Overview of Crash Landing on You
The 2019–2020 South Korean television series ‘Crash Landing on You’ was created by Park Ji-eun, directed by Lee Jeong-hyo starring Hyun Bin, Son Ye-jin, Seo Ji–hye, and Kim Jung–hyun. The story centres around on a chaebol heiress and successful businesswoman from South Korea who, while paragliding near Seoul, South Korea, is caught in a sudden storm and crashes in the North Korean sector of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
There, she meets an Army Captain who is the son of the Director of the General Political Bureau (GBP) in the Korean People’s Army and decides to help her hide. Even though their respective countries are divided and are at odds, they eventually fall in love.
Profile
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Drama: Crash Landing on You (English title) / Love’s Emergency Landing (literal title)
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Director: Lee-Jung-hyo
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Writer: Park Ji-eun
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Network: tvN
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Episodes: 16
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Release Date: December 14, 2019 – February 16, 2020
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Language: Korean
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Country: South Korea
Cast
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Hyun-bin – Ri Jeong-hyeok
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Son ye-jin – Yoon Se-ri
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Seo Ji-hye – Seo Dan
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Kim Jung-hyun – Gu Seung-jung
Synopsis
Yoon Se-ri (Son Ye-jin), a South Korean chaebol heiress to Queen’s Group, and Ri Jeong-hyeok (Hyun Bin), a member of the North Korean elite and a captain in the Korean People’s Army, are the subjects of the story of ‘Crash Landing on You’.
Yoon Se-ri is paragliding in Seoul, South Korea when she is suddenly knocked unconscious and blown off course by a tornado. When she wakes up, she discovers that her paraglider has collided with a tree in a forest in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) of the North Korean sector. She is discovered by Ri Jeong-hyeok, North Korean Army personnel, who eventually provides for her while creating a strategy to assist her covertly in returning to South Korea.
Despite their differences and disagreements, they eventually fall in love.
The news of Yoon Se-ri’s disappearance is kept quiet by her family back in South Korea out of concern that it may lower the chaebol’s stock price. Her half-brothers, Se-jun and Se-hyung, who had trouble running the chaebol’s subsidiaries, were chosen as Se-ri’s successors just before she vanished because of her commercial acumen, as demonstrated by the fact that she had successfully built her own company.
The brothers are encouraged by Do Hye-ji (Hwang Woo-seul-hye) and Go Sang-ah (Yoon Ji-min), respectively, their equally ambitious spouses. While Se-ri is away, Se-hyung uses dishonest tactics to outmanoeuvre his siblings and acquire the right to manage the family business, while Sang-ah tries to take over Se-ri’s business.
Seo Dan’s (Seo Ji-hye) and Gu Seung-jun’s stories are connected with those of Se-ri and Jeong-hyeok (Kim Jung-hyun). The affluent proprietor of a department store in North Korea has a clever daughter named Dan. She has been studying the cello in Russia for several years, but she returns to wed Jeong-hyeok, with whom she is already married through an arranged union, despite the fact that they have only had a few encounters.
She runs across Gu Seung-jun several times as she makes her way back to Pyongyang, North Korea. Gu Seung-jun had escaped to North Korea (under the protection of dishonest North Korean officers) to avoid being pursued by Se-hyung, under whose inept supervision he had embezzled significant sums of money.
Jeong-hyeok’s efforts to keep Se-ri hidden and facilitate her return to South Korea are the focus of the first half of the drama. They are hampered by Cho Cheol-gang (Oh Man-seok), a dishonest and cruel officer from the State Security Department who had earlier orchestrated the assassination of Jeong-hyeok’s older brother, an officer who wanted to expose him for his treacherous activities against the North Korean regime.
Jeong-hyeok’s devotion to Se-ri upsets both his fiancee Dan and his father, a prominent politician, because of the revelation that Jeong-hyeok was hiding a South Korean citizen that could be exploited by rival authorities to harm their family’s reputation.
Se-ri is able to return to South Korea in the second half of the drama and take over the management of her company, startling her family and others who had assumed that she had passed away. Cheol-gang is originally found guilty and given a life sentence for his crimes, but he manages to elude justice with the help of his devoted soldiers and criminal network, enabling him to invade South Korea in search of Se-ri for revenge. Jeong-hyeok first arrived in South Korea covertly before his soldiers were secretly deployed to Seoul by Jeong-hyeok’s father.
They were here to help Jeong-hyeok in his mission to safeguard Se-ri from Cheol-gang’s retaliation, despite reluctance from his father who still grudgingly lends his support. Although, Seo Dan and Seung-jun’s first meetings in North Korea were random and unpleasant, she finally became his protector when the dishonest officers turned him over to Se-hyung’s gangsters and they fell in love.
