‘Love in the Big City,’ based on same original novel, but with different charms

The original Tving series, “Love in the Big City,” is based on a novel of the same name by Park Sang-young. The recently released film of the same title is also based on the same novel. Courtesy of Tving

The film and TV series based on Park Sang-young's novel “Love in the Big City,” which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022, were released in theaters and OTT (over-the-top) platforms around the same time. The two works, which are rooted in the same novel, are appealing to fans of the original with their similarities and differences.

OTT service Tving released its original series “Love in the Big City” on October 21. The eight-episode series is a youth romance in which Go Young (played by Nam Yoon-soo), who dreams of becoming a writer, learns about life and love while meeting various people. The original novel, a collection of serialized novels, was serialized into eight episodes of 50 minutes each.

The author Park wrote the script, while Son Tae-gyum (episodes 1 and 2), Heo Jin-ho (episodes 3 and 4), Hong Ji-young (episodes 5 and 6), and Kim Se-in (episodes 7 and 8) directed the series. It is a Hollywood system to have different directors for each episode.

The TV series, which was released in its entirety on the day, Go Young, an LGBTQ+ person, meets his best friend Mi-ae (played by Lee Soo-kyung), who is a woman, and they start living together, and he grows up little by little as he meets four men, Nam-gyu, Young-soo, Kyu-ho, and Habibi. The film, which was released on October 1 and attracted about 630,000 viewers by the previous day, cheerfully shows the story of "Jae-hee" among the four short stories in the 118-minute video. With different actors and different platforms, the two works both capture the youth who “waste their youthfulness to the fullest” and the city of Seoul which is sometimes brutal but fascinating.

While the film lightly depicts the melancholy and wanderlust of youth and fleshes out the original with real-life issues faced by LGBTQ+ and women, the TV series focuses on Go-Young's love and growth. The TV series is similar to the film in that it is narrated by Go Young (who is “Heung-soo” in the film), but unlike the film, which split its attention between Heung-soo (played by Noh Sang-hyun) and Jae-hee (played by Kim Go-eun), Go Young is the sole protagonist of the TV series. The acting of actors and actresses who play the same characters are also worth watching.

While the film’s protagonist, Heung-soo, played by Noh Sang-hyun, is a bit more gruff and masculine, the TV series’ protagonist, Go-young, played by Nam Yoon-soo, is closer to the original Go-young's bubbly personality. Lee Soo-kyung and Kim Go-eun, who play Mi-ae (“Jae-hee” in the film), also depicted the character with different charms.

Actor Nam Yoon-soo explained the differences between himself and Noh Sang-hyun, who plays Heung-soo in the film, at a press conference held in Yongsan, Seoul, on the 16th. “I thought that each actor thinks differently and expresses differently. Both films and TV series have different charms, and I hope people will enjoy seeing the different charms of Heung-soo and Go Young rather than analyzing 'who did well' and 'who didn't.'”

Author Park said, "After the production of a commercial film was scheduled, the production of a TV series was decided and I thought about how to make it different from the film. In the end, I came up with the answer to stay faithful to the principle, to the original. I wrote the script with the intention of capturing the color of the original and what I wanted to talk about in a dense series.”

※This article has undergone review by a professional translator after being translated by an AI translation tool.