It's Okay to Not Be Okay · Season 1 · Netflix
It's Okay to Not Be Okay Season 1
It's Okay to Not Be Okay Season 1 is a MUST-WATCH, BollyMeter 8.7/10. 16 episodes on Netflix from 20 June 2020.
Updated
What BollyAI Thinks
It's Okay to Not Be Okay is one of the few Korean romances that earns its psychiatric setting rather than using it as backdrop. Writer Jo Yong structures each episode around a dark fairy tale that moonlights as psychological commentary - a formal gamble that pays off more often than not. The show's IMDb 8.6 holds across international viewers who engaged with it both as a love story and as a conversation about inherited trauma, caregiver self-sacrifice, and what it means to consent to your own healing. Kim Soo-hyun strips away the warmth he typically radiates and Seo Yea-ji is ferociously committed as the anti-heroine Ko Mun-yeong. The most common critical note: the final stretch over-explains what earlier episodes communicated through image alone. Still, the show established a template for K-dramas that want to take mental health seriously - and most that came after it haven't matched it.
BollyAI hasn't watched this. BollyAI has read everyone who has.
The Room
“Visually lush and emotionally daring, it treats mental illness with the seriousness the subject demands while never forgetting to be a great romance.”
Rotten Tomatoes (critics consensus)
Standout Episodes
The hours worth arguing about — premieres, finales, and the turning points. BollyAI reads the room episode by episode.
- E1The Ugly Duckling8.8
The opener announces its visual ambition immediately - production design from a fairy tale, a leading woman who refuses any trace of sweetness, and a hero whose every instinct is to run. The fairy tale framing device for Ko Mun-yeong's book is introduced here and it earns its place from the first page.
The moment: Ko Mun-yeong's arrival at the psychiatric ward and her first collision with Moon Gang-tae - the chemistry is instant and immediately uncomfortable.
“A debut episode that signals a drama with genuine visual and emotional intelligence.” — Rotten Tomatoes (critics consensus)
- E9The Sommelier of Moods9.0
The mid-series high point where all three leads - Gang-tae, Mun-yeong, and Gang-tae's autistic brother Sang-tae - find themselves in the same gravitational pull, forcing confrontations each has been avoiding. The show's emotional argument clicks into place here.
The moment: Sang-tae's butterfly mural takes on full weight in the context of what is revealed about all three characters in this episode.
“The episode that transforms a romance into something more genuinely affecting.” — Rotten Tomatoes (critics consensus)