Mine is a Korean Drama that originally aired in May and June of 2021. It ran for 12 episodes.
It centers around the Han family, the filthy rich owners of a conglomerate called Hyeowon Group. Hi-soo, wife of second son Han Ji-yong, visits an orphanage that the family sponsors. Mother Emma, the nun who runs the orphanage, gets Hi-soo to offer a job to Kim Yu-yeon, a teacher at the orphanage who is deeply in debt. Yu-yeon, who is mild-mannered and dresses modestly, agrees to work for the Han family as a maid. Hi-Soo's sister-in-law Seo-hyun, wife to first son Han Jin-ho, goes looking for a tutor for Ha-joon, Ji-yong's son. She hires Kang Ja-kyung, who is more flashy and assertive than the other new hire, meek Yu-yeon.
At a sumptuous banquet—the Han family is so damn rich that each guest at dinner gets their own waiter—patriarch Han Suk-chul announces that the dinner is the last time the family will celebrate "her". He then says that he is bestowing a gift, and the servants bring out an enormous blue diamond. Before Suk-chul can give out the diamond, a servant whispers something into his ear. Whatever it is, Suk-chul is horrified. In fact, he collapses, and falls into a coma.
Arriving back home shortly after this incident is Han Soo-hyuk, who looks to be of college age and is son to Jin-ho. Soo-hyuk and Yu-yeon can't stop sneaking glances at each other, and the sexual tension is obvious.
But before all of the above, the first scene, set some 60 days after the chronological start of the story, has Mother Emma leaving a funeral to go to the police. She reports that there's been a murder.
Tropes:
- The Alcoholic: Jin-ho, who has a habit of getting roaring drunk and passing out in public places, like hallways of the mansion. By episode 10, his wife has him involuntarily committed to rehab.
- Answer Cut:
- In the first episode Seo-hyun says that she hired as the new tutor "someone who was perfect." That statement is immediately followed by a cut to Ja-kyung, who is shown for the first time.
- It's implied that Jin-hee is the one who leaked to the reporter about Hi-soo not being Ha-joon's bio mom—until she vociferously denies it. She then wonders "Then who was it?". Cut to a smugly satisfied Ja-kyung.
- Arranged Marriage: Soo-hyuk has been paired off with another wealthy young lady, Ah-rim. He isn't happy about it.
- As You Know: Mother Emma makes sure to point out that it's been "five years since donations started", so the audience understands that the Hans sponsor the orphanage and that's why Hi-soo is there.
- Awful Wedded Life: Two of the three Han children are trapped in terrible marriages. Jin-ho and Seo-hyun can't stand each other, he cheats on her constantly, and oh by the way Seo-hyun is a lesbian. Han Jin-hee's husband is desperate to divorce her. Then there's second son Han Ji-yong; his marriage to Hi-soo seems healthy and stable, but when his old lover Ja-kyung pops back into his life again, he starts cheating almost immediately.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: Oh dear, the Hans.
- Patriarch Suk-chul has three different children by three different women.
- Eldest son Jin-ho is stuck in a poisonous marriage to Seo-hyun. He observes that she doesn't love him and doesn't even like him, and doesn't like his son either, so he doesn't understand why she married him. Seo-hyun says that the only reason she doesn't get a divorce is the bad publicity. Also, he's an alcoholic and serial philanderer and she's a closeted lesbian.
- Middle son Ji-yong has an apparently stable marriage to Hi-soo, and they're good parents to son Ha-joon...except that Ha-joon is actually Ji-yong's love child by an old girlfriend, and that girlfriend has wormed her way back into the household under a fake identity.
- Only daughter Jin-hee is also stuck in a miserable failed marriage. She has a terrible temper problem and is prone to fits of screaming rage.
- Family scion Soo-hyuk, Jin-ho's son, is miserably unhappy about his impending Arranged Marriage to a society girl. He falls in love with Yu-yeon, the maid.
