Coffee Prince: The Most Rewatchable Kdrama?

I have made sweet, sweet blog love to Coffee Prince more times than I can count.

My relationship to this drama has progressed much in the way actual romances do: It started with love at first sight. I watched episode after episode in rapt, starry-eyed euphoria, unable to believe how much I liked everything about them. Then came the honeymoon period. Things were still pretty amazing, but Coffee Prince was starting to edge its way off the pedestal and my obsession with it was becoming more manageable. In the doldrums of our relationship, I came to notice my beloved’s failings: the second half was packed with tension-killing filler, and the concert scene sure was silly. Nowadays, Coffee Prince and I are like the cozy-looking elderly couple I sometimes see holding hands as they walk through the park in front of my office. We’ve been through a lot together, and it’s a comfort to know that my favorite drama will always be there, just waiting for me to hit play.

Although the sizzling passion of our early days has burned itself out, I think I may be better able to appreciate Coffee Prince now, in the advanced stages of our love. When I first saw this show everything about it seemed impossibly new and original. But all the many hours of Korean television that I’ve watched since have given me another perspective: Coffee Prince is actually just as derivative as most other Kdrama romances. It uses the same raw materials as all those other shows, and might have ended up being the drama equivalent of a suburban American mall, a cookie-cutter entity virtually indistinguishable from every other member of its species. But because its creators were smart enough to twist their common elements and use them in unexpected, thoughtful ways, Coffee Prince ended up being something more like the Taj Mahal—it uses the most earthbound of foundations to make something etherial.

Last week I watched Coffee Prince for the fourth (fifth?) time. In honor of another seventeen hours of my life down the drain, I thought I’d try once more to crack the mystery of what exactly makes this drama so spectacularly rewatchable.

The quiet moments. Kdramas don’t spend a lot of time alone with their characters. This isn’t all that surprising—their plots are driven by interactions between people, so any scene that doesn’t feature a number of characters must seem like a narrative dead end to the Drama Overlords. But Coffee Prince shows just how wrong this is. Its characters become three-dimensional, souled beings in the empty places between big moments: Eun Chan delivers milk in the tentative light of early dawn. Yoo Joo fishes forgotten socks from under Han Sung’s bed. Han Sung glides down a hill on his bike, surrounded by silence and the lush green of midsummer Soul.

And then there’s Han Gyul, who is shown being both alone and lonely in practically every episode. Crouched on his deck, he listlessly throws gravel into the distance. After watching as much television as he can stand, he ends up playing with legos while wearing a football helmet. He cleans his apartment top to bottom, then trashes the place because he can’t think of anything else to do.

Han Gyul may be a standard-issue chaebol heir, but Coffee Prince takes the time to make him a living, breathing person who has fallen through the cracks of life—he loves his family but doesn’t feel as if he belongs to them. He bounces from Korea to America and back again. He lives alone in a big, gorgeous apartment that’s ultimately barren. All these in-between times are what let us really understand Han Gyul: he’s a person who has never known a true home, at least not until he meets Eun Chan.

Han Gyul’s car is one of the greatest isolators in his life. A physical embodiment of his family’s wealth, it both gives him freedom and sets him apart from the people around him. It allows him to avoid public transportation and even just walking down the street—in his Mini Cooper, he can zip through the world without really being touched by it. Everything outside of the car is blurred unreality to Han Gyul, just as Han Gyul is blurred unreality to everyone standing outside. But when he allows Eun Chan to join him, they’re suddenly inhabitants of the same dimension, experiencing the world from the same perspective.

All these little moments add up to a drama that feels poignantly real, whether you’re watching it for the first time or the tenth.

The interwoven narratives. Coffee Prince is composed of a number of narrative threads—Eun Chan and Han Gyul are A, Han Sung and Yoo Joo are B, and Eun Chan and Han Sung are C. The tertiary characters have their own threads, too, all the way down to Mr. Hong and his tragic lost love.

The show plays with these narratives in two ways. The first is an extremely well-done version of a trick that is fairly typical in Kdramas: the threads often dovetail chronologically and spacially, such as when Eun Chan finds herself waitressing at the same wine bar Han Gyul and Han Sung are drinking at in the first episode. The second way is a form of storytelling economy: The multiple threads aren’t necessarily obvious. Maybe I’m an idiot, but it took me at least two complete viewings of the show to piece together the fragmentary story of Mr. Hong.

To a first-time viewer, Mr. Hong exists only to provide fodder for gross-out jokes. But when you rewatch the show, you realize that he has his own narrative arc. Spread throughout Coffee Prince’s run are scenes that tell his story—you just have to find them. When we’re introduced to Mr. Hong in episode 1, he’s asking Han Gyul’s grandmother for money and being denied because he abandoned her for some girl. Then in episode 5, Mr. Hong improvises a song about a man who’s still in love with a mysterious woman. And when he gives Han Gyul advice in episode 12, he’s explaining the back story behind his very first piece of dialogue on the show, 11 episodes earlier.

