Review of Dear Hyeri / 나의 해리에게

If you’re new here to my blog, welcome! You can read more reviews of dramas, books, and movies on my blog if you end up liking this post. But if you’re not here: you’ve probably been noticing that I’ve cranked up the drama reviews lately, especially when it comes to Korean dramas.

All of this stems from the fact that in the summer of 2024, I spent all of it abroad in Busan, South Korea. That meant I was fully funded to study at Pusan National University thanks to the U.S. State Department to learn Korean. I had a Korean roommate, language partner, and pretty much was heavily immersed in Korean culture and society.

So when I returned home to the United States in mid-August, it was an interesting time going back to the normal routine. I was reflecting a lot on my time in Korea, and I was missing certain elements, despite saying I wanted to go home when I was actually there.

I started watching a bunch of dramas to remind myself of what I left behind, including the people I had come to love, and this is how I watched Dear Hyeri. It wasn’t a lot of episodes, so the low commitment is what I needed during this time.

Let’s get into the review before I start rambling too much!

A news announcer with split personalities struggles with her main identity and her other one.

In this drama, the female lead, Joo Eun-ho, is an announcer who develops split personality disorder due to her past trauma involving her sister. At the beginning of the series she’s going around as her second personality often, named Hyeri (her sister’s name), and she doesn’t remember anything she does with this personality.

Eventually she does start writing down what she did as this personality in her journal, as whenever she would wake up from her time as Hyeri she wouldn’t know anything she just did. Hyeri works in a parking lot as an attendant, and befriends the announcer Kang Joo-yeon.

She even begins dating him at one point, but he has no idea that she isn’t who she says she is. A side plot going on here is that Joo-yeon’s coworker has a very obvious crush on him, but is friend zoned to the max because he is so fixated on Hyeri.

At the same time, as Eun-ho begins struggling with her own announcing job, her ex-boyfriend Jung Hyun-oh comes back into her life. He’s the golden boy, and everyone wants to work with him, but he has his own issues too at the end of the day.

He’s an announcer too, and from what we can see on the show, he still cares for her. However, after seven years of dating, he broke up with her for reasons that become clearer throughout the course of the show, especially when Eun-ho overhears that he is getting married to someone else.

The differences between Hyeri and Eun-ho become even more stark, but as the series goes on, it becomes harder to distinguish the two. It becomes hard because her two personalities’ lives are starting to blend together and people begin realizing the truth behind who “Hyeri” really is.

All in all, I was really interested in this plot line in the beginning, but as I’ll discuss in the next section, it starts really falling flat when the show delves more into romance territory in the final third of its story.

Overall Thoughts

I think for me, the show was great until we started hitting episode eight or nine. I can’t vouch at all for the representation of Eun-ho’s disorder, so I think a more professional opinion would be needed if you want to know about how that was depicted on-screen.

It was the romance that did me in for the show. I don’t want to include major spoilers in this review, but I think that I would’ve been fine if this weren’t a show that included romance at all and focused more on Eun-ho’s healing journey and realizing she has this disorder.

I’m also not the biggest fan of thinking of returning to your ex when he dumped you. Like girl I get the longing you’re probably feeling, but the relationship ended once already. We don’t know if it’ll turn out the same way in the end.

All in all: I thought this was a solid show until it gave me whiplash with the tonal shifts. But this is just my opinion, and taste is subjective. Maybe someone else would be more interested in it than I was! And that’s okay, as how we react to these shows are highly subjective.

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