“Marriage has no guarantees. If that’s what you’re looking for, go live with a car battery.” – Erma Bombeck
These days, even a car battery can just die before its stipulated time. Any driver can tell you a car battery will kaput without any warning and at the worst of time, likewise with a marriage. With every matrimony of a couple, all parties go in with their hearts full and eyes clear on a future with sun-drenched sunsets and palm trees waving in the background. In reality, it’s all a pipe dream. Marriage is hard work. There are days that are perfect, but there will be days when you feel like a piece of dirt stuck in a rut. When it all goes down the hole, one needs to realise broken relationships are like glass; sometimes it’s better to leave the broken shards on the ground rather than hurt yourself by trying to put them back together.
The World of the Married is a remake of UK’s Doctor Foster (2015) which I have never seen and thus can’t make any comparisons, but knowing the Koreans, they can take something old and make it so compelling that the original pales in comparison. This series generated the highest audience in Korea and the word from the grapevine was so sterling that I cannot call myself a self-respecting cinephile if I don’t check this out – a voyeuristic thrill of watching a couple flailing themselves in spectacularly devilish ways before my eyes.
When we first see Ji Sun Woo (Kim Hee-ae), she appears to have it all. Successful, happy, a popular doctor and an Associate Director at a local hospital in Gosan, Ulsan city. A newly acquired family portrait tells us she is a doting mother to a teenage son, Joon Young (Jeon Jin-seo) and a wife to a noticeably younger-looking husband, Lee Tae Oh (Park Hae-joon), a promising filmmaker. But everything that she takes comfort in, her marriage and her friendships, will be crushed by the end of the first of 16 episodes. Welcome to the first hour of the next 22 hours of your life.
The World of the Married is nothing you have never seen before – a story of a cheating husband and his long suffering wife eventually giving him his just deserts. I thought the mystery of discovering the cheating will form the bulk of the story, but it surprised me by how it dealt with it in the first episode with a climax that is out of this world. The first arc of the beast of a story will climax in a show-hand fifth episode that had me in absolute delirium and utter confusion because where the heck is the story going to go for the next eleven episodes.
Stories like this play out a dime in a dozen in manipulative family TV dramas and in reality, but what makes this K-drama stand out is that it’s fashioned like a thriller with twists galore, tick-tock suspense and eleventh hour close-calls. In both the dramatic and suspense aspects, it scored stellar marks.
Led by Kim Hee-ae in the pivotal role of the wife, Kim carries the ubiquitous premise all the way to the last frame with an affective range that is stunning. She is able to dial into the anguish, agony and despondency of discovering how she was betrayed with aplomb. To this reviewer, she is uncannily beautiful in a matured sort of way, flashing her soulful eyes ravishingly, but she is never more moving than when her eyes are on the brink of tears. From the get-go it is easy to get behind her as she navigates the minefield of betrayal and revenge, and she is not against weaponising her sexuality.
Sun Woo’s despicable husband Lee Tae Oh never seeps down the road of caricatures. He will occasionally try on the mask of a budding misogynist just to see if it fits. The hateful dirty mind games between Tae Oh and Sun Woo certainly makes for compulsive viewing. I know I am supposed to hate Tae Oh, but his mind is so totally shut out from his own faults that I laughed and pitied him. In him, I see the behaviour of many who are blind to their own faults.
The World of the Married doesn’t just tell a revenge story which in itself is a rather finite story, it takes the breathing space of sixteen 85-minute episodes and uses it in sublime ways to comment on social hierarchy, gender roles, the stigma of divorce and bourgeois domestic happiness. Of all the subplots, I particularly enjoyed seeing how Ye Rim (Park Seon-yeong) and Je Hyuk’s (Kim Young-min, last seen in Crash Landing on You) arc played out, proving once again that in the aftermath of a tumultuous breakup you are really not missing the person, you are missing the feeling.
It was mentioned by Je Hyuk that there are two types of men: those who cheat and those who are caught with their pants down (pun intended). I don’t even want to think of the first category and I most definitely am not savvy enough to hide anything from my wifey. I can look at a phone message and my mouth curls up ever so slightly, and she will ask: “what’s so funny?” The World of the Married is a cautionary tale for me.
Part of the pleasure is listening to my wifey’s running commentary as we were absorbed by the drama. We have seen so many gripping shows on the telly, but I have never seen her so animated, throwing out lines like “noooo…. that’s a mistake!”, “oh… here comes the loud music” and “you deserve it, you idiot!” That’s when I realised the unfolding drama has the uncanny power to intersect with and form a quotidian relationship to the viewers’ lives. How many movies or series have that astonishing power? Not many.
Written by Daniel Chiam
BookMyShow Singapore 
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