Crash Landing on You: The defector Who Brought North-South Korean Romance to Life
The most recent Korean drama sensation is an unbelievable love story about a South Korean heiress who inadvertently paraglides into North Korea, lands on a soldier, and falls in love with him.
‘Crash Landing on You’ is in many respects a conventional K-drama romance, but it has received accolades for its meticulously researched and nuanced portrayal of North Korea. This was made possible by having a real-life North Korean defector on the writing team.
Kwak Moon-wan, who was an assistant writer on the show helped bring the story to life. He has the physique of a bodyguard with big shoulders and muscular torso. This is most likely due to the fact that, up until 2004, he was a member of the Supreme Guard Command, an elite security unit that looks out for North Korea’s ruling Kim family.
Due to his high level of trustworthiness, he was given the opportunity to work abroad for a North Korean trading firm in Moscow that was bringing in much-needed foreign currency.
Only a small number of North Koreans are allowed to work outside the nation, and the officials have put safeguards in place to assure their ongoing devotion. Kwak was forced to leave his wife and son in North Korea.
He was told to go back to Pyongyang in 2004. He learned during a layover in Beijing that a buddy of his in Moscow had told their Pyongyang masters what he had stated in a private chat. When he arrived home, he knew right once that what he had said would be extremely problematic. Since then, he has been living in South Korea without his family.
From Defector to Film Adviser
Kwak had spent time learning about movies before enlisting. As the then-leader Kim Jong-il’s well-known passion for the arts, the North Korean film industry enjoyed a boom in the 1980s.
Kwak was then preparing to continue his education when Pyongyang University of Dramatic and Cinematic Arts approved him to pursue film directing. A well-known filmmaker who was working on a film project with a North Korea-themed plot contacted South Korea’s spy service shortly after Kwak arrived in the country seeking some advice. Kwak had just completed his interrogations, a step in the resettlement procedure for recent defectors, during which he had discussed his filmmaking abilities.
He met the director through the agency, who introduced them and gave him a job offer at his production firm. Kwak quickly agreed to it. Later, he contributed as a screenwriter and adviser to a number of movies and dramas.
In 2018, a former coworker connected Kwak to Park Ji-eun, the drama’s head writer. Her lack of deep knowledge of Northern life was a pressing worry. She had an idea for a romantic comedy starring a North Korean officer and a South Korean heiress. ‘Crash Landing on You’ was launched when Kwak joined the team.
Undercover Spies and Homeless Children
The show has grown to be one of the greatest Korean dramas of all time. It depicts Yoon Se-ri and Ri Jeong-hyuk. Se-ri is trapped while paragliding and Jeong-hyuk discovers her and, rather than handing her in, decides to keep her safe. They inevitably fall in love.
Kwak was able to provide clever story devices thanks to his deep knowledge of how North Korean officials conduct themselves.
For instance, Se-ri is discovered by secret police at one point hiding in a village. Jeong-hyuk comes up with the story that she is a spy for Division 11, a military organisation that operates covertly in the South, very swiftly.
This gives the girl the opportunity to tour the village and connect with people while avoiding answering their queries about her life out of security concerns. It also helps to explain her Southern accent, lack of documentation, and appearance. There are images of life that could be rendered plausible throughout the show thanks to someone with Kwak’s perspective. There are images of trains abruptly halting due to power outages, street children, and refrigerators that are being used to store books and clothes rather than food.
Kwak contributed to the drama’s storyline about Gu Seung-joon and Seo, another star-crossed couple from the North and South.
Seung-joon steals a sizable sum of money from Se-ri’s brother, flees, and plans to get asylum in North Korea.
“North Korea is the only place Interpol can’t reach”, Kwak says. Is it accurate to say that North Korea will provide wanted criminals with security in exchange for a sizable sum of money? “It is indeed plausible,” Kwak says. “That’s all I’d like to say.”
Representation of and Reception in South and North Korea
Despite being a work of fiction, the series has won praise from North Korean defectors for its portrayal of daily life there. However, other features have come under fire, like the ease with which the characters cross the border, the ease with which food is available, and the Army’s generally friendly approach. North Korean writer and actress Kim Ara, one of the extras who played a peasant, claims that she felt “like [she] was genuinely back in a North Korean village.”
A North Korean defector named Kwak Moon-wan served with the Supreme Guard Command, which guards the Kim family in power. He served as an adviser for the series and gave the creators information about daily life in North Korea and North Korean government institutions that gave the programme more credibility.
He accepted some of the criticism and acknowledged that he had exaggerated some aspects of North Korea’s portrayal (for example, by omitting to mention food shortages), but he rejected claims that he was endorsing the regime or creating an artificial analogy by pointing out that the programme also showed some of the more disturbing aspects of life there, such as the problem of kotjebi (child homelessness) and the frequent power outages.
