My Youth: An Aimless Journey Through Nostalgia & Wistfulness

Have you ever watched a story that seemed incredibly full of potential, but once you reached the last episode, you felt completely empty? You can see its strengths, recognise its charm, but you can’t help feeling numb? Maybe you can’t really understand what the point was, or just couldn’t relate to most of the story’s scenarios? Unfortunately, that’s the case with JTBC’s My Youth, a 12-episode romantic drama that aired from September to October 2025.

Directed by Lee Sang-yeob and Go Hye-jin and written by Park Si-hyeon, My Youth follows Sunwoo Hae (Song Joong-ki) and Seong Je-yeon (Chun Woo-hee), two childhood sweethearts who reunite after ten years apart.

Hae was a popular child actor whose career fell apart before he reached adulthood. Abandoned by his parents, Hae struggled to care for his little sister and attend high school, where he met his first love, Je-yeon. Life saw them following different paths as adults, and so, a decade goes by with them apart. Hae now works as a novelist and florist, leading a tranquil but happy existence. His peaceful routine changes when he crosses paths with Je-yeon, now a tenacious team leader at Feel Entertainment.

Counting on an extraordinary cast, beautiful cinematography, and a touching premise, My Youth starts full of promise. However, as the narrative unravels, Hae and Je-yeon’s story turns out to be a flimsy, aimless journey that never lives up to its full potential.

This review is spoiler-free! But if you’re in a rush, make sure to pin our summary. It’s at the bottom!

A Story of Encounters & Farewells

My Youth is a slow-paced drama whose narrative is determined by encounters and farewells. Our protagonists — Hae, Je-yeon, actress Mo Tae-rin (Lee Joo-myung), and accountant Kim Seok-ju (Seo Ji-hoon) — might have attended the same high school or been fellow child actors, but their lives have taken labyrinthine turns that pulled them apart. That is, until fate brings them together once again. Their character dynamics, then, are characterised by a unique blend of familiarity and strangeness. At the same time that they have known each other for ages, they aren’t sure who they have become during the time they spent apart.

Hae, Je-yeon, Tae-rin, and Seok-ju have four very distinctive personalities, which allows the series to offer extremely sharp dialogue and a slightly sarcastic sense of humour throughout. Dialogue might be My Youth‘s greatest strength: it has rhythm, it’s genuine, and it flows naturally. With such excellent dialogue, it makes it easier for the series to create relationships that feel natural and spontaneous, too.

As these four strengthen their friendship and develop their romances, My Youth provides them with a lot of positive screentime. That makes their bond feel believable because you get to see how constructive the time they spend together is for their character dynamics. This idea extends to some of the supporting cast, too, applying to Hae’s sister Nu-ri (Choi Jung-woon), Hae’s friend Lee Geon-no (Yoon Byung-hee), and Je-yeon’s colleague Bang Han-na (Lee Bong-ryun). These moments create emotional depth, carrying the narrative on their shoulders. Geon-no’s unwavering support, Han-na’s subtle wisdom, Hae and Seok-ju coming together to raise Nu-ri — this is what My Youth is really about.

Besides the allure of Hae and Seok-ju’s complex, vivid brotherhood and Je-yeon and Tae-rin’s powerful friendship, romance also has a clear identity in My Youth. Romance in the series is tender, innocent, and absolutely unproblematic. Conflicts are either completely avoided or quickly resolved. There are no love triangles or explosive arguments. Hae and Je-yeon are instinctively drawn to each other, and their relationship is delicate, supportive, and inevitable. Even better is the romance between Tae-rin and Seok-ju: there’s something youthful, cheeky, and mesmerising about them (Lee Joo-myung and Seo Ji-hoon have a ton of chemistry, which definitely helps as well).

The first half of My Youth establishes itself as a story about yearning and nostalgia as it blends past and present. The things that have been lost and those that have been gained. Who these characters once were and who they have become. The people who have left and those who have chosen to stay. All of these elements come to the surface as the series introduces us to these characters’ past — and here, we get to the show’s most extraordinary episode.

Episode 2 is mostly a flashback to Hae and Je-yeon’s high school days. More than a well-structured script, this instalment shines bright as My Youth‘s greatest accomplishment for a simple reason: Nam Da-reum and Jeon So-young’s outstanding performances. Nam and Jeon respond to each other with remarkable naturalness, delivering multi-layered versions of Hae and Je-yeon that say much more than what the script dictates. Alongside little Lee Chae-yu as young Nu-ri, they offer an episode full of wistfulness and hope. There’s no doubt that no other instalment of My Youth manages to achieve the level of emotional resonance and narrative clarity that this one does.

