K-Drama Rewind, A Time Called You: How Ahn Hyo-Seop, Jeon Yeo-Been’s profound drama made grief a silent witness

Before Lovely Runner came and swept us off our feet into its time-travelling romance that breaks the time and space continuum, A Time Called You, had already spun a tale of tragedy, grief and persevering love spanning decades. A remake of the Taiwanese hit Someday or One Day, the show starred Ahn Hyo-Seop and Jeon Yeo-been.

 At first glance, the premise seems simple: Jeon Yeo-been’s Joon-hee is mourning the loss of her boyfriend, Yeon-joon, who perished in a plane crash. His body was never found, and she clings to the faint hope that he might return. The smallest things trigger memories, a toothbrush, the bed, moments frozen in time. The show doesn’t waste time in too many sobs and heartbreak exposition; grief is visible in the loss of the familiar, the little domestic routines that form the basis of love and relationships. That’s the most searing to watch.

How do you accept that?

While those around her have accepted his death, she remains trapped in grief, replaying her time with Ahn Hyo-seop’s character, some memories being gentle, others bittersweet, all lingering. It’s always the what-ifs that hurt us unbearably, and the show quietly and subtly shows that without delving too much into it or relying on excessive exposition.

Then, a mysterious gift from a stranger catapults her into the past. She wakes up in 1998, inhabiting the body of her doppelgänger, Min-joo, a teenager with a life of her own. There, she meets a boy, the spitting image of her lost love. But is he really Yeon-joon? And if so, why is she here?

More importantly, where is the real Min-joo, the girl whose life Joon-hee has taken over?

Oh, she’s still there. Watching. Trapped.

Min-joo longs to be everything Joon-hee is in this altered version of the past—bright, social, adored. She even finds herself in a love triangle, perhaps. Yet, no matter how much she wishes, she can’t be someone else. We are who we are, and we can only make the best of it. It’s a crippling realization, and Min-joo’s yearning for a life that isn’t hers drives her to the brink of something dangerous.

As Joon-hee soon realizes, she’s not just fighting to rewrite the past or reunite with Yeon-joon—she must also save Min-joo. Not from fate, not from tragedy, but from herself.

And that’s what A Time Called You is truly about. Beyond the heartache and the exhilaration of falling in love twice, it is a story of acceptance—wrapped in a time-travel mystery, a romantic drama, and even a thriller. A heavy kind of acceptance. Acceptance of loss. Acceptance of reality. And, most painfully, acceptance of oneself.

These lessons of acceptance are entrenched in sorrow, love, and grief, handled with careful sensitivity. It takes meticulous skill and craft to portray several distinct characters, but Yeon-been and Ahn Hyo-seop do a remarkable job of showing the nuances of each character. You almost know instantly when Yeon-been’s Joon-hee. And you know, when she is Min-joo; the answers lie in the dullness of her eyes, the tilt of her lips.

A Time Called You isn’t the easiest watch, partly because it needs concentration and effort involving different timelines and different personalities. Grief exists as a character in the show too, sometimes in the foreground, otherwise sitting quietly in the background---not saying much, but still watching from the sidelines like a spectator.