Seulgiroun Euisasaenghal: Hospital Playlist - Season 1
August 9, 2021 6:01 PM - Season 1 (Full Season) - Subscribe

Hospital Playlist tells the story of five doctors who have been friends since they entered medical school in 1999.

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KDramaLove Review: "An exemplary medical drama that proved wildly popular worldwide, Hospital Playlist (2020) was a class act all the way, with an outstanding cast of established players who had fantastic chemistry together."

HelloKPop review

TheFangirlVerdict Review: "Warm, wholesome goodness dressed in hospital garb, Hospital Playlist is the medical themed drama that even the medical drama-averse can easily love.

Hospital Playlist checks a lot of boxes, for me. The writing and directing is assured; the cast is outstanding individually and together; the overall feel is balanced, with enough attention given to the cases of the day without losing focus on our key characters; the music is heartfelt and breezy, made even more special when performed by the cast.

The slice-of-life approach might feel meandering and slow to some, but in exchange, you really feel like a fly on these characters’ walls, in their professional and personal capacities. The long episodes might feel intimidating at first, but once you grow to love the characters, the length of the episodes become more of a boon than a bane."
posted by oh yeah! (8 comments total)
 
I'd hoped to finish watching this first season before season 2 started on Netflix back in June, but the episodes are so long, and I was trying to keep up with a bunch of other new kdramas dropping new episodes weekly that I quickly fell behind and only made it to the finale this weekend. I doubt I'll catch up with season 2 before the September 2nd finale, but I'll get there eventually.

Anyway, I agree with all the positive reviews. Great ensemble, and a good mix of outcomes for the patients -- the sad ones are really sad (the stillbirth diagnosis scene, oof), but it's not unrelenting tragedy after tragedy like some medical shows. And Jo Jung Suk is hilarious.
posted by oh yeah! at 6:16 PM on August 9, 2021


Hmm, I’ve been meaning to watch this…thank you for the reminder! It sounds really good.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 9:54 PM on August 12, 2021


I really enjoyed these characters, but I struggled to keep track of who’s who when they were wearing surgical masks and glasses with loupes attached. It helped that each doctor had a different specialty; if it’s a liver transplant, then it must be Ik Jun and if it’s a pediatric case, then it’s probably Jung Won (unless it’s a kid who needs a liver transplant ☹). Ik Jun is a great character, and the actor is multi-talented, but as boyfriend material goes, his constant clowning around would drive me nuts, so I was rooting for, the neurosurgery resident as Song Hwa’s love interest. Plus that actor, Kim Joon Han, played a smug and entitled boyfriend in One Spring Night, so I wanted him to be rewarded for playing a humble and generous guy on HP (he’s not part of the cast for HP2, so I think I’m out of luck).

While I love the friendship of the 5 main characters, I’m also really enjoying the parallel relationships that seem to be forming for the older generation (Jung Won’s mother, the hospital administrator, Suk Hyung's mother, etc.) The actress who plays Ro Sa looked so familiar, but I just couldn’t place her – it turns out she portrayed Mrs. Choi, the Grandma who sold corn dogs on Start-Up. I think her transformation between those two roles was amazing.

Now I'm moving directly on to HP2, with episodes of Misaeng and The King Eternal Monarch mixed in.
posted by kbar1 at 5:35 PM on August 23, 2021 [1 favorite]


What's the gore factor like in this show? (Turns out I have a very low tolerance - I couldn't make it through the first episode of Dr. Romantic)
posted by trig at 6:15 PM on August 23, 2021


The five main leads are surgeons, so there will be blood, but not the gratuitous gore you might see in an emergency room drama (I haven’t seen Dr. Romantic so I can’t compare HP to that). Most of the time it’s realistically presented with the surgeon demonstrating a procedure to the resident or intern. There are close up shots of hearts and livers that I believe were real, but the filming of those scenes felt more like a documentary than a drama. Episode 8 dramatized a placental abruption which was quite bloody and the resulting C-Section looked and sounded real to me (but it was not). Oh, and there was a scene in episode 2 involving maggots – I averted my eyes.

Each episode is about 1 hour and 20 minutes, but I’d estimate that they spend less than 10 minutes performing surgery or other procedures that might show blood. Most of the show is about friendship, discussing medical procedures, drinking coffee, eating lots of food, and band practice.
posted by kbar1 at 6:47 PM on August 24, 2021


Thanks kbar1
posted by trig at 5:45 AM on August 25, 2021


Yeah, there are occasional shots of someone making their first incision, or touching a beating heart for the first time, or of a whole organ plunked on a tray after being removed, but most of the time the surgery site is off-camera, or 'picture-in-picture' view where the surgeons are looking at a screen magnification of what they're working on. But they don't tend to linger over it, or start the scene on it, so, I think it would be pretty easy to avert your eyes without missing many subtitles.

They do have some pretty realistic-looking premie-baby-dummies, so, this show might be rough for anyone dealing with infertility/miscarriage or especially upset by children in distress. There are a lot of successful outcomes for the pediatric & OBGYN patients, but, there are definitely some baby/child patients who die, and a very heart wrenching scene of near-term mother learning that her baby will be a stillbirth. But they tend to have more successes than tragedies, and I think they tend to end episodes on the happier ones rather than on the sad ones.
posted by oh yeah! at 9:45 AM on August 25, 2021


Thank you too!
I think I'll give it a try eventually and see how it goes. Some day. It's not only directly seeing blood and gore that bothers me (though it does, especially when stuff squelches) but even things that aren't directly shown can be a problem. Like, there was a lot of gore in that Dr. Romantic ep, but iirc the point where I gave up was when they had an ER patient whose abdomen had been impaled by a long pole connected to a concrete block (construction accident) and it was emphasized a million times how that pole had to be kept completely stable to avoid killing the guy and then of course someone gets jostled and the pole gets wrenched to the side and I don't think I could see the damage onscreen - but my brain very viscerally filled in the blanks.
So we'll see!

(by the way, kbar1, enjoy Misaeng - I thought it was incredible.)
posted by trig at 11:33 AM on August 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


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