which I’m glad Lina and I got to watch at the same time! Writing k-drama reviews together is always fun and we always get to see different opinions on things are we can scream about our favourite actors. It’s nice to see Yoon Bak in a main role (and a drama that’s not Forecasting Love and Weather lol) because he really did deliver everything here – he’s definitely well suited for the roles of nice male characters and Lord knows both Lina and me are a sucker for those. More of nice guys, thank you! Let’s review and dig deeper into this short drama.
Fanletter, Please might deal with a lot of serious topics such as illness, death, grief, anxiety and many more but at the end of the day, it was a rather light watch definitely more on the positive, idealistic side. That was expected considering the drama is only 4 episodes long and has to resolve quite a lot of things during those, but my point is that the drama isn’t really going to throw you in a depressed crying fit – it’s a slice of life, one that focuses on the family above everything else, and while it has its realistic, sad moments, it’s still a sweet story. It’s always nice to see a father-daughter relationship which is based on trust in k-dramas and series in general and Fanletter, Please definitely delivered that through its four hours long run. Yoon Bak and child actress Shin Yeonwoo had such a great chemistry as a father-daughter duo and it’s impossible not to love both of their characters. They were both the scene stealers and the ones who pushed the plot forward.
On the other hand, Sooyoung’s character provided a different sort of storyline which is also important right now. The one of a celebrity who keeps encountering hardships similar to those we’ve heard about these past couple of years. You know, the ones which threaten to ruin your career even if they’re untrue. It was nice to see a lot of public vs celebrity discourse being addressed rather directly in Fanletter, Please and I think Sooyoung did a great job in her respective role. She was very charming, likeable and had tons of chemistry with both sides of the father-daughter duo. The supporting characters such as her manager, Jungseok’s best friend and the kids from the hospital were adorable as well and definitely contributed a lot to the comedic, sweet moments of the story.
Like Lina, I do wish we got at least two more episodes just because it would’ve been nice to wrap up some loose ends like a deeper dive into history of Jungseok’s life and maybe even some more high school moments (which I’ve surprisingly enjoyed a lot). The plot did leave me with a few important questions but don’t let this worry you – when it comes to the main storyline, everything is wrapped up nicely by the end, albeit a bit too optimistically but it’s a soft, healing drama so I think that route was the right choice. Sometimes it’s just really nice to watch something uplifting, even among the sad moments, and something that will leave you feeling that things might work out after all. If you enjoy slice of life stories – this mini drama will be just the right treat for you! A recommendation from me as well.
Header Image Source: MBC
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