And there’s another reasons why Coffee Prince is so supremely rewatchable: it rewards close viewing with a textured narrative that offers many layers of story.

The heat. Love is a thing of words in most Kdrama romances, which are full of dramatic confessions and lengthy discussions about relationships. This is fine, but one of the great things about Coffee Prince is that it takes love a step further.

There’s plenty of innards-metling sweet talk when Han Gyul and Eun Chan are together, but it’s the sense of physical attraction between them that makes their pairing one for the ages. Coffee Prince doesn’t tell us that Eun Chan and Han Gyul like each other; it uses body language and close-ups to show us.

Their personal gravitational pull is created by a number of things: a pair of actors who have natural, zingy chemistry; lots of casual skinship that both characters seek out and take obvious pleasure in; and the many, many shots of the leads looking at each another. Even before Han Gyul realizes Eun Chan is a girl, he’s always watching her with a mix of adoration and expectant delight on his face—as if he’s sure she’s about to say or do something that will charm him to within an inch of his life.

And instead of saving this sort of physical magnetism for big kissing scenes like other dramas, the creative team behind Coffee Prince interweaves it into almost every moment of the show. No matter what’s happening around them, it always pays to keep your eye on Eun Chan and Han Gyul. The first time you watch this show, there are too many distractions to fully enjoy their simmering chemistry. So of course you have to watch it again. (And again.)

The twist. Coffee Prince is full of Kdrama tropes, from piggyback rides and heads rested on shoulders to daring first kisses. (And isn’t a girl pretending to be a boy a drama trope all of its own?) But the show’s staging of these familiar scenes is always skewed, with Eun Chan acting as protector/aggressor instead of Han Gyul. She piggybacks him, makes the first move when it comes to kissing, and waits for him when he’s too scared to use the outhouse by himself. Han Gyul is just as likely to play the role of drama “girl” as Eun Chan is—he uses her shoulder as a headrest and stress eats when they fight.

After a long string of dramas that feature traditional gender roles—i.e., girls who need help, and boys who give it—I always come home to Coffee Prince, a romance between two human beings, not two exemplars of stereotypical genders.

The relationships—all of them. Eun Chan and Han Gyul are my forever, ultimate, most cherished OTP. But Coffee Prince has more to offer than just its central romance. There are the friendships that develop between the Princes and Han Gyul’s relationship with his cousin. There are loving parents and bickering sisters who secretly love and respect each other. Heck, even Han Sung and Grandma are given some memorable moments.

But my favorite of all Coffee Prince’s secondary relationships is the one between Eun Chan and her mom. One is slightly airheaded, addicted to the color pink, and a member of the longterm unemployed. The other has wash-and-wear hear, an androgynous wardrobe, and works all the hours god made. But instead of hating each other, they’re supportive and thoughtful. The sweetest moment in this show isn’t shared by the two leads: it’ s when Eun Chan crawls into bed next to her mom after a stressful day, just for the comfort of being close to her.

“Children are the map of their parents” is a saying that comes up in some Kdramas, and it feels especially appropriate for Eun Chan and her mom. But Eun Chan isn’t her mother’s duplicate—she’s her complement. What Mom can’t do, Eun Chan can; what Eun Chan can’t do, Mom can. Eun Chan has partly evolved in response to her mother’s limitations.

The more you watch Coffee Prince, the more you see these secondary relationships—they’re waiting to be discovered in the background of every scene.

The details. When a show works on only one level, it almost never stands up to a rewatch. There’s nothing extra to be gained because you’ve seen everything you need to see the first time around. But a great show—a Coffee Prince show—keeps  giving every time you watch it.

This screenshot from episode 12 is a perfect example of all the hidden treats Coffee Prince has to offer. It’s taken from the middle of the big fight Han Gyul has with Han Sung after he realizes Eun Chan is a girl. There’s a lot going on in the scene, so it’s easy to miss one key detail: Han Gyul’s earring. This is a pretty significant piece of jewelry. He gave Eun Chan its mate episodes ago, back when he asked her to be his sworn brother; these couple (ear)rings are an outward manifestation of their relationship. And even though he’s outraged and feels betrayed by everyone he trusted, Han Gyul is still wearing the earring.

This subtle little spot on your screen says volumes about Han Gyul and his feelings about Eun Chan—and good luck catching that on your first time through this show. (Another thing to notice? The many appearances of Han Sung’s ”Ocean Travel” song. You’ll find it in unexpected but meaningful places throughout.)

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I’ve spent a ridiculous number of words over the past year and a half trying to explain just why I love Coffee Prince so much. With every post on the topic, I feel like I get a little closer to the heart of what makes the show so great, but I’m still not quite there.

Guess I’ll have to watch it one more time. Drat.