Drama Short: Time between Dog and Wolf (2007) Review

Grade: A+ 


What it’s about
A young intelligence officer deals with inner demons and tries to find his place in the world while seeking revenge for the killing of his mother, which he witnessed as a child. 


First impression
As of episode 5, I loved this drama so much I wanted to have its puppies. Nonstop thrills, a great love triangle, and amazing production values make it feel like a long, excellently made movie. Just what I needed after some drama disappointments.

Final verdict

As a big fan of romantic comedy, I rarely wander over into the action genre. I’m so glad I did here, though—I literally can’t believe how good this show is. Thrilling, action packed, and filled with sophisticated storytelling and complex, nuanced characters, it still manages to include a compelling love story. Loved it. (Read full review here.)

Added to top 10.

Playing Favorites

Coming up with their very own top-ten list seems to be a major rite of passage for every fan of Korean television. Now that I’ve been watching Kdrama for almost a year, I guess my time has come. I’ve seen seen an awful lot of dramas: some that I’ve loved, some that I’ve loathed, and some that weren’t good enough to merit either emotion.

The shows listed here may not be the finest dramas Korea has ever made, but they are my favorites—the ones that stuck with me long after I watched their final episodes.

1. Coffee Prince (2007). A delight on every level, Coffee Prince is rooted in what could have been just another Kdrama cliché: a hardworking, tomboyish girl pretends to be a boy to make money to support her family. Over the course of 17 episodes, though, it manages to subvert almost every drama trope as it grows into a genuine, heartfelt story of best friends falling in love. The perfect mix of comedy and melodrama, it’s peopled by a huge cast of incredibly compelling characters and graced with sky-high production values. This drama may not have much to say about homosexuality, but if you listen closely it does have something to say about what it means to be a woman, a state of being that, contrary to popular Kdrama opinion, doesn’t require a two-inch skirt, white pancake makeup, or teetery high-heels. With its heart in the real, everyday world, Coffee Prince is a Kdrama romance unlike any other: It’s not a show about finding ways to keep people apart. It’s a show about bringing them together. So wonderful, even a year after watching it for the first time just the thought of Coffee Prince can make me smile until my face hurts.

2. Sungkyunkwan Scandal (2010). Only the hardest of hearts won’t be charmed by this candy-colored, deeply principled fusion sageuk that values learning, loyalty, and friendship above all else. Yet another story about a girl pretending to be a boy so she can support her family, Sungkyunkwan Scandal features one of Kdrama’s greatest quartets, perfectly embodied by a group of young actors with unforgettably flirty chemistry. This show’s most wonderful conflict isn’t to be found in its archery contests, classroom competitions, or royal intrigues. Instead, it’s the constant battle of worldviews waged by the jaded female lead and the idealistic young Confucian scholar she comes to love. Fun, swoony, and sometimes silly, Sungkyunkwan Scandal’s dreamy brand of revisionist history is the perfect introduction to historical Kdramas.

3. Boys over Flowers (2009). This story of Cinderella meeting Prince-not-so-charming isn’t good by any stretch of the imagination—but if you’re susceptible to its particular brand of cheese, it’s nonetheless irresistible. With characters so flatly iconic they’re approaching Hero of a Thousand Faces territory, it focuses on a poor every-girl and the dashing, mega-rich (and mega-flawed) young man who inexplicably wants to whisk her away into his life of privilege. Boys over Flowers has it all: wish-fulfillment shopping sprees, lavish tropical vacations, a nail-biting love-triangle, and more handsome knights in shining armor than it knows what to do with. The impact of this sweetly chaste, odds-defying love story is still reverberating throughout Asia—and the world. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I cannot tell a lie: I loved almost every minute I spent watching this train wreck. 

4. Que Sera, Sera (2007). A sordid Kdrama for grownups, this is a dark gem full of complex characters, edge-of-your-seat storytelling, and deeply felt emotions. There’s no cartoony Kdrama villain to be found here; instead, human nature in all its greedy, jealous, and cruel guises takes on the role of bad guy. And just when you think Que Sera, Sera’s imperfect characters are completely beyond redemption, they find a way out of the cycle of hurt and regret that propels most of this drama’s action and emerge as people who might just be better for their heartbreaking pasts. Compulsively watchable and with a surprisingly satisfying ending, this dark horse drama isn’t to be missed.

