Thirty Nine

February 16, 2022

Cha Mi-jo (Son Ye-jin), Jung Chan-young (Jeon Mi-do), and Jang Joo-hee (Kim Ji-hyun) — best friends for twenty years — are 38 going on 39. The Apgujeong world they inhabit establishes their comfortable but not uncomplicated lives.

February 16, 2022

Chan-young is diagnosed with a terminal illness. The drama does not delay this revelation or use it for shock — it is the story.

February 23, 2022

The three women's friendship — its history, its specific warmth, its capacity to hold grief — is the drama's subject. More than the romance plots, more than the illness arc.

February 23, 2022

Chan-young decides how she wants to spend the time she has. Her choices are her own — the drama honours this completely.

March 2, 2022

Evening walks along the Han River in Mapo. The drama uses the riverside for the conversations that cannot happen over coffee.

March 2, 2022

Mi-jo's romantic situation — a man who entered her life at a complicated moment — is given more texture than a secondary storyline usually receives.

March 9, 2022

Joo-hee's life — the parts she has not shared with her friends — is revealed.

March 9, 2022

The three women simply together — eating, talking, sitting in comfortable silence. The drama's quietest episode and one of its best.

March 16, 2022

The Apgujeong streets and shops in afternoon light. Both ordinary and suffused with the specific feeling of time being finite.

March 16, 2022

A birthday celebration the drama handles with complete sincerity — neither falsely uplifting nor miserably sentimental.

March 23, 2022

The drama's final arc. The three women in the last stretch of time they have as this specific configuration of friends.

March 23, 2022

The finale. A quiet, unsentimental drama about adult female friendship praised for its emotional honesty — Son Ye-jin's first drama after Crash Landing on You, and proof she had not been resting on that success.