Review of Once Upon a Small Town / 어쩌다 전원일기

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

My usual intro for this blog, and for the scheduled posts up until I received the wonderful news, has been that I spent a solid chunk of 2025 unemployed. Definitely one of the worst times to be unemployed, as the labor market and hiring practices of companies hasn’t been great since the new US president took office. I call him he-who-shall-not-be-named.

Anyways, I got a job offer. In the time where I was unemployed, I was spending a lot of time in-between job applications watching shows and movies, reading books, and writing as much as I could. I kind of knew that I was never going to get this opportunity again in my life to have such flexibility, as well as being homebound outside of traveling to places with good public transport.

When I got the job offer I crammed a lot of shows and movies in before I no longer had the time to watch them as freely as I have been. During this time I was specifically watching a lot of Asian dramas, which is why around November and October I’m going to have an influx of reviews for those shows. I was in quite the mood for East Asian content, so I watched a ton of movies from around the region as well.

I ended up splitting the drama Once Upon a Small Town between my New York City trip. I started the first four or so episodes when I was at home, swore I was going to continue watching it when I was in the city, and then I didn’t. I ended up finishing the show a week later when I returned home, which was fine by me. By usual Korean drama episode standards, this is more of six complete episodes (as it’s 12 thirty minute episodes).

Let’s get into the review! I know intros can get quite long on posts, which is why I’m trying to be mindful of how much space I’m using here.

A Seoul-based veterinarian goes to the countryside to help his grandfather’s clinic, but finds a home and romance instead.

This show begins with our male lead: Han Ji-yul. He’s a leading veterinarian in Seoul, South Korea, and is well-known on social media not only for his dashing good looks, but how well he takes care of his patients’ animals too. Things are about to change for him though when he heads off to the countryside to check on his grandfather.

When he arrives, he discovers his grandfather’s clinic in the village needs to be taken care of, and he’s one of the only people who can probably do so. Not only does he clash with local policewoman Ahn Ja-young when he first meets her, but his city-like ways and attitude rubs the local people the wrong way.

He’s just not used to the lack of privacy and kindness of those from the countryside, but as he takes over as the town’s veterinarian, he’s going to learn it fairly quickly. As he continues to interact with Ah Ja-young, the more these two are going to grow closer. The frostiness of their initial interactions is going to slowly melt away, leading to the sweetness this drama dashes out towards the end.

It doesn’t help that someone else local was already interested in her, which leads to one of the subplots. There are a small handful of subplots in this show, but, to be honest, they’re not many or too in-depth simply because the show can’t handle too much plot in such a short run time. There’s also another subplot where someone is interested in Ji-yul and comes in from the city, creating more romantic friction.

While it was vibes, I’m not sure this show really needed to be longer. It feels like it ends at a good spot for me, even though the characters do have to consider the possibility of being long distance between the village and Seoul. If the plot were stretched out, it definitely would not have captured my interest further—but that’s just me.

There’s not much else to say in terms of the plot if we’re going to be honest. I’d describe this very much as a slice of life set in the countryside, but it reminded me more of Japanese dramas because of how quickly it zoomed through everything. It felt like I was just getting started—I guess I’ve become used to the hour long episodes for sixteen episodes.

Overall Thoughts

I would say that I enjoyed this show. Both the female and male lead were cute in the sense that I enjoyed their initial awkwardness and anger with each other slowly turn into something else. I also thought the secondary characters were decent with whatever little nuggets they got throughout the show.

I don’t know if I would return to this show though in the future. While I did enjoy the experience of watching it, I feel like there are other slice of life dramas set in the countryside that I would rewatch over this one. It’s not bad, but it’s not unique in the way that it stands out compared to the others.

I say watch this one if you’re interested in it! It’s worth giving a shot at least once, that’s for sure, if it seems like something that you would want to watch. I watched it on the United States’ version of Netflix, so I’m not sure where it’s available elsewhere.

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