- Bad Boss:
- Jin-hee, only daughter of the Han family, loses her shit with the employees of one of the bakeries she runs. She physically assaults the manager, shoving him before flinging cream pastries at him and making a mess. Later she is embarrassed when stills from the scene are posted on the internet.
- Her similarly awful rageaholic mother Soon-hye is also prone to screaming at and occasionally slapping the staff.
- Catapult Nightmare: Ji-yong has the standard catapult nightmare in episode 9, popping up awake in bed after dreaming that his wife murdered him with a shotgun.
- Cat Fight: Jin-hee's comic relief subplot climaxes in episode 15 when she has a hair-pulling, screeching cat fight with Jasmin, the woman who's having an affair with her husband.
- Chekhov's Gun: The absurd oxygenation system in the mansion, and specifically the mention of how the basement apartment has the best oxygen connection. This is how Seong-tae arranges for the death trap for Jin-ho in episode 16, by hooking up bottles of phosgene to the vents.
- The Chessmaster: Ji-yong, who by episode 7 is revealed to have orchestrated everything. He banished Ja-kyung six years ago, and he deliberately brought her back. He got Soon-hye to agree to this (she alone knew what Ja-kyung/Hye-jin looked like) by agreeing to step aside and support his elder brother for the chairmanship...except that he knows that Jin-ho is an alcoholic and ridiculous and basically a loser. It might have worked, except for 1) Ja-kyung not being content with simply being Ha-joon's tutor/caretaker, and 2) the fact that Seo-hyun had a trump card Jin-ho didn't know about, in the form of Suk-chul's will, which names her as the chairman and Soo-hyuk as the heir when he comes of age.
- Coming-Out Story: A subplot throughout the series is Seo-hyun dealing with her sexuality. She decides to come out publicly although she never does onscreen. She does come out to her family—Jin-ho seems relieved—and in her final scene is calling up her old girlfriend Suzy and reconnecting.
- Contrived Coincidence: Seoul is a teeming metropolis of ten million, but naturally Seo-hyun sees her old lover Suzy completely at random on a sidewalk, in episode 7.
- Cool House: It isn't just that the Hans live in an absurdly large, lavish house with big windows and modernist decor, a gigantic pool, and a private exercise room. What makes it really cool is that they can increase the oxygen level in the house. At the touch of a button one of the Hans can raise the O2 level in the mansion to 30%. That's cool. (And it would obviously require a ridiculously huge storehouse of oxygen tanks.)
- Distant Finale: A common Korean drama trope. The finale skips forward six months, to show Hi-soo back in acting, Seo-hyun running the company and reconnecting with her old girlfriend Suzy, Yi-yeon bossing her former coworkers around, Jin-ho managing the domestic staff, and Jung-do, mercifully divorced from the awful Jin-hee, meeting Jin-ho to play video games.
- Dramatic Sit-Down: Whatever Suk-chul is told by a servant in the first episode is so horrifying that he dramatically sits back down in his chair at dinner, clearly shocked. Then he tries to get up again and leave, only to collapse.
- Entertainingly Wrong: Seong-tae finds Jin-ho's second, secret cell phone, which has a bunch of photographs of buff, muscular, shirtless dudes on it. He draws the conclusion that Jin-ho is gay, which is reasonable, but wrong. The photos are actually related to Jin-ho's side hobby of staging private ultimate fighting bouts where he watches as an audience of one while men beat the hell out of each other.
- Faking the Dead: Kang Ja-kyung's real name is Lee Hye-jin. After giving up her baby to the Hans she faked her death and assumed a new identity.
- Feet-First Introduction: Feet-first re-introduction for Yu-yeon. When she returns to the mansion after getting engaged to Soo-hyuk, she is introduced with a close-up of her designer heels click-clacking down the path, signifying that she has moved up in the world.
