The Road In Between (2024) is a very lovely and poetic KBS2 Korean one hour Drama Special about two professional people in their thirties who fall in love in a gentle, slow, romantic way, as each one tries to solve personal problems related to their past.

I thought the soft background music was appropriately wistful and the two leads had nice chemistry together onscreen. I love a slow-growing romance like this one! Strange to say but it actually had a kind of Jane Austen feel to it at times! The two leads had been in a 2019 web drama together called The Best Ending which had been a story of two immature people in their twenties in love, so The Road In Between was a nicer and more refreshing story about two maturer people in their thirties who help each other cope with past losses as they fall in love. It is definitely one of the nicest Korean Drama Specials I've enjoyed over the years, hence the A grade. I wish more K-drama fans would watch these wonderful short one hour KBS2 Drama Specials -- they don't know what beauty they are missing by neglecting them!

The Story:

Won Seo Hu (Jung Gun Joo, The Secret Romantic Guesthouse) works for a map building company in a small neighborhood on the outskirts of Seoul. He often travels through the winding city streets creating web videos of them to bring back to his computer at work for processing. He is rather aloof from other people since his heart had been broken by an artist girlfriend named Joo Se Yeon (Hwang Se Yeon, Romance Is A Bonus Book) who had left him in the lurch to further her career abroad.

Sung Eun Ha (Choi Hee Jin, Snowdrop) is a pharmacist who owns her own pharmacy located in the same streets that Seo Hu travels through for his work. She is rather sad because the single Dad who raised her suddenly disappeared from her life a year earlier, with no specific reason given to her in a brief letter he left behind.

Seo Hu and Eun Ha keep running into each other on the streets and at one point they stop and converse with one another and he learns about her missing Dad. He invites her to his workplace to search his street videos on his computer for the day he had disappeared. Amazingly, when she takes him up on his offer, she sees her Dad in front of an empty shop, just staring sadly outside the place.

Excited to finally obtain a clue about his possible whereabouts, she and Seo Hu search the area and learn the empty shop had been a hair salon where he had once learned how to take care of Eun Ha's hair when she was little. She worries that he might have left for some tragic reason he couldn't reveal to her.

During their searching together for her Dad, Eun Ha and Seo Hu begin to fall in love. Finally Seo Hu loses his former aloofness with people and becomes friendly with other people in Eun Ha's life, like the other pharmacist in her shop, a supportive older lady named Kang Ja Kyeong (Kang Myung Joo, Castaway Diva).

But then, suddenly, Seo Hu's artist girlfriend Se Yeon returns to Korea to open her own art gallery and it's obvious she expects to resume her prior romantic relationship with Seo Hu. However, Seo Hu reflects within himself and discovers he really doesn't love Se Yeon anymore: his heart has been captured solely by Eun Ha. He lets Se Yeon know it's over between them and commits to Eun Ha totally. Then, precipitously, around the same time Eun Ha learns where her missing Dad could be and she and Seo Hu race to that place to confront him. Will it be a tragic or a happy reunion?

I highly recommend this poignant drama special! As of this writing you can watch it on Viki.com at THIS LINK. Enjoy!

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