He spends his days caring for patients on a psychiatric ward and his nights carrying a weight he has never been allowed to set down; she writes fairy tales for children and privately believes none of them. It's Okay to Not Be Okay, the 2020 Korean series directed by Park Shin-woo, puts these two people in the same room and watches what happens.
What is It's Okay to Not Be Okay about?
A caregiver on a psychiatric ward has built his whole adult life around responsibility. He looks after others professionally, and he has shouldered a heavy family obligation for as long as he can remember, leaving no space for wants of his own. Into that tightly managed existence walks a successful author of children's books, a woman whose stories are full of wonder and whose own outlook is anything but. Their first encounters are prickly and unpromising. Yet as their paths keep crossing, each begins to loosen something in the other: he starts to admit how much he has buried, and she is forced to look at why she writes about happy endings she refuses to trust. The series follows that slow, uneven process of two damaged people learning to be honest, with comedy and melodrama taking turns at the wheel.
About the cast
Kim Soo-hyun and Seo Ye-ji lead the cast, with Oh Jung-se, Park Jin-joo, Kim Chang-wan, Jang Young-nam, Kim Mi-kyeong and Kang Ki-Doong rounding out the ensemble around the hospital, the family and the publishing world the story moves through.
Context & significance
It's Okay to Not Be Okay arrived in 2020 and sits at the intersection of three genres the brief lists for it: comedy, drama and romance. Each episode runs around seventy-five minutes, which gives the show room to shift register within a single instalment, from sharp verbal sparring to extended, quiet scenes of care. Its setting on a psychiatric ward is unusual for a romantic series, and the show uses it to make mental health, trauma and the long tail of childhood experience part of its everyday texture rather than a one-off issue episode.
Watching It's Okay to Not Be Okay on Ktime
The full series streams on K-Time, with the long-form episodes playable straight through from the Persian-language interface. You will need a K-Time account to watch; creating one and logging in is free, and the catalogue, search and player are all presented in Farsi for the Iranian diaspora audience the service is built for.