I’ve been watching a Korean show on Netflix called Record of Youth. 

The story centers around 3 characters: Sa Hye Jun, a male model and actor; An Jeong Ha, a makeup artist who becomes Hye Jun’s girlfriend; and Won Hae Hyo, Hye Jun’s best friend and a fellow model and actor. 

Hae-Hyo comes from a wealthy family and his mother is particularly pushy trying to further his career. But he is finding some success as a commercial model and actor. 

Meanwhile, Hye-Jun is struggling and perpetually missing opportunities. His family is poor and his mother works as a maid to Hae-Hyo’s family, where Hae-Hyo’s mother rarely misses an opportunity to rub her own son’s success in the face of Hye-Jun’s mother, who is aware that her own son is not doing as well. 

Hye-Jun’s father and brother are against him and continually remind him he is failing and needs to give up this dream of becoming an actor. He also has his military service looming, so he is constantly balancing whether he should give up on acting and enlist, or put off enlisting for one more chance. 

I’ve read a few reviews of this show and they concentrate on the love interests. But I feel like the show is a commentary on celebrity and the surrounding culture- in this instance, Korean celebrity culture. So that’s what I’m going to focus my commentary on. 

Early on, Hye-Jun’s weasel manager stiffs him for a modeling gig, apparently not the first time, and Hye-Jun quits. The manager does his best to undermine Hye-Jun’s career by casting doubt on him to the various directors that have considered hiring him. This causes Hye-Jun to lose a few gigs. The weasel manager’s response to this is: hey, I’m teaching you how not to trust people in this business, which is good for you, so you ought to thank me. The weasel manager is going to repeatedly figure in this show as a model of self-interest who will try and use other’s fame, or try to knock down other’s fame for his own ends and profit. 

Hye-Jun meets Jeong-Ha, a makeup artist hired to do his makeup for a modeling gig and they quickly connect as a couple.  

But eventually, Hye-Jun’s personality, ability, and dedication gets him noticed and his career begins to take off. This is where I believe the show’s message lies. 

Hye-Jun’s family is slow to react to the change. His mother and grandfather, who had supported him before, are happy for him. His father and brother continue to doubt his success, but the increasing amount of publicity make it hard to deny. His father, a partner in a small construction company, begins to be sidelined because the others around him think he is now wealthy, supported by his son. Having never supported his son’s career, he expects nothing from it, and at first, receives nothing from his son. Nonetheless, people’s attitudes about the father have changed because of their perceived ideas about the father’s position. This bothers the father a lot, but he is forced to deal with the change too: he was once the provider in the family, and now his son, who he denigrated, is seen as the top-dog in the family. 

The brother also begins to receive some preferential treatment at his job in a bank, when his manager finds out he is Hye-Jun’s brother. But the brother, always considered the “good” brother before, now finds himself as the second.  

As quickly as Hye-Jun’s career takes off, and he finds himself very successful, there are a lot of people who seem to want to take him down for no other reason that he is successful.  

Hateful online comments appear about him. Scandal articles made up by a busybody reporter looking to make a name for herself cause him undue trouble. His old agent tries to undermine him, and at the same time take over as his agent- which means he goes into overdrive trying to represent himself as Hye-Jun’s old friend, while simultaneously undercutting the current manager.  

And Hye-Jun’s best friend’s (Hae-Hyo) mother (the pushy stage-mom) sees her maid’s son’s success as a poke in the eye- as if to think- how dare this poor family’s son do so well when my son is not having the same success. 

She berates her own son as a failure for not doing better than his friend. She tries to manipulate the pieces to her son’s advantage, but has no luck. This causes friction in her family with her husband, who she inexplicably blames, and with her son, who resents her interference and berating.  

While Hae-Hyo, the best friend, knows it’s wrong to hold his friend’s success against him, he can’t help it given his mother’s attitude about the whole thing. It doesn’t help that he is also falling for the makeup artist, his best friend’s girlfriend. 

The girlfriend, who has remained faithful throughout Hye-Jun’s meteoric rise to fame, finds herself more frequently sidelined due to her boyfriend’s work commitments. The never-ending scandal articles- alleging romantic involvements with other actresses, a homosexual romantic involvement with a former employer when Hye-Jun was still a model, and impropriety allegations with his old manager, continually stress the couple’s relationship. 

At one point, Jeong-Ha’s mother, who is poor, reappears wanting money too. She finds out her daughter is dating this popular actor and wants to cash in with some parental guilt laid on her daughter. 

For reasons that I can’t understand, I guess it would be really bad in Korean culture for Hye-Jun to come out and say he is in a relationship with his makeup artist girlfriend, because that, in itself, would be some sort of scandal. This is apparently so, because the busybody reporter threatens to release a story exposing the relationship. I don’t know why this would be an ‘exposé’… but apparently, it is. So they do their best to keep it under wraps. At one point though, she decides it would be better to simply break things off, since the relationship seems to be causing such problems, even though she loves Hye-Jun. 

Hye-Jun goes home at night and sometimes just cries himself to sleep over everything that is happening.  

The catalog of negative consequences that follows on the heels of Hye-Jun’s success is extensive, both to him, and those surrounding him. This is where the show seems to me to be a commentary on the effects of celebrity. I know Korean culture places a lot of value on celebrity, and perhaps this show is meant to serve as a warning to those that want to achieve fame for fame’s sake- be careful what you wish for because fame is not all it’s cracked up to be.  

I myself have heard people long for fame, for nothing more than being famous. They just want to be known and adored. But one of the things this drama brings out is that the pure fact of someone being successful seems to trigger a need in others to bring them down. Hye-Jun is an all-around decent guy. But his success causes people online, who nothing about him or his situation, to speculate all kinds of evil. A youtuber in the show dedicates himself to trashing Hye-Jun’s reputation, all so he can get views. The reporter takes any salacious report, finds the worst interpretation, and magnifies that in order to make her own reputation. 

Why would these people delight in taking down someone else’s success for their own? It says something about human nature- our belief that someone who is successful must be so through underhanded means. It’s a basic human jealousy that sees someone else’s success as somehow detracting from our own… making us look bad in comparison maybe.  

We see this in the mother of the best friend too. Her focus is on trying to make her own son look good, but she sees her son’s success only in comparison with his best friend. As long as the best friend is doing better, he is seen as ‘less’, so she pushes to a degree that ends up making everyone miserable. The fact that her son is making a living as an actor, when probably hundreds, if not thousands, never get THAT far, is not good enough for her. Jealousy has made her depreciate her son’s achievements, rather than appreciate them. 

There is actually a lot more to this show than I’m telling right now. If I were to catalog the plot better, and spend a lot more time, I would give a lot more detail into the consequences of fame that are explored. But I’ll leave off for now. 

It’s a good show, and I still have one more episode to go, but I’ve found it to be a more thoughtful show than some of the reviews I’ve read make it out to be. I think it’s a great exploration of human nature and the consequences of fame.