Review of Welcome to Samdal-ri / 웰컴투 삼달리

In the summer of 2024, which wasn’t too long after the time I’m typing this originally, I spent the entire summer living in Busan, South Korea. I had a Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. State Department, which meant I was fully funded to study Korean language at Pusan National University.

Because I was living in Korea at the time through an intensive immersive program, I didn’t spend a lot of time wanting to watch Korean dramas like I usually did.

If I wanted to watch a television show or movie, I tended to go for English language content because of how my brain was slowly falling apart if I tried to watch something in Korean.

I was at a PC Bang, or an internet cafe, towards the beginning of the program when I tried to watch Welcome to Samdal-ri. This was about when I realized that I couldn’t keep consuming Korean content, as I only got four episodes in total the entire summer before I gave up. The PC Bang did make me realize that I wanted a bigger screen computer in general.

Anyways, I finally finished the show in September 2024, almost a month after coming home from Korea. I took my sweet time trying to get through this show, which was fine by me at the end of the day—sometimes some shows aren’t meant to be binge watched in one go.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in this introduction.

A disgraced photographer returns home to Jeju, where she finds herself again—and love.

In this series, the female lead is Cho Sam-dal, a prominent photographer in Seoul who’s going through a series of catastrophic events. One of the girls who works at her photography studio has accused her of being a bully and taking her down intentionally, and the media goes on a frenzy going against Sam-dal right before her first fashion photography exhibit is due to open.

Suddenly, all of her clients are withdrawing, and no one wants anything to do with her except the other two girls who work at the studio. Those two are the only ones who know that the other girl lied, and later in the show they realize this girl also did something that could probably get her canceled, too.

With her career and relationship down the drain, Sam-dal gathers her sisters and they head back to their home in Jeju-do. Their mother, the head haenyeo of the island, is surprised to see them, but allows them back into the house, where the rest of the series takes place.

It’s on Jeju that Sam-dal reunites with her childhood friend Yong-pil. He’s become a weather forecaster for the island, as we see when he was younger his mother died due to the weather not being accurately predicted. This left his father pretty traumatized, as well as Sam-dal’s mother, as Yong-pil’s mother was her good friend.

All though things are a little awkward at first between Yong-pil and Sam-dal, we’ll see over the course of the series how their relationship starts to rekindle and even become romantic. Other tensions do come bleeding in: back in Seoul, Sam-dal keeps appearing on the news as her former employee badmouths her.

I went to Jeju-do for the first time while I was abroad this summer, and I will say I loved seeing this kind of representation on the screen. I don’t know if I caught it properly or misheard, but there was one point in the show where I heard the Jeju dialect being used between characters.

Overall Thoughts

This isn’t a super complicated drama when it comes to the plot. I found it to be pretty straightforward, even with the B plots and romance elements. It’s laidback in many different ways, just like island life in general. And while this might not be the most exciting drama, but it can be entertaining depending on what you’re looking for.

I wasn’t looking for high art or something thought provocative, but I did find some of the themes in this show to be worth thinking about.

One was the cancel culture that emerged throughout the show—this plot point felt a little like a dead horse being beaten when it kept coming back, but it’s worth having a conversation about with our current society.

The romance was also just okay. I didn’t find the two of them to have really good chemistry, but they were cute together. It’s a classic trope and it was done right. It wasn’t revolutionary, but it was done right.

Go watch this if you’re interested and have some spare time. I’d say it’s worth giving a chance if you vibe with the synopsis.

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