Coffee Prince, Episode 1: A Fangirl Recap

Like most Kdrama obsessees, I turn to recaps for a number of reasons. I’m out of my element in dramaland, so they can be invaluable when it comes to interpreting what’s on my television screen. Recaps are also a great way to appreciate little details and subtleties I may have missed in beloved shows. And when I’m not sure if I want to watch something, I often browse comment sections to see if the drama is really worth my time.

As such, I’ve always been both grateful for and intrigued by people who write recaps. It’s clearly a long, incredibly involved process, from watching the show to writing the summary to getting the images to preparing personal commentary about the episode. On top of the time commitment involved, relevancy demands the recaps get posted quickly—and appear twice a week. That’s genuinely insane.

And yet, the Kdrama community is full of amazingly dedicated recappers, both those posting on big collaborative sites like Drama Beans and personal blogs like Mad Dino’s Asylum and Adverse Effects.

I’ve always wanted to give recapping a try myself, but know that I don’t have the gumption to do it regularly. So I thought I’d come at it from another direction: during my recent re-watching of Coffee Prince, I set out writing a recap of the first episode. As expected, it took hours and was actually a lot of fun.

But five thousand words and a mere twenty minutes of running time later, I gave up: It was just too much work. On the one hand, recapping forced me to see the show with fresh eyes, and really unpack all its many pleasures. On the other hand, it pulled me out of the story and prevented me from enjoying the narrative flow. I also suspect that recapping a show you’ve practically memorized from beginning to end is a really different experience than recapping something that’s currently airing—I knew exactly where all the puzzle pieces fit, and could evaluate them in context of the entire series.

Admittedly, what I ended up with was closer to a swooning analysis than a true recap. But if writing it has taught me anything, it’s that the lazy and long-winded should never, ever try to recap.

Here are the results of my first (and probably only) attempt at it.