by Michael McCarthy
There’s something almost novelistic about You and Everything Else. Watching it feels less like bingeing a television series and more like slowly making your way through a long, emotionally dense literary drama about friendship, resentment, jealousy, guilt and regret. For much of its runtime, the series is genuinely absorbing, thanks largely to phenomenal performances by Kim Go-eun as Ryu Eun-jun and Park Ji-hyun as Cheon Sang-yeon.
Unfortunately, while the acting remains excellent throughout, the writing eventually undermines both of its central characters to the point where I found myself struggling to like either of them by the finale.
At the beginning of the drama, the audience is very clearly guided toward sympathizing with Eun-jun while viewing Sang-yeon as selfish, vain and manipulative. Sang-yeon is essentially introduced as a diva — the kind of person who barges into other people’s lives and expects the world to revolve around her. But as the series unfolds and more of her history is revealed, the writers cleverly complicate that image. We begin to understand why Sang-yeon became who she is, and for several episodes the show does an excellent job of shifting audience sympathies back and forth between the two women.
That moral complexity is initially one of the show’s greatest strengths.
But somewhere along the way, the balance collapses.
By the end of the series, Sang-yeon feels even more manipulative and emotionally exhausting than she did at the start. Instead of growth, the character seems trapped in an endless cycle of selfishness and emotional chaos. Meanwhile, Eun-jun becomes increasingly difficult to empathize with as well. Her refusal to forgive Sang-yeon after repeated pleas for forgiveness eventually stops feeling emotionally honest and starts making her seem cold and vindictive. Likewise, her unwillingness to give Kim Sang-hak (played wonderfully by Kim Gun-woo) another chance becomes frustrating because Sang-hak consistently comes across as one of the drama’s few genuinely decent people.
Ironically, the series becomes so committed to emotional pain and unresolved bitterness that it eventually drains much of the emotional investment it spent so long carefully building.
The present-day storyline involving Sang-yeon’s terminal cancer diagnosis and desire to travel to Switzerland for assisted suicide also feels strangely disconnected from the rest of the series. Since so much of the drama takes place in the past, the euthanasia plotline often feels less like an organic culmination of the story and more like a device created to force the two women back together. It’s not that the storyline is inherently bad — it just feels oddly grafted onto a different type of drama.
The series’ handling of its transgender subplot also left me with mixed feelings.
Without getting into every detail, Sang-yeon eventually discovers that her sibling — who later died by suicide — was transgender and deeply traumatized by family rejection and societal expectations, including pressure surrounding military service and masculinity. On one hand, it’s genuinely notable to see a mainstream Korean drama even attempt to include a trans character sympathetically, since LGBTQ representation in K-dramas is still relatively rare compared to Western television.
But the emotional framing of Sang-yeon’s reaction becomes confusing and, at times, uncomfortable. After learning the truth, she becomes so emotionally shattered that she contemplates suicide herself. The problem is that the series never clearly establishes whether she is devastated because she finally understands how much suffering her sibling endured, or whether she is horrified by the revelation itself. That ambiguity weakens what could have been one of the show’s most emotionally powerful storylines.
And yet… despite all these criticisms, I can’t say I disliked the series overall.
The performances are simply too strong for that. Kim Go-eun and Park Ji-hyun fully commit to these emotionally messy characters, and the drama’s sprawling structure often feels ambitious in a way that many modern series no longer attempt. Even when the writing starts to falter, the actors continue grounding the material with believable emotional intensity.
In the end, You and Everything Else is a frustrating experience precisely because it comes so close to greatness. For long stretches, it feels rich, mature and emotionally fearless. But by the finale, the series seems less interested in meaningful emotional resolution than in keeping its characters trapped inside their suffering.
I admired it. I was moved by it. I was often impressed by it. But by the end, I also found myself emotionally exhausted by it.
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