Love Next Door — Jung So-min Delivers, But the Real Stars Are the Parents
Spoiler Alert — the following contains spoilers for Love Next Door.
After binging through most of Bae Suzy's catalogue — Start-Up, Doona!, Vagabond and more — I decided to switch gears and explore Jung So-min's work. She was so good as Mu Deok in Alchemy of Souls — which is genuinely one of the best K-dramas I've seen — that I had to find out if she delivers in other genres too.
Alchemy of Souls is set in a fantasy Joseon-era world, so I deliberately chose a modern show to see how she handles it. After some research, I landed on Love Next Door.
The Central Romance Is Good — But Not What Makes the Show
Jung So-min plays Bae Seok-ryu, whose central storyline revolves around a romance with her childhood best friend and literal next-door neighbour Choi Seung-ho, played by Jung Hae-in. I won't go deep into this thread — I'll just say it's well done but does feel familiar. You've seen variations of this premise before.
What makes Love Next Door genuinely different is everything woven around the central romance.
The Lavender Group — Revertigo in Action
The first thing that hooked me was the Lavender group — a friend group of four moms who've been close since high school and now have adult children. Park Ji-young and Jang Youngnam play two of them, the ones who live next door to each other, which is how the two romantic leads came to know each other in the first place. The show makes clear throughout that without the Lavender friendship, the central romance simply wouldn't exist.
What I loved about these four women is that despite having lived very different adult lives, they still interact exactly the way they did as teenagers. That phenomenon has a name — Revertigo — famously coined by How I Met Your Mother, which I've written about before. When you're around your oldest friends, something pulls you back to who you were with them. The intimacy of knowing someone for decades can't be manufactured.
This hit close to home. I still have my closest friends from high school. We've each taken completely different paths in adulthood — different careers, different timelines for marriage and kids, different rhythms of life. We don't get to see each other as often as we'd like. But whenever we're together, Revertigo kicks in immediately. There's a specific kind of comfort that only comes from knowing someone for more than 30 years. The show captures that beautifully.
The Dads — An Unexpected Highlight
I'm a dad, so I have to mention this subplot.
The two dads — played by Jo Han-chul and Lee Seung-joon — barely know each other at the start. But through a series of drinking sessions and increasingly honest conversations about life, they quietly become best friends. By the end of the show, Jo Han-chul's character is essentially begging his friend to retire early so they can spend more time together. Funny — and also kind of moving — because that's usually what a spouse asks, not a friend.
This storyline resonated with me personally. My group of high school friends recently had a conversation about how genuinely difficult it is for men to make new friends past a certain age — and apparently this is well documented. I've made friends through university and work over the years, but honestly I can count the ones I've stayed close to on one hand. Whether it's the absence of that long shared history, or the reality that when you change jobs you see each other less and less — it's just harder. The show understands this, and it plays it with both humour and real warmth.
Parents, Hopes and Expectations
The biggest thematic thread running through the whole show is the weight of parental expectations — on careers and on love.
Jung So-min's character quits her corporate job in the US and moves back to South Korea. Her mom is not happy. Then when she discovers her passion is cooking, even her father — who is a cook himself — pushes back because he knows how hard that path is.
This landed for me in a specific way. Growing up Chinese Canadian, academic and career expectations are high — and I mean high. Straight A's from middle school upward. Top university. A career in medicine, law, science or tech. And beyond academics, there's the full extracurricular program: Math tutoring, English tutoring, piano or violin, one sport, and Chinese school. That's the standard package for many Chinese Canadian families trying to set their kids up for success. I'm more relaxed than most — my wife and I don't put our kids through all of that — but the cultural pressure is real and I recognize it.
I'd guess the same expectations exist across much of East Asian culture, including South Korea. The show clearly agrees.
The second layer of parental expectation is around who their children will love. The show handles the usual tropes here, but there's one moment that caught me off guard — when Kim Ji-eun's character falls for someone who already has a child, and her mother is completely against it. Not out of cruelty, but out of genuine worry that her daughter's life will be harder. That's a more nuanced take than most K-dramas give this storyline.
By the end, every parent in the show comes to accept their child's choices. And the show makes a quiet point that sits with me — parents never really stop worrying about their kids, no matter how old those kids get. The main characters are 34 and still deeply entangled with their parents' hopes. I'm in my forties with a decent career and my mom still asks about work regularly. Partly curiosity. Partly something that never quite turns off.
Back to Jung So-min
The whole point of watching Love Next Door was to see Jung So-min outside of fantasy. And she delivered.
Like Bae Suzy, she moves between emotional and comedic registers naturally and with real skill. But her style is distinctly her own. She has this slightly crooked smile that appears whenever her character is being playful — it's completely specific to her and instantly recognizable to anyone who watches her. Fans of Jung So-min will know exactly what I mean.
Her physical comedy is also genuinely impressive. Throughout the show, her character keeps putting Jung Hae-in's character in a headlock — sneakily, almost casually. So near the end, when she's trying on a wedding dress and he teases her that she can't possibly headlock him while wearing it — and then she lures him in and does exactly that — I laughed out loud. I'm not sure many actresses could pull that off in a K-drama without it feeling forced. She makes it feel completely natural.
Final Thought
I've watched a lot of K-drama lately between my Bae Suzy run and now Jung So-min. My wife has been telling me to try a new C-drama next.
So — what should I watch? Drop your recommendations in the comments. I'm genuinely asking 🙏
