Our Beloved Summer follows Choi Ung and Kook Yeon-su, former high school sweethearts who broke up five years ago and swore never to see each other again. Their plans crumble when a documentary they filmed as students goes viral, and the production team wants a follow-up. Forced back into each other’s orbits, they must navigate lingering feelings while maintaining the fiction that they’ve moved on. The show unfolds in two timelines, intercutting the warmth of their past relationship with the awkwardness of their present reunion.
The show earned a devoted following for its gentle pace and emotional authenticity. Community response appreciates its restrained approach to romance and its visually distinctive style, while some viewers find it too slow for its premise.
The Past and Present of Love
The dual-timeline structure is the show’s most effective storytelling tool. The contrast between the carefree high school relationship and the guarded adult interactions creates a constant emotional tension that the show mines expertly. Each timeline enriches the other: the past explains why the present is so painful, and the present gives the past a bittersweet quality that pure nostalgia couldn’t achieve. The editing between timelines is handled with real skill.
Choi Woo-shik and Kim Da-mi bring contrasting energies to the leads that create a compelling dynamic in both timelines. Woo-shik’s Choi Ung is an introverted illustrator who hides behind laziness, while Kim Da-mi’s Yeon-su is a driven professional who hides behind ambition. The show reveals that both facades are responses to the same heartbreak, and watching them recognize this in each other provides the show’s most rewarding moments.
The visual style is notably elegant. The show uses soft colors, careful framing, and a specific visual palette that makes it look distinct from most K-dramas. The documentary-within-the-show device adds another visual layer, and the contrast between the warm documentary footage and the cooler present-day cinematography reinforces the thematic divide between past and present.
Beautiful But Thin
The show’s gentle pace becomes a liability across sixteen episodes. The central question of whether the leads will reconnect can only sustain so much runtime, and the middle episodes in particular feel like they’re stalling. The show stretches emotional beats that would be more powerful if compressed, and certain episodes end without having advanced the relationship or the plot meaningfully.
The secondary characters don’t receive enough development to fully support the main story. The second-lead romantic interest and various friend characters feel like they exist to complicate the main pairing rather than as fully realized people. The show is so focused on its central couple that the surrounding world sometimes feels like a stage set rather than a populated world.
Some viewers find the leads’ communication issues frustrating rather than dramatic. Both Choi Ung and Yeon-su could resolve their situation with a single honest conversation, and the show’s contrivances to prevent this can feel manipulative. The obstacles keeping them apart are internal rather than external, which is thematically appropriate but can test patience when repeated across many episodes.
Why First Love Haunts
Our Beloved Summer’s most honest insight is that first love doesn’t haunt you because it was perfect but because it shaped you before you knew who you were. The show understands that returning to a past relationship isn’t really about the other person but about confronting the version of yourself you left behind. This self-reflective quality gives the romance more depth than standard second-chance love stories typically achieve.
Should You Watch Our Beloved Summer?
If you appreciate slow, visually beautiful romance that prioritizes mood over plot, this show offers a lovely viewing experience. It’s particularly suited to viewers who enjoy watching characters gradually lower their defenses. Skip it if slow pacing frustrates you, or if sixteen episodes of “just talk to each other” sounds like your idea of dramatic hell.
The Verdict on Our Beloved Summer
Our Beloved Summer is a gentle, aesthetically pleasing romance that handles its second-chance premise with emotional care and visual distinction. It’s too long for its story and too thin in its secondary elements, but the central dynamic between its leads is authentic and moving. The show works best when it trusts its quiet moments, and at its peak, it captures the specific ache of revisiting a love you thought you’d outgrown.