5. Painter of the Wind (2008). The rarest of birds: A thoughtful, girl-centered sageuk that beautifully explores the creation of real-life works of art by two historical figures. At the heart of the story is the imagined relationship between the artists, part professional mentorship, part friendship, and part love. (Did I mention that the younger artist happens to be a girl pretending to be boy so she can attend the royal painting academy?) The most sincere of the Korean gender-bending dramas, it explores the repercussions that would probably be felt by someone who actually spent most of her life hiding her gender. For my money, the most compelling relationship in this show isn’t the one between the two leads, though—it’s the one between the young artist and the courtesan she romances while searching for her true self. Tragic, exciting, and gorgeously filmed.

6. Goong (2006). Still the gold standard when it comes to dramas featuring modern-day Korean royalty, Goong is a goofy take on the standard love triangle. Instead of chaebols, though, the every-girl female lead gets to choose between two handsome princes—one distant and prickly, the other sweet and clingy with a creepy mother from hell. Its clever conceit, able script, and almost painfully winsome cast elevate Goong above its rom-com competition. A perfect vehicle for Yoon Eun Hye, this drama is charming, sweet, funny, and so wonderfully unafraid of being cute and cuddly that every episode ends with a teddy-bear diorama. (I love you, Korea.)

7. I Need Romance (2011). This show is the one thing I never expected from a Korean drama: racy. The only Kdrama romance I’ve seen that honestly depicts adult relationships, sex and all, I Need Romance is built around the friendship between three women in their early 30s. It explores the perils and pleasures of love from each of their perspectives—one a goddess of lust, one a long-term girlfriend, and one a virgin. Although the making, breaking, and remaking of an established relationship is at the heart of this show, no member of its likeable cast is wasted. Sex in the City, if Sex in the City were less sex-mad and more sweet-hearted (and Korean).

8. Padam Padam (2012). Being no stranger to the gutter makes the heights reached by this supernatural romance all the more powerful. Having spent most of his adult life in prison after being convicted for the murder of his best friend, Padam Padam’s male lead is understandably dour and jaded. But when the stakes are highest, God or fate or the universe steps in to give him a chance at happiness, rewinding time and allowing him to right the wrongs he’s committed. The real miracle of this drama is that it never loses sight of telling a good story about compelling characters, even when faced with the distractions of heartrending possible angels, supernatural plot twists, and truly breathtaking cinematography. Even a fairly lame final plot twist and an uninteresting female lead aren’t enough to ruin this lovely, reflective show.

9. Time between Dog and Wolf (2007). An action thriller with a heart, Time between Dog and Wolf is a high-tension exploration of the relationships between fathers and sons, whether they’re related by blood or not. This is the drama City Hunter should have been but wasn’t: a beautifully shot, thoughtfully written story of a young man’s quest for revenge against his mother’s murderer, and all the many things that get in the way—including his love for the murderer’s daughter (this is a Korean drama, after all).

10. Shut Up! Flower Boy Band (2012). SUFBB’s screenwriters could have phoned it in—nobody expects a gimmicky drama intended for teenage girls to actually be good. Instead, they created a gritty, acutely observed coming-of-age story that just happens to focus on good-looking bad boys in a rock band, and be set in the cutthroat world of Kpop. This drama is most memorable for its brisk pacing, strong characterizations, and poignant adolescent friendships that are closer to family ties. Also, the cute boys. (Duh.)

Learned from the list:

• I love it when girls pretend to be boys. Sadly, I suspect this is because it’s one of the few times Kdrama rom-com girls get to be smart and capable instead of airheaded and bumbling. (Note, of course, that Go Mi Nyeo from You’re Beautiful is the exception that proves this rule. She’s airheaded and bumbling as either gender.) Also wonderful is that gender-bending romantic leads tend to spend more time together—they’re not separated by the Great Wall of Boy versus Girl.

• My absolute favorite dramas are some of the first few I watched—of course, they’re also most everyone’s favorites, which makes them popular and easy to find. I think it was also easier to love without reservation back in the early days of my obsession, when I was too blinded by the fantastically exotic sparkle of Kdrama to watch with a critical eye. (This, I like to think, explains my undying love for Boys over Flowers. It was the second Kdrama I ever saw—of course I imprinted on it like a baby duck.) It’s certainly harder to please me nowadays, but I also think that I’m running out of classics. My first year down the Kdrama rabbit hole was spent watching the greatest hits that are widely beloved and still under discussion, while today I’m branching out into lesser-known shows, which can be hit or miss.

• I love youthful coming-of-age romances, and wish there were more of them out there in dramaland. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m a failure at adulthood, but somehow I find 15 infinitely more interesting than 35.

• I’m incapable of writing about Korean drama without using the word heart a lot. Whether that says something about me or Kdrama, I’m not sure. On the bright side, I’d still rather jump off something extremely high than discuss a character’s (or person’s) dream, whatever it may be.

