When Life Gives You Tangerines (Spring Is Near!): K-Drama Review

I finally got to see the hype and it was totally worth the time spent on every episode. I think I've read more reviews about this series than I ever did for other series before I got to see the full seires, episode by episode. It was on my top list for 2025 kdrama to see and even though I'm yet to see the others, this choice seem very perfect.

Talk of a storyline that is very relatable and well played by characters who may not have experienced even a tiny bit of all they had to show and make their viewers feel from it. A question came to my mind as I saw the series, how do the cast play these roles so well like they've been through it in reality? A superb cast!

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"When Life Gives You Tangerines" is a 2025 Korean television series, a coming-of-age and period drama, created by Kim Won-seok and starred by Park Bo-gum, IU, Moon So-ri and Park Hae-joon as the main cast. It's said to be based on a real-life couple from Jeju Island, the love story of Hong Kyung Ja and her late husband.

The series has 16 episodes with each one perfectly following up the story with good pacing and not much confusing throwbacks for better understanding of what they try to tell from the story. The story is big on romance, comedy, period era, family, life's struggle and most importantly, changes, to keep their viewers glued.

To be honest, I watched this series as slowly as I could to enjoy every bit of it and I made sure to only see it when I'm in the mood to continue from whenever I stopped. Some of the many reasons being that, I am a huge fan of the leading casts and some scenes were quite too overwhelming for me to continue and so I just take some break.

When Life Gives You Tangerines, The Story!

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Oh Ae-sun is a spirited girl who lost her mother at the age of ten and had to help take care of her step younger siblings until she was 18, she is a bright student and good in poetry but things got too difficult for her to continue schooling. She has a childhood, Yang Gwan-sik who is ready to give her anything but has nothing much to offer.

Gwan-sik took the bold step to ask his first and only love to be with him and they both decide to go through their storms together amidst the many challenges they had to deal with, starting from a mother in-law who is bent on making things hard for Ae-sun. Having their own children and making sure they live better, life gets harder.

The two lovebirds fought through the storms and kept embracing their spring season with so much gratitude as their children grow older, becoming rebellious to their ever loving care towards them. Ae-sun's daughter, turns out to take so much after her mother with an unexpected difference that made the story more beautiful for viewers.

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For me, the starting of their story (Yang Gwan-sik and Oh Ae-sun) was so beautiful, they gave so many epic scenes like where Gwan-sik swims across a huge ocean to be with his girl, the scenes where both tried to run away from home, having their first child, losing their third child... All those scenes were so emotional and memorable.

It was more beautiful to see them being all lovey dovey even in their fifties and recounting their happy days even when life have thrown more Tangerines their way. It's rare in our world to see couple stay together through their storms but it happens and I like how this series gave a beautiful reminder to all the couples out there.

My review won't be complete without mentioning the character who played the husband to their daughter, Kim Seon-ho. He played the perfect guy who falls and gets married to his love, even though not a first but it felt like a first. Continuing the unconditional love legacy Gwan-sik had made his daughter grow up to see that it truly exists.

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