When Life Gives You Tangerines is Time’s best K-drama of 2025
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
When Life Gives You Tangerine, starring South Korean actors Park Bo-gum (right) and IU (left), topped the Best K-dramas Of 2025 list released by Time magazine.
PHOTO: NETFLIX
Follow topic:
IU and Park Bo-gum-headlined K-drama series When Life Gives You Tangerines
The magazine published its Top 10 picks last on Dec 18, stating how the slice-of-life series managed to pull off director Kim Won-suk’s goal of “[helping] break down the invisible barriers between generations, genders, and just people in general” with its storyline.
“This year’s best K-drama – and one of the year’s best TV series, full stop – told a beautiful, deeply engaging story using only the stuff real life is made of,” the magazine said.
“Anyone can make the fantastical seem extraordinary. But to make the ordinary feel extraordinary without losing any of its complexity or texture? What a rare and precious feat,” it added.
Following When Life Gives You Tangerines on the list are Way Back Love (Gong Myung, Kim Min-ha), Squid Game Season 3 (Lee Jung-jae, Lee Byung-hun), Tempest (Jun Ji-hyun), and Our Unwritten Seoul (Park Bo-young, Park Jin-young, Ryu Kyung-soo), which respectively ranked second, third, fourth and fifth.
The rest of the series who secured a spot on the list were Resident Playbook (Go Youn-jung, Han Ye-ji, Shin Si-a) which placed sixth, Study Group (Hwang Min-hyun, Han Ji-eun, Cha Woo-min) as seventh placer, The Tale Of Lady Ok (Lim Ji-yeon, Choo Young-woo, Yeonwoo, Kim Jae-won) on the eight spot, Spirit Fingers (Park Ji-hu, Cho Jun-young, Choi Bo-min, Park You-na) on the ninth, and Trigger (Kim Nam-gil, Kim Young-kwang) on the tenth place. PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER/ASIA NEWS NETWORK