• When I started putting this list together, I was only sure of my top two or three dramas. As I got going, though, I realized all the shows that were coming to mind were ones I had devoted an entire blog post to (or most of one, anyway). The rest of the shows I’ve written about in detail here? They would go on this list’s counterpart—my ten least favorite Kdramas.

Drama Review: Kimchi Family and Time between Dog and Wolf

Kimchi Family: C+

Time between Dog and Wolf: A+

The funny thing about me and  “quality" is that I don’t always like it. 

The world is positively chock full of undeniably high-quality things that I could happily live without: the works of Ernest Hemingway, the movie Wings of Desire, the vegetable cauliflower. You’re welcome to them…I’ll just be over here reading Twilight while I watch America’s Next Top Model and eat a heaping bowl of Kraft macaroni and cheese. Sure, there’s a time and a place for works of art, but I can be made just as happy by consumable crap with no qualitative merit.

This is why I often take the recommendations of serious critics with a grain of salt. And when it comes to the world of online Kdrama, it’s pretty clear that the webmaster at DramaTic is about as serious and critical as they come—which means I approached the list of best dramas on that site with no slight trepidation. Would a lover of trendy dramas and romantic comedies really enjoy something truly, objectively good? It turns out that the answer is yes, if that thing is number 56 on the list of DramaTic’s best shows of all time: the thrilling, beautifully constructed 2007 drama Time between Dog and Wolf.

I was ready for a change after finishing this year’s saccharine Kimchi Family, and it seemed likely that an action drama beloved by the males of the species would be just the palate cleanser I needed. It turned out that this was true, but not quite in the way I expected: Deep down, under all that fur and fermented shrimp paste, these two shows weren’t so different after all. At heart they’re both about identity and family, and how the two are always inextricably tangled together. (Laughably awful mustaches are also a common theme, regrettably.) With this common DNA, it’s only natural that the dramas faced many of the same decisions—what’s amazing is how different their choices were.

I can see how someone might really like Kimchi Family—at its best, it’s a beautifully produced, big-hearted drama about the power of family and food. I was sold for the first few episodes myself. But what began as a story of foodie magical realism told through the lens of a traditional Korean restaurant and the people who frequent it  quickly descended into a series of makjang plot twists taken right out of the Big Book of Kdrama Clichés. Birth secrets? Chaebols in disguise? Gangsters with hearts of gold? Fatal and/or debilitating diseases? Kimchi Family has them all in spades. (In fact, there are at least two separate incidents of each one of these plotlines—and sometimes more.) What it doesn’t have, however, is any true depth, darkness, or hint of friction between its lead characters. Instead of exploring their interactions and motivations, this is a drama that lines up lots of obstacles and stands back—as long as you keep your characters tolerably busy, its writers seem to have decided, nobody will notice that they exist only in one dimension.

As far as I’m concerned, Kimchi Family’s best episodes were the ones that focused on its core group of characters: the Lee sisters and their uncle Kang Do Shik, as well as the two men who became live-in staff members at Heaven, Earth, and Man, their family’s restaurant. The food is beyond toothsome and charmingly presented as the most important part of the Lee family heritage. The girls’ happiest childhood memories involve learning to make kimchi from their mom, and no wonder—she imbues the process with a palpable sense of enchantment, spinning kid-friendly stories about the ingredients of each recipe. When the narrative begins to widen and explore Kimchi Family’s supporting cast, though, the drama loses its focus on creating indelible characters on a meaningful journey, and instead dwells on over-the-top plot developments and overwrought reaction shots.

Kimchi Family is a fine drama for what it is; my problem is that I wanted it to be something more. Its greatest disappointment is a failure to take advantage of its setup. It began with just the right blend of sweet and tart, after all—during the first few episodes, the younger Lee sister is living in the city and working at a fancy French restaurant, having vowed never to return home to be part of the simple, traditional life of Heaven, Earth, and Man. She’s an exasperated perfectionist who wants to succeed in the modern world, and it seems clear that the writers initially planned for her unwilling homecoming to be a fish-out-of-water story. Somewhere around episode 5, however, any development of her character comes to a screeching halt, to be replaced by a series of meaningful smiles over a vat of kimchi ingredients that she shares with her beautiful, childlike sister.

From that point on, the show gives up any hint of being a sophisticated character study in favor of treacly, makjang busyness: A nice-guy gangster searches for his birth father; an orphan avenges himself on those who have wronged him; a man comes to terms with the child he thought he’d lost forever; and a family grapples with the loss of a loved one, all in the space of 24 scenery-chewing episodes.

