Our Beloved Summer
🎬 Netflix
⭐ 8.5 / 10 MDL
🔞 15+
📋 Drama Overview
Everything you need to know before you hit play.
💗 Romance Must-Watch
SBS
Kook Yeon Su (Kim Da-mi) and Choi Ung (Choi Woo-shik) were high school opposites — she was driven and disciplined, he was an unbothered, daydreaming artist. Forced to film a documentary together for school, their bickering chemistry was captured on camera, and somewhere between the arguments, they fell in love. When it ended, it ended badly — and for ten years, they built their lives around never having to face each other again.
Then the old footage surfaces online, goes viral, and a production company wants a follow-up. Yeon Su, now at a PR firm, agrees for career reasons. Ung, now a reclusive but quietly successful illustrator, agrees without knowing she’s involved. The cameras roll again — and everything they buried starts rising back to the surface. Our Beloved Summer is a romance about two people who know exactly why they’re wrong for each other, and spend sixteen episodes figuring out why they can’t stay apart.
16 / 16 ✅ Completed
⚡ Quick Verdict
One box. Everything you need to decide.
· MDL Score · 45,000+ ratings
▶ Official Trailer
🎭 Cast & Characters
Twelve performances that make this story feel impossibly real — from the couple everyone rooted for to the friend who loved quietly.
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🎬 Episode Guide
All 16 episodes — spoiler-light recaps of every chapter of Ung and Yeon Su’s story.
🏁 Ending Explained
Full spoilers ahead — everything that happens in the finale and what it all means.
Spoiler Warning — This section covers the full finale of Our Beloved Summer. Stop here if you haven’t finished the series.
The documentary is finally complete — and so are they. Episode 16 opens not with a dramatic confrontation or a tearful confession, but with something much more disarming: ordinariness. Ung and Yeon Su, having already made their choice in Episode 15, are simply together. The finale earns that simplicity by understanding exactly what this drama has always been about — not the reunion itself, but the question of whether two people who hurt each other badly can grow into versions of themselves capable of doing better.
Yeon Su’s breakthrough is the emotional spine of the entire series. Her arc has always been about the armour she built in childhood — the self-sufficiency that protected her through poverty and grief but eventually became a wall between her and anyone who loved her. In the finale, she dismantles it. Not in a single cathartic speech, but in small, concrete ways: letting Ung in without immediately calculating the cost, asking for help without framing it as failure. The writing is careful enough to show us this is work, not magic — and that makes it land.
Ung’s arc completes with the finished body of work he presents — a visual record of everything he couldn’t say out loud. His illustrations, which have quietly traced his love for Yeon Su across the entire series, form a kind of confession that bypasses language entirely. The gesture is very Choi Ung: indirect, unhurried, completely sincere. Ji-ung, for his part, gets the resolution he deserves — not a redemption arc or a consolation prize, but dignity. He steps forward into his own story, and the show allows that to be enough.
The title’s meaning only fully lands in the finale. “Our Beloved Summer” isn’t about a single season — it’s about every moment they were truly present with each other, in high school and in the uncomfortable present they film themselves inhabiting. The documentary is released, the cameras are off, and they’re still there. That’s the ending: no airport, no last-minute obstacle, no grand speech. Just two people who grew up, figured themselves out, and chose each other again — quietly, on purpose. The most romantic thing the show ever does is let that be enough.
✍️ KDramaWorlds Editor’s Take
Our honest read on why this drama is worth your time — and who it’s for.
There’s a particular kind of K-drama that doesn’t try to manufacture urgency — no memory loss, no terminal illness, no third-act villain reappearing with new information. Our Beloved Summer belongs to that rare category. What it offers instead is Choi Woo-shik and Kim Da-mi in two of the most natural, lived-in romantic performances of their careers. They don’t play a couple so much as they inhabit one — the chemistry so unforced it borders on documentary itself. The show’s central structural conceit (a documentary about their high school relationship going viral and forcing a follow-up) is clever enough to serve the story without ever overwhelming it, and director Kim Yoon-jin shoots both timelines with the same warm, slightly overexposed intimacy, as though everything is already a memory. If you enjoy Twenty-Five Twenty-One or Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, this belongs in your queue immediately.
The show’s most divisive element is also its most honest: it’s genuinely slow. Not slow in the way bad dramas are slow — not padded or repetitive — but deliberately, architecturally unhurried. Episodes 7 through 10 in particular ask you to sit with discomfort, with two people circling each other without resolution, which can test patience if you’re used to romance dramas that keep the reunions coming. The reward is a middle section that builds emotional density most dramas skip entirely in favour of plot momentum. Kim Sung-cheol’s supporting arc as Ji-ung is quietly devastating — a man who loves two people (his best friend, the woman he can’t have) with complete selflessness, and the show honours that love by refusing to diminish it into a plot obstacle.
At 16 episodes, it runs slightly long — there are stretches where you feel the pacing choice rather than just experiencing it. But the finale earns the runtime. What Our Beloved Summer ultimately argues is that the most romantic thing two people can do isn’t a grand gesture or a perfectly timed confession — it’s growing up enough to deserve each other. Choi Woo-shik and Kim Da-mi make you believe it completely. It’s the kind of drama that doesn’t announce itself as a classic — it just quietly stays with you for weeks.
Viewers who love a quietly artistic male lead
Anyone who wants a drama that rewards patience with warmth
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