Chun Hyo-jin, a North Korean refugee who left the border village of Hyesan at the age of 19, is one of those who tends to concur: “Even if what they say glamorises North Korea, is true, would they choose to live there?? I don’t think so”. She asserts that the drama is still very important despite the fact that it ignores political issues, which are crucial to North Korea’s problems. In her opinion, its depiction of North Korea is a bit far from reality, but it helped the people develop an interest in North Korea.
Lee Jung-hyo, the drama’s producer, stated during a press conference in Seoul in December, “I know some people are uncomfortable about our subject, North Korea, but we don’t portray a wholly authentic North Korea in our drama. Most settings are closer to a fantasy, although some aspects do reflect real North Korean life”.
About 60% of North Korea’s portrayal in the show, according to Kang Na-ra, a North Korean defector who provided advice to the production team, “The richer families in North Korea like to show off their wealth by adding lace curtains to their windows. So that was pretty well portrayed”.
She particularly liked this information about kimchi caves, “Since rural North Korea doesn’t get electricity, they don’t have refrigerators. They have kimchi caves where they store kimchi, and that was also recreated well”. Also common are house inspections. She admitted that in order to avoid being discovered, she once had to hide inside a furnace at the home of the broker who assisted her in escaping.
In the drama, when security personnel showed up one evening, the heiress had to hide in the kimchi storage area. North Koreans are only permitted to select from a predetermined list of hairstyles, including 18 for women and 28 for males, as represented in the play. In both areas, there were also critical reactions to the drama’s themes.
The Christian Liberal Party (CLP) filed a complaint against tvN at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency in South Korea in January 2020, alleging that the network had violated National Security Law by glamorising North Korea through this series. Then, in March 2020, a few North Korean media outlets denounced South Korean films and television shows that dealt with North and South Korean ties but did not name them. Although ‘Crash Landing on You’ was not specifically identified by the media, it was thought to be one of the pieces being referred to.
Awards
- 56th Baeksang Arts Awards
Best Supporting Actress – Kim Sung-young
Popularity Award – Hyun Bin, Son Ye-jin
Bazaar Icon Award – Seo Ji-hye - 15th Seol International Drama Awards
Outstanding Korean Drama
Outstanding Korean Actress – Son Ye-jin - Asian Academy Creative Awards
Best Drama Series (Korea)
Best Drama Series (Korea) - 2020 Korea Cable TV Broadcasting Association
Global Award (VOD Category) - Tokyo Drama Award 2020
Tokyo Drama Award 2020 - 3rd Annual Global TV Demand Awards
Most In-Demand Korean Drama Series
Grand Prize (Daesang) – Hyun Bin - 7th APAN Star Award
Best Supporting Actor – Kim Young-min
Best Supporting Actress – Kim Sung-young
Best Supporting Actress – Son Ye-jin - 2021 Korea Communications Commission Broadcasting Awards
Grand Prize (Daesang) - Korea Cable TV Broadcasting Association
PP Special Award (VOD Category)
Interesting Facts about ‘Crash Landing on You’
- When it comes to South Korean TV, it is the third highest-rated drama in cable television history.
- After its final episode on 16 Feb 2020, ‘Crash Landing on You’ officially boasts a remarkable 9.1 rating on ‘My Drama List’ as well as a 5-star approval rating on Google.
- Apart from South Korea, the drama was also filmed in Switzerland and Mongolia.
- Kwak, who learnt film directing in Pyongyang and had been a member of an elite security force protecting the Kims, helped to craft the drama’s plot, and assisted in conceptualising the setting and scenes in the drama depicting everyday North Korea life.
- China’s streaming website crashed during the finale of “Crash Landing On You”.
- After the drama’s premiere, Crash Landing On You was accused of “glamorising” the reclusive state.
FAQs
- In which year was ‘Crash Landing on You’ released?
It was released in 2019. - Are the couple from ‘Crash Landing on You’ married?
‘Crash Landing on You’ actors Hyun Bin and Son Ye-jin are married. - How many episodes are there in ‘Crash Landing on You’?
There are 16 episodes in ‘Crash Landing on You’. - Where did the ‘Crash Landing on You’ shooting take place?
Apart from South Korea, the drama was also filmed in Switzerland and Mongolia. - What do the fans call the leading pair in ‘Crash Landing on you’?
The RiRi couple, as fans fondly call the pair (Yoon Se Ri + Ri Jeong Hyeok). - What is the Instagram ID of the main leads?
The Instagram ID of Hyun-bin is hyunbinactor and Son Ye-jin is yejinhand.