To its credit, Kimchi Family never fully plunges into cartoon-land, unlike many other making spectacles before it. Its characters resist outright “bad-guy-ness,” and by the final episode most everyone is believably redeemed. In the end, though, Heaven, Earth, and Man has little more to offer than flavorless kimchi primarily composed of clichés.

Time between Dog and Wolf, on the other hand, manages to be the best of both worlds: It marries whizbang car chases, hot boys, and gangster intrigue with genuine, keenly felt character insights and a moving story of love and revenge. It’s a delicious fermentation of Alias, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and the few redeemable aspects of Lee Min Ho’s deeply mediocre City Hunter. Ultimately, this is a show about the push-and-pull that exists between fathers and sons on the road to manhood. It’s about the choice between defining oneself and being defined by another. It’s about doing right when it’s so easy and tempting to do wrong.

Where Kimchi Family succumbed to plot for the sake of plot, the twisty, adrenaline-filled storyline of Time between Dog and Wolf exists not to fill time, but to put the show’s characters through their paces. It twists and turns them, looking at them from every angle imaginable before finally melding them into complete, multi-dimensional wholes.

This drama is peopled not by “good guys” and “bad guys,” but by nuanced, fully drawn characters that sometimes happen to be more good than bad, and other times more bad than good. The ultimate example is Mao Liwarat, the show’s lead gangster and one of its two most powerful father figures. He’s a cold-blooded killer who loves his daughter and carefully mentors his followers, treating them with respect and effortlessly fostering their loyalty. He’s a bad guy, all right, but thanks in part to the measured, weighty performance of Choi Jae Sung, one I wanted redeemed, not dead. (Weirdly, Choi was also in Kimchi Family: he played a distant but cuddly uncle who…wait for it…just happened to be a retired gangster known for his brutality. Did his role in that show predispose me to like him in TbDW? Maybe.)

Although Time Between Dog and Wolf is largely a boy’s club, it also features women—smart women who stand on their own two feet, whether they work at a Korean intelligence agency or quietly wear the pants in a household funded by their gangster husband. Just like their male counterparts, they’re more than I usually dare hope for from a Korean drama.

I can’t say the same for Kimchi Family, even though it seems to be a show geared toward women. Its girls all fulfill traditional roles: they’re teachers and mothers and suppliers of comfort. God help them if they have plans in life beyond docile housewifery, because Kimchi Family certainly won’t—it will instead paint them as cold, cruel abandoners of children who are worthy of forgiveness and nothing more. Also, note that chef in particular is one of the things Kimchi Family don’t allow its women to be. Professional chefs, after all, are men; a woman at the stove is nothing more than a mother. Although Heaven, Earth, and Man is owned by the Lee family, neither daughter has been groomed to take the helm after their father. By the end of TbDW, in contrast, it’s a principled, savvy woman who’s leading the entire intelligence agency.

Time between Dog and Wolf is the exact opposite of Kimchi Family on another front, too. TbDW is beautifully but economically done, with few examples of the hammy overacting (Song Il Gook, I’m talking about you) and baroque direction that characterize pretty much everything about Kimchi Family. In that show, one 10-second reaction shot is never enough: instead, it has to drag out for forty or fifty seconds, giving the actor plenty of time to cycle between four or five different expressions. Its every scene is full of bizarre, unnecessary camera angles: all the zooming and cutting to point-of-view shots from behind random scenery gets distracting after a while. There are even instances when the two halves of a split-screen phone conversation each suffer from multiple, separate cuts and angle changes. (This actually reminded me of a moment in one of the Naked Gun movies when a camera zooms in on an actor, then zooms in some more, and finally zooms in to the point of smacking him in the face. It’s a miracle the cast of Kimchi Family survived, really.)

Instead of feeling self-indulgent and pointless like much of Kimchi Family’s camera work, Time between Dog and Wolf’s direction is calculated to bring the viewer into its characters’ minds: After sustaining a head injury the male lead loses his memory. In the moment he realizes he’s a stranger to himself, there’s a point-of-view shot of the actor looking into a mirrored sun-catcher, which blurs and distorts and replicates his face to the point of unrecognizability, to both him and us. And this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to meaningful filming techniques—it’s clear that somebody really thought about this show, and worked to film it in the most compelling, appropriate ways.

Then, of course, there’s TbDW’s big finale. It’s one thing to cry at the end of a drama, but it’s another to get goosebumps. An epic shootout staged in a house of mirrors, it’s the show’s final, greatest comment about personal identity and the power of fatherhood.

That, my friends, is some tasty kimchi. If number 56 on the DramaTic list of best dramas is this good, the mind boggles at how fabulous number 1 must be.