- Finger-Twitching Revival:
- In episode 9 Suk-chul, who's been in a coma since the first episode, starts twitching his finger. Sure enough, at the end of the episode he wakes up.
- The guy beaten into a coma in one of Ji-yong's ultimate fighting duels revives in the exact same way later.
- Flashback:
- It's so broadly telegraphed that Ja-kyung is Ha-joon's birth mother that it doesn't even really count as The Reveal when it's finally confirmed in episode 4. But when it is finally confirmed, there's a quick flashback to Ja-kyung asking to hold her baby one more time before giving him up.
- Another flashback in the next episode shows a heavily pregnant Ja-kyung struggling up a long flight of stairs to the orphanage, where the nuns take her in.
- A flashback explains why Seo-hyun entered into a loveless and obviously sexless marriage to a man she can't stand: Suk-chul, when discussing the marriage, told her that he was planning to make her head of Hyeowon Group.
- Generation Xerox: Soon-hye, wife to Han family patriarch Han Suk-chul, is given to violent fits of temper that involve screaming, flying spittle, and physically assaulting her staff. Her daughter Jin-hee is the exact same way.
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Ja-kyung relates that her parents tried to get her to abort her baby, but she didn't, because otherwise, there'd be no show.
- Gratuitous English:
- For no obvious reason, during her bug-eyed freak out where she's screaming at her bakery employees in episode 2, Jin-hee slips into English. ("How many times do I have to tell you guys, huh?")
- Jin-hee does this again in episode 5. When her husband mocks her for losing her job, she hisses "Shut up, asshole" in English.
- Jasmin, the one woman in Hi-soo's Bible study group, the one cheating on her husband out of a sense of revenge, has a habit of doing this as well. When Jin-hee joins the Bible study group she and the other woman start sniping at each other in English—and this is with Jin-hee not even knowing that Jasmin is having an affair with her husband, Jung-do. The other two Bible study women wonder if Jung-do has a thing for women who speak English.
- Held Gaze: The attraction between Soo-hyuk and Yu-yeon is established in the first episode by multiple intense held gazes between the two of them.
- Hollywood Tone-Deaf: Soon-hye continues her campaign to shock the world with her awfulness by getting singing lessons. The voice coach tries his best, but she is screechy and horrible.
- How We Got Here: The first scene of the first episode has a panicked Sister Emma going to the cops and reporting a murder. Then the story skips back to "60 days prior to the incident".
- I Never Said It Was Poison: In episode 5 Hi-soo is suspicious that Soon-hye knows something about Ja-kyung, so she asks about the name and birthdate of Ha-joon's birth mother. A flustered Soon-hye denies knowing anything about the mysterious birth mom's whereabouts. Hi-soo picks up on this immediately, saying "I never asked about her whereabouts." (After all, the birth mom is supposedly dead.)
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The series ends with Hi-soo making her comeback as an actress...in a drama called Mine.
- Let the Past Burn: All the mementos of Suk-chul's old girlfriend Mi-ha are removed from the basement apartment and burned after her son Ji-yong dies. Instead Suk-chul has the apartment filled with mementoes of Ji-yong, and he resolves to live there full-time and do penance for failing his son.
- Lingerie Scene: Hi-soo is quite surprised in the first episode, when she finds Ja-kyung wearing the orange dress that Hi-soo wore to the dinner. After Hi-soo barks at Ja-kyung to take it off, Ja-kyung does, and strides away wearing nothing but bra and panties. (Somehow, she keeps her job.)
- Lipstick Lesbian: Suzy Choi, Seo-hyun's lesbian lover. As seen in the flashbacks, Choi wears long frilly dresses and has long, flowing hair, unlike Seo-hyun, who has Power Hair and wears more assertive clothing and generally dresses in a more masculine/powerful way.
- Once More, with Clarity: A long series of flashbacks in episode 11 reveals that Ja-kyung's whole custody lawsuit was a scam. Ja-kyung, Hi-soo, and Seo-hyun were all in on it together, staging a lawsuit that they all knew Hi-soo would win, so they could make Jin-yong look bad in court and set up a legal paper trail to help her win custody in her divorce.
