Hallyu is still going strong, and we do our own little bit to keep the wave alive by watching Korean dramas.

That Winter, the Wind Blows, The Ghost, and Healer were great introductions to the genre, and offered us many hours of entertainment.

Since then, our choices have proved a little more iffy. One was The Suspicious Housekeeper, a remake of a Japanese drama (as indeed was Winter). I struggled with this much more than with the previous three, which I followed avidly.

It's a story of a broken family. Mum committed suicide because Dad was having an affair. The housekeeper arrives to subdue the domestic chaos, but brings along lots of issues of her own.

Personally I found it schizophrenic. Was it a family drama, or a thriller? Was it for kids (surely not... such heavy themes...), or for adults (surely a little teensy, if so)?

The acting was good, that's for sure. Dad slowly acquires some backbone over the course of the episodes. The kids were great, although I guess you can have too much of those trademark affecting stares... And how Ji Woo Choi (who plays the housekeeper) manages to put all that expression into an unsmiling, rigid face is quite remarkable.

But essentially she plays a weird character. Omniscient and super-capable, she's also totally vulnerable to emotional blackmail. Initially robotic and fatalistic, she regains some humanity over the course of the series, but she remains, it has to be said, extremely odd.

There's always a fine line between the larger than life (without which no K-drama comes into being) and the downright incredible. Many of these characters threaten to cross it, none more so than the former stalker Ji-hoon Seo -- he of the impeccably curled lip.

But I'm clearly on the losing side. This reviewer sees Housekeeper as "an exceptional, unique Korean drama with a fantastic cast". And this one gives it 9/10, and thinks "it shows the reality of our society".

The Painter of Wind, our first historical drama, grew on me over time. This series is based on a novel by Jung-myeong Kee, which deals with the life of 18th-century Korean painter Yun-bok Shin. We know very little about this person except that he painted exquisite pictures of women. So the novel poses the hypothetical question, "What if Yun-bok Shin was actually a girl dressed in men's clothes?"

I found the pace of the first few episodes excruciatingly slow. The second half (where the "detective" element kicks in) is much more enjoyable. But throughout it is beautifully filmed, full of gorgeous costumes and lovingly created interiors -- and of course, Korean art, which I now want to see more of. This reviewer finds it "mesmerizing" -- and it is, once it gets going.

Plus it was fun to spot places we thought we'd visited.









Like many, I found the final episode curiously unsatisfying. It's not that I yearn for "happy endings". But Danwon had sacrificed so much... And Hyewon clearly likes him... I guess he's a bit old for her. But if they didn't want to be a couple, couldn't they at least have hung out as painting buddies?

This reviewer interprets the conclusion as "a happy ending for Yun-bok [Hyewon] and Jeong-hyang [the courtesan, whom -- kind of confusingly -- the cross-dressed Yun-bok falls in love with]... Yun-bok's mentor may be a father to her, but Jeong-hyang is her heart." But this one is thoroughly discontented: "I will not discuss the ending because I refuse to accept it. In my mind, Danwon and Hyewon... ran away to some peaceful, faraway land, had two children and painted landscapes and portraits for the rest of their lives. The end."

You see how involved we get?

We're currently watching Big Thing. This is the story of a young woman's journey right to the top of political life.

Borgen it's not. But it's arguably no more belief-stretching than what's really happening in South Korean politics at the moment...

And I must admit that once we got through the somewhat inauspicious opening episode, I began to find it pretty enjoyable. The young politician arrives starry-eyed, all buoyed up by the thought of changing the world, and making politics clean. If only it were possible...