Friend, Our Legend

Friend, Our Legend is a 2009 MBC drama that expands Kwak Kyung-taek's 2001 film Friend into a 20-episode story about four boys who grow up together in a working-class Busan neighborhood in the 1970s. Han Dong-soo, Lee Joon-seok, Jung Sang-taek and Kim Joong-ho share the same streets and the same school, but their families sit on opposite sides of the city's social line: Dong-soo's father runs a small bathhouse, while Joon-seok's father leads a local crime organization. As the boys move into adulthood, that gap starts to define them. Joon-seok is pulled into his father's syndicate and rises through its ranks, while Dong-soo tries to build an honest life and falls for Choi Jin-sook, a woman connected to both men's world. Sang-taek and Joong-ho follow their own paths through military service, work and family pressure, and the group's old loyalty is tested every time one friend's choices put another at risk. The series opens with scenes set later in the timeline before moving back to show how the friendship formed and how it began to fracture, a structure carried over from the film. School fights, first jobs, first loves and the widening reach of Joon-seok's gang all reshape the four friends' bond, turning old habits of trust into open rivalry between the strand built on the street and the strand built on the law. Friend, Our Legend was co-directed and co-written by Kwak Kyung-taek and Kim Won-seok, with Han Seung-woon also credited on the script. It aired on Saturdays and Sundays from June 27 to August 30, 2009. The series gives Dong-soo's romance with Jin-sook and the growing distance between him and Joon-seok more screen time than the original film had room for, without settling here how the friends' rivalry is eventually resolved.