By Jae-Ha Kim
Substack
May 28, 2025
☆☆☆ (out of ☆☆☆☆)
Lee Hae-sook (played by Kim Hye-ja)
Ko Nak-joon (played by Son Suk-ku)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.
tl;dr Capsule review: This superb K-drama made it into my annual Best K-dramas of 2025 list in Teen Vogue:
In an innovative take on a May-December romance, Heavenly Ever After centers on a couple in their eighties. Hae-sook (played by the legendary Kim Hye-ja of Mother) is a hardworking money lender who also takes care of her bedridden husband Nak-joon (Son Suk-ku). Not long after he tells her that she is at her most beautiful at her current age, he dies. Her will to live wanes and she follows him up to heaven. Given the choice to remain the same age or younger, she remembers his words to her. So she’s surprised, disappointed, and embarrassed when she is reunited with Nak-joon … who chose to look like his 30-something self.
This show could’ve used the five-decade physical age gap for cheap laughs. But what it does is present a deeper look at a complicated relationship and how that manifests when you are given a second chance at life (amongst the dead). Once Nak-joon gets used to seeing Hae-sook again, he flirts with her, showing that he’s still very much in love and attracted to her physically. Heavenly Ever After is a slice-of-life series that tackles ageism, sexism, poverty, child trafficking, and alcoholism. (The worst offenders are relegated to hell in a shockingly gross episode where the punishment for an immoral life on earth includes tongue ripping.) And while all people may not go to heaven, all dogs clearly do. In a beautifully-filmed short but memorable sequence, newbies sent up to heaven are apprehensive and frightened – until they recognize their pets, who’ve patiently waited for them to arrive. (Netflix)
But there’s so much more to this series that I couldn’t fit into a short blurb. So I wanted to do a deeper dive into the series.
🚨 There are mild spoiler alerts. (I will put major spoiler alerts at the bottom of this review.)
• When Hae-sook gets to heaven, she is given a device that all senior citizens receive. Unlike most people, this device has no filter and says exactly what she is thinking, leaving room for a lot of comedic highlights.
• In the first episode, viewers are introduced to a little girl named Young-ae (portrayed by Lee Jung-eun). Her father was a gambler who abused and neglected her. He took out a loan from Hae-sook to pay off his debts. But when he was unable to repay her, she said she would take litle Young-ae instead. You could take that one of two ways: Hae-sook was a cruel woman who took a child to punish the father. Or, the way I looked at it, the father was a hopeless gambler who couldn’t properly raise his daughter, so she decided to raise the girl. Young-ae grew up to become Hae-sook’s enforcer.
• Actress Choi Hee-jin plays the human version of Hae-sook’s cat, Sonya. Choi is purrrrfect in her role. (Her facial features reminded me a lot of Blackpink’s Jennie.)
• Episode 5 was difficult to watch, because it was gross as hell. Appropriately so, I suppose, because it was set in 지옥. When Hae-sook is temporarily downgraded to hell, Ja-jang — a cute little dog — goes there to try to find her. Instead, he recognizes his former abusive owner, who had named him 개똥, which literally means dog shit in Korean. Ja-jang had always wanted to punish his owner. But when the latter is about to burn in a pit of molten lava (or something of that ilk), Ja-jang resues him. Because that’s the kind of dog that he is. Hell for Ja-jang would’ve been letting a man die, even if the latter deserved to.
• In Episode 6, viewers are reminded that not too long ago, Korea was a poverty-stricken nation. A desperate mother was so poor that she put her two children in an orphanage, intending to come back for them when she had earned enough money to properly feed them. But when she returned to bring them back home, they were gone. I had initially assumed they had been adopted. But I don’t think that was the case. When the sister got married, her older brother (rather than an adoptive father) — walked her down the aisle. So it’s likely they grew up in an orphanage until they aged out at 18. They never knew that their mother hadn’t abandoned them, and that she had saved money for them until the day she died. Nak-joon, who has a job working between heaven and earth, is sent to grant the mother’s wish. He delivers the bank books for her children. (A 2022 amendment to the Child Welfare Act extended orphans’ protected status to the age of 24. But at the time that these siblings grew up in an orphanage, independent life would’ve begun when they turned 18.)
• The monster-in-law concept is explored in Episodes 7 and 8, but puts the onus on Nak-joon, for not protecting his wife from his mother’s verbal wrath. Unlike the scenario in “When Life Gives You Tangerines” — where the husband moved his family out of his mother’s house to protect his wife — he reprimands Hae-sook for not being more understanding of his mother. Hae-sook has vivid memories of eating fish heads while her husband and his mother ate the white meat.
When her mother-in-law refers to Hae-sook as 아가, or baby, viewers are cued in that there’s something more going on than we initially thought. The back story depicts how Hae-sook and her mother-in-law’s pasts worked together to define their future, with Hae-sook paying for the sins of her past incarnations. As the god-like figure in heaven tells Hae-sook, “If you want to know your past life, just look at the world like a mirror. Whoever torments you now, was actually yourself in the past.”
• Before he is reincarnated, Mandu — one of the street dogs — is given the choice of picking his new owner. Instead of picking someone with money who can buy him all the best, Mandu selects a homeless man. After all the stories he’s heard from other pets who spent most of their time alone, waiting for their people to return home from work, he wanted a companion who would be with him 24/7. (Of course, if the man ended up getting a job, Mandu would be at home by himself. But I’m not going to dwell on that point.)
Airdates: Twelve episodes, about 70 minutes each, aired from April 19 to May 25, 2025, on JTBC in South Korea. (I watched this on Netflix in the United States.)
Spoiler Alert: There is a lot to unpack. We get confirmation that the pastor is Hae-sook and Nak-joon’s son, Eun-ho. While out shopping with him, Hae-sook lost Eun-ho in a crowded market. She had always told him that if they were separated, he should wait for her at the church steps and she would find him. But a corrupt cop, who is part of a child-trafficking ring, kidnaps him. At five, Eun-ho was still small and cute enough to be attractive to potential adoptive parents. But the traffickers treated him as an object, stripping him of most of his clothes and not feeding him. He froze to death alone in the shed he had been locked up in.
One of the things that confused me was that Eun-ho was a child when he died, but he was a pastor in heaven. I’m just going to assume that he arrived in heaven as a little boy and was allowed to mature into an adult in heaven.
I had guessed that the pastor was Eun-ho all along. But a plot point that surprised me was the connection between Young-ae and Hae-sook, and Young-ae and her abusive father. Before being reincarnated as his daughter, Young-ae had been his concubine. She gave birth to a daughter she wasn’t allowed to raise. The baby she gave birth to was Hae-sook. In their next lives, Hae-sook took in little Young-ae and raised her like her own daughter.
© 2025 JAE-HA KIM | All Rights Reserved
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