It’s important to mention that the entire cast does a good job throughout — I have to say that Chun Woo-hee once again proves to have an unparalleled ability to blend flawless comedic timing with some intense dramatic chops. With stunning production design and fitting cinematography, My Youth always looks great.

How My Youth Forgoes Narrative & Thematic Consistency

However, the narrative of My Youth fails to hold water throughout its 12 episodes. It’s as if the story couldn’t define its themes, couldn’t bother to strengthen characterisation, and openly refused to develop its character arcs.

Halfway through the series, we’re faced with a brusque change in tone. From a quiet dramedy, My Youth suddenly turns into a melodramatic tragedy. We find out that Hae suffers from a terminal disease, and so, he can die any day. Worse than capsizing the series’s tone, this plotline exists without proper explanation and serves no clear purpose in the story. To the very last episode, we’re never told what the disease Hae has really entails or why he can simply die any day (because, let’s be honest, anyone can die any day). We just don’t know what’s really at stake for these characters here.

As it doesn’t contribute to any of the characters’ development either, Hae’s illness becomes a lazy plot device to create melodrama. It’s impossible for audiences to truly relate to Hae’s predicament because we can’t associate it with our existing knowledge of the real world, and we don’t get to see how it changes the universe of My Youth.

It simply exists (unnecessarily) and that’s all there’s to it.

There’s much to My Youth that merely is — and that’s not a compliment. Characters sometimes communicate, sometimes they don’t. Supporting roles that seemed instrumental for the narrative earlier on suddenly disappear. Photography pops up so often that you’d guess it’s a motif, but it is used haphazardly throughout the story. Something is said, but then, something else is shown.

My Youth lacks consistency and coherence, narratively and thematically. The characters who suffer the most from the script’s fickleness are Hae’s father, Sunwoo Chan (a typecast Jo Han-chul), and his wife and Seok-ju’s mom, CEO Pil-do (Jin Kyung). Their roles are offered shallow, erratic characterisation, and their relationship isn’t just toxic, but senseless. We never truly understand why Chan is so submissive and why Pil-do often behaves so deplorably. They are not given a development arc nor a redemption arc, and their relationships with their children never evolve (or devolve) appropriately. They just appear in the last episode as slightly different versions of themselves. But how they got there is a mystery.

When it comes to the theme, My Youth becomes an even bigger mess. Is this a story about unconventional families? About creating an ability to rely on and openly communicate with others? The effect of media and greed on one’s upbringing? Resilience to overcome hardship? Letting go of the past to embrace the present? Forgiveness? Hope?

It’s difficult to tell. The series often works with the idea of family as a bond beyond blood and how your youth shapes your identity as an adult. Parents are portrayed as awful, selfish, and irresponsible individuals who are always keen to victimise themselves. Children are constantly paying for their parents’ sins and suffering the emotional consequences of their chaotic upbringing.

The greatest example of all is Hae, our protagonist, who was neglected, exploited, and mistreated as a child and teenager. As an adult, he doesn’t want to be a burden due to the parental abandonment he faced when young. He struggles to face his father, whom he often responds to with anger and scorn. His traumas, however, simply exist. They aren’t reinforced, but he’s never offered any sort of arc that allows him to grow out of them either.

Parenting, then, seems to lie at the core of My Youth, but without solid character arcs to support it, the series never gets to develop it as a main theme. Everything lives in a limbo — neither one thing nor the other. It’s as if the point My Youth wants to make is that people can be both loved and despised, admired and feared. Present and past blend, reality and desire mingle. Nothing is ever black and white, and that’s the moral of the story.

With such a lack of consistent character arcs and narrative development, it’s up to the score to evoke emotion. My Youth is full of instances in which a dramatic score drowns everything else, not-so-subtly nudging the audience to feel the characters’ fears, uncertainty, and sorrow. Does it work? Not really. Music can’t really represent something that the script itself doesn’t establish.

Should You Watch My Youth?

Starting off as a slow-paced, quiet romantic dramedy, My Youth gets upended halfway through its run to become a full-blown melodrama. Despite its talented cast, beautiful visuals, and excellent dialogue, the narrative reveals itself to be an aimless journey whose characters neither cherish their youth nor renounce it. That doesn’t mean that My Youth doesn’t have its charms, but it ultimately remains constrained by its own devices. Instead of blossoming alongside Hae’s flowers, this is a series that wilts, scared to let its characters explore who they are, where they’ve been, and how to shape their own futures.

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