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When Life Gives You Tangerines has a title inspired by the old proverb, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade“, telling you to make the best of a bad situation.
Opening in the present day, we see our lead, Ae-sun, at the age of 70, reminiscing about her life and still missing her late mother, who used to have a dangerous job as a conch picker in the sea, when Ae-sun was 12 years old, in 1961.
Going back to those days, in the opening episode, her hard-working mother’s always angry, because with a husband having passed away, she and her current husband are poor. Hence, Ae-sun lives with her uncle, and in turn, he’s moaning because since she’s a bright kid, he thinks she steals all his son, Gwan Shik’s luck.
Despite everything, her Mum knows she gives Ae-sun a hard time, and just wants the best for her daughter, even trying to sort out an unfair situation at school, where the count of voting has led to someone else being school President, and we’ve had a bit of a counting kerfuffle when it comes to US Presidents of late…
When Life Gives You Tangerines is a lovely little slice-of-life drama, albeit not so little, as it’s 12 episodes of around an hour each, but it’s a soap opera that jumps around in time a bit, mostly showing us 1961 before moving on to 1967 and the relationship between the two now-late teens – played by IU, as Ae-sun, and Park Hae-joon as Gwan Shik – a well as flashforwarding to 1993, briefly, so it gets about a bit.
As an aside, there’s a point in episode 1 where the subtitles state that Ae-sun’s mother is singing “Hush little baby, don’t say a word“, but the English dubbing has something entirely different and more basic! Erm… why?!
I’ve only seen the first two episodes so far, but I do want to check out some more. But then just as I think it’s getting engaging, it then dips. For example, I know she’s got some problems in life, but as a young woman, while Ae-sun can come across strong and cold-hearted, at other times, she has a tendancy to get hysterical and start bawling her eyes out, like a badly-written CGI character.
So, this is very much a mixed bag of a drama, and so far, I’m far from 100% about what to make of it.
Thanks to our friends at Netflix for the screener prior to release.
When Life Gives You Tangerines is not available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD, but is on Netflix from today.
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 60 minutes per episode (12 episodes)
Release date: March 7th 2025
Studio: Netflix
Format: 2.00:1
Director: Kim Won-seok
Producer: Kim Won-suk
Writers: Im Sang-choon, Lim Sang-Chung
Creator: Kim Won-seok
Cast:
Ae-sun: IU
Gwan Shik: Park Hae-joon
Young Ae-Sun: Kim Tae-yeon
Young Gwan Shik: Lee Cheon-mu
Ae-sun (middle aged): Moon So-ri
Gwan Shik (middle aged): Park Hae-joon
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.