- The One That Got Away: Seo-hyun entered into marriage with Jin-ho, whom she can't stand, for wealth and power with the Han family. But to do so she had to give up her lesbian lover Suzy Choi. Seo-hyun is haunted by this decision and cdan't stop thinking about her girlfriend.
- Parking Garage: Ja-kyung goes to a parking garage in episode 13, starts her car...and narrowly escapes the thug who appears outside her window and tries to murder her.
- Plot Hole: The murder investigation ends with the police being informed that Jin-ho ordered a large bottle of sleeping pills. They write him off as a suicide. Not only does the suicide idea not really explain how he came to be lying in a pool of blood with a shattered skull, apparently no one bothered to run a toxicology report which would have shown that Jin-ho had no drugs in his system.
- Power Hair: Seo-hyun has the standard power hairdo, namely a short cut that is swept to the side in front and so carefully moussed it looks like a blade. Contrast the other daughter-in-law, Hi-soo, who is hardly a wilting wallflower but still has a more conventional feminine hairstyle.
- Product Placement: Folks sure do eat Kopiko brand chocolate candy a lot. Gets very obvious in episode 11 when one of Seo-hyun's assistants hands her a Kopiko and says "It'll make you feel better."
- Quitting to Get Married: Before marrying in to the Han family, Hi-soo was an actress popular enough that people still ask for her autograph six years later. She now regrets giving up her career to subsume her self in the Han clan.
- The Reveal:
- The first big bomb is dropped in episode 2. Seo-hyun is stuck in a loveless marriage to the first son, Jin-ho...which is a problem, because she is a lesbian. The lover that she was filmed saying a final goodbye to, is an artist who is professionally billed as Suzy Choi.
- Episode 7 reveals that there is a secret room, in fact a fully furnished basement apartment, underneath the storeroom where the jewels are kept. It seems that it belonged to Jin-yong's birth mother.
- The end of episode 7 drops a bigger bomb. Jin-yong has orchestrated everything. In fact, he and Ja-kyung have actually been carrying on an affair for two years. It wasn't stepmom Soon-he who took the baby and faked Ja-kyung's death six years ago; contrary to his protestations of innocence Jin-yong arranged the whole thing. It was also Jin-yong who brought Ja-kyung back to the mansion in the first place, firing the old tutor and arranging for her to be hired simply because he wanted his old girlfriend around.
- Episode 9 reveals who is the person lying in the How We Got Here pool of blood, apparently dead, when Hi-soo wakes up: her husband Jin-yong.
- Title Drop:
- In episode 6, Mother Emma asks why Suzy Choi was so special to Seo-yun. Seo-hyun answers, "Because she was mine."
- Hi-soo drops the title in episode 8 when, after being confronted by Ja-kyung swearing she'll get her son back, she snarls "I'll kill anyone who tries to take what's mine."
- The very end of the series has Hi-soo talking in voiceover about how one has to love oneself to love others, and how one has to keep the things that make one happy close. Then, as the show ends with shots of both Seo-hyun and Hi-soo looking directly at the camera, the last line of dialogue is Hi-soo saying, in English, "Mine."
- Ultimate Job Security: Ja-kyung is caught wearing Hi-soo's dress, and she isn't fired. She angrily confronts Hi-soo and accuses her of not defending Ha-joon enough because she isn't his birth mother, and she still isn't fired. She marches over to The Bully's house after the bully persecutes Ha-joon, and slaps the bully's mom across the face...and she still is not fired.
- We Can Rule Together: In episode 11 Ji-yong makes this appeal to Seo-hyun, saying that it will be best for the company if they run it together rather than tear each other down in the press and make the company look bad. Seo-hyun, who loathes him, categorically refuses and tells him to come after her if he dares.
