Our Blues Review: A Jeju Island K-Drama That Makes You Look Twice at the People Around You

In the fishing village of Pureung, the morning starts the way it has for decades. Haenyeo divers zip up their wetsuits before dawn and wade into the cold water for the day's catch. A fish market rings with the bark of an auctioneer. A grandmother hauls a cart of dried seaweed past a coffee shop where old classmates trade gossip over instant coffee. Nothing about this looks unusual. That is exactly the point of Our Blues.

Watch long enough, though, and the surface starts to crack. The woman selling fish is carrying a grief she has never spoken aloud. The truck merchant flirting with regulars is estranged from his own mother. The confident young diver has a secret she checks her phone for every night. Our Blues spends twenty episodes showing you that the ordinary, hardworking people around you are never quite as simple as they look — and that this is reason enough to treat them gently.

What Is Our Blues About?

Our Blues (우리들의 블루스) is a 2022 South Korean drama written by Noh Hee-kyung and directed by Kim Kyu-tae, the team behind some of Korean television's most quietly devastating family dramas. It ran for 20 episodes of roughly 70 minutes each, airing on tvN in Korea between April 9 and June 12, 2022, and streaming internationally on Netflix.

The setting is Pureung, a fictional fishing village on Jeju Island, and the format is an omnibus: rather than following one couple or one family from start to finish, the show moves through a rotating ensemble, giving each storyline its own arc before handing the spotlight to someone else. The cast is stacked with names Korean drama fans will recognize immediately — Lee Byung-hun, Shin Min-a, Cha Seung-won, Lee Jung-eun, Han Ji-min, Kim Woo-bin, Uhm Jung-hwa, Kim Hye-ja, and Roh Yoon-seo among them — but the show's real achievement is refusing to let any single star eclipse the ensemble around them.

Why Our Blues Feels Different From Other K-Dramas

Most dramas ask you to root for one couple, one family, one outcome. Our Blues asks something harder: to care about everyone. A haenyeo diver hiding a family secret gets the same emotional weight as a bank manager quietly going broke to pay for his daughter's dream. A pair of teenagers panicking over a pregnancy test gets the same seriousness as an elderly mother reckoning with a lifetime of estrangement from her son. Nobody in Pureung is a minor character in their own life, even when they are a minor character in someone else's.

That structure is also what makes the show feel so recognizable. These are not extraordinary people living extraordinary lives. They are the friend who always seems fine, the parent who never complains, the neighbor whose business appears to be thriving. Our Blues keeps insisting that if you actually looked — really looked — you would find that almost everyone you know is carrying something heavy while still showing up, still working, still laughing at the fish market. It is an uncomfortable kind of recognition, and it is also, somehow, a comforting one.

The Healing Point: Every Person Deserves to Be Looked at Twice

If Our Blues has a single message about living without regret, it is this: the people closest to you will not be around forever to be understood, and the version of them you think you know is probably incomplete.

The clearest example is the relationship between Lee Dong-seok (Lee Byung-hun) and his mother, Kang Ok-dong (Kim Hye-ja). For most of his life, Dong-seok has treated his mother with open contempt, certain that he understands exactly who she is and exactly how she wronged him. It is only when her health forces him to slow down and actually sit with her — to hear the parts of her story he never asked about — that his certainty starts to loosen. The drama does not rush this. It lets him stay angry for a long time before it lets him stay curious, because that is closer to how it actually happens.

That is the healing point worth carrying out of the show: the people you have already decided you understand — a difficult parent, a distant friend, a coworker who seems to have it all together — are very likely more complicated, and more burdened, than the story you have written about them in your head. Our Blues suggests that finding this out while someone is still here to talk to is a form of grace you will not get a second chance at.

The People of Pureung Village

Our Blues is built around several interlocking stories. Here are a few of the ones that stay with you longest.

Lee Dong-seok & Kang Ok-dong (Lee Byung-hun, Squid Game; and Kim Hye-ja, Mother)

Dong-seok is a truck merchant who has spent his whole life resenting the mother who left him behind as a child to become another family's mistress. When her illness becomes impossible to ignore, he is forced into her orbit again, and the show spends its final stretch asking whether decades of resentment can soften once you finally let yourself see the whole of someone's life, not just the part that hurt you.

Lee Yeong-ok & Lee Yeong-hui (Han Ji-min, Miss Baek; and Jung Eun-hye, in her television debut)

Spoilers ahead for episodes 11–14.

Yeong-ok arrives in Pureung as a first-year haenyeo with a reputation the village elders quietly disapprove of — a woman, they assume, who moves from man to man. The truth is that she is diving for money to support her twin sister, Yeong-hui, who has Down syndrome and lives at a care facility in Seoul. Yeong-ok has spent her adult life protecting her sister from a world that treats her as a burden or a curiosity, and protecting herself from the guilt of one moment, years earlier, when she nearly walked away. Jung Eun-hye, who has Down syndrome herself, plays Yeong-hui with a warmth and specificity that turns what could have been a plot device into one of the show's fullest, most alive characters.

Jung Eun-hee & Choi Han-su (Lee Jung-eun, Parasite; and Cha Seung-won, The Divine Move)

Han-su returns to Jeju claiming to be freshly separated from his wife, rekindling a romance with his unmarried first love, Eun-hee, a market vendor who has quietly built real wealth. It slowly becomes clear that he is not separated at all — he is broke, desperate to fund his daughter's golf career, and hoping Eun-hee's feelings will make her generous. The storyline is unsparing about how money changes what people are willing to do to the people who trust them, and about the particular loneliness of being valued for your bank balance instead of yourself.

Min Seon-a (Shin Min-a, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha)

Seon-a is a childhood classmate of Dong-seok's who returns to Jeju in the middle of a bitter divorce and custody battle. Years of disappointment have left her guarded to the point of self-destruction, unwilling to let anyone, including herself, believe things could still turn out well. Her arc is one of the show's gentlest arguments that a closed heart is not the same thing as a healed one.

Bang Yeong-ju & Jung-hyeon (Roh Yoon-seo, Little Women; and Bae Hyun-sung)

Two high school students, children of feuding fathers who were once inseparable friends, find out they are expecting a child of their own. Our Blues treats their fear and confusion with unusual respect, refusing to turn either teenager into a cautionary tale, and using their story to reopen the wound between their two fathers as much as to explore parenthood itself.

Who Should Watch Our Blues

Our Blues rewards patience. It is slow by design, more interested in a character's interior life than in plot momentum, and it does not flinch from heavy material — grief, estrangement, disability, divorce, teenage pregnancy, and financial desperation all get real screen time. If you are drawn to slice-of-life dramas that treat ordinary people's pain as worth taking seriously, or if you loved the ensemble warmth of Reply 1988 or the quiet ache of My Mister, Our Blues belongs on your list.

It is probably not the right choice if you want a fast-moving romance, a single central couple to root for, or an easy watch after a hard day. This is a drama that asks something of its viewer in exchange for what it gives back.

Final Thoughts

Go back to that morning market in Pureung. The auctioneer is still shouting prices. The haenyeo are still hauling in the day's catch. Nothing about the scene has changed. What has changed is how you look at it — and, if Our Blues does its job, how you look at the ordinary, unremarkable people going about their own mornings around you. Somewhere close to you is a version of Dong-seok, a version of Yeong-ok, a version of Eun-hee, carrying something you have not asked about yet. Our Blues is a quiet, persistent argument for asking before it is too late to.