Its Okay To Not Be Okay — Soothes the mind and heals the heart
Before watching the show:
I had lost interest in the love-story and romance genre a long time ago. I don’t remember the last good love-story I had watched or read.
Most shows and movies dealing with mental illnesses either have a mental hospital with a gloomy ambiance or mental patients who are too manic and crazy.
When we think of siblings love, we generally want to remember the good and happy moments and show the unity and respect among them.
About the show:
This is what a mental hospital should be:
Welcome to OK Psychiatric Hospital — a happy, cheery and sunny place where mental patients are smiling, hopeful and optimistic. Mental diseases may still be a stigma outside but within the campus of this hospital, it is treated like any other disease by kind and considerate doctors and nurses. It is a place that makes you believe that healing can happen. This is the place where not only the patients in show heal their mental wounds, but also the three main characters of the who are not patients but employees or contractors.
Same-same but different-different love story:
The hero (Gang-tae) and heroine (Moon-young) both are victims of a personal loss early in their childhood. Yet the kind of person they grow up to be are polar opposites, due to their initial upbringing and their responsibilities in life. Polar opposites attract is something you must have heard but polar opposites heal is something you will witness in this show. I found their reluctant romance to be quite interesting, where one person is chasing and the other person is running away due to some preconceived notions.
Bitter-sweet love story of Moon brothers:
When a 12 year old orphan boy (Moon Gang-tae) has to take care of his autistic elder brother (Moon Sang-tae) and change his city every year due to Sang-tae’s trauma, life can’t be easy. Yet the two survive and always look out for each other. They try to live a stable life as much as possible, and keep their emotional baggage buried from everyone.
An unlikely but adorable friendship:
This might be a bit of a spoiler but I have to mention it here because it is one of my favorite parts of the show. The friendship between Moon-young and Sang-tae is interesting because both tend to speak the truth — Moon-young enjoys speaking the truth to disturb others and Sang-tae only speaks the truth. Hence they fight and bicker but eventually learn to care for each other perhaps because they are quite similar in many aspects and have suffered similar tragedies in childhood.
The supporting cast:
Every character in this show is so lovable and adorable that you’d really want to meet them in real life and wish for such people to be an integral part of your life. There’s Jae-soo (hero’s friend), Ju-ri (another girl who likes the hero), Soon-deok (Ju-ri’s mother who takes care of Moon brothers and other tenants in her house), Ji-wang (Director at the OK Psychiatric Hospital), Sang-in (heroine’s book publisher), Seung-jae (who hates her boss Sang-in) and many others. My favorite are the two oldies — Ji-wang and Soon-deok.
The Storytelling with impressionable visuals and unforgettable music:
This show excels in storytelling maybe because it is a story of an author of bestselling fairy tale books. Each episode is inspired by some fairy tale. The effect is effectively enhanced with impressionable visuals and unforgettable music that fits seamlessly into the mood, setting and situation of the show. The show does get grim at some points, during which the creators have added some needed funny moments as a relief — I really liked this.
The finale was just perfect. The three main characters and some other supporting characters got what they desired and they all lived happily ever after.
After watching the show:
My wife and I watched this show on Netflix. Fortunately for us Netflix has provided an excellent Hindi-dubbed version of this show which further enhanced our viewing experience. Both of us are immensely impressed with this show especially the way every character overcomes their trauma and grief and learns to accept themselves and move on to life a better life.
My biggest takeaway from this show is something the director of the psychiatric hospital had said (I am paraphrasing):
“Two weak people can take support of each other to become strong.”
AND
“If it hurts to stay away from each other and it hurts to stay together, it is better to stay together and face the misery together.”
There are many more such wonderful one-liners that leave a deep impression during the show.
Don’t let the subtitles discourage you. Do check out this amazing emotional ride that dwells into traumas suffered by many characters and how they overcome those with understanding and compassion of other people.
You’ll laugh, cry and equally enjoy both.
