Next

Next is a fourteen-episode MBC miniseries that aired Mondays and Tuesdays from May 16 to June 28, 2005. It follows four people whose present-day romances keep going wrong: Lee Soo-hyun (Park Ye-jin), her former partner Min Ki-beom (Ryu Soo-young), his current partner Kang Jung-hwa (Jang Shin-young), and Ki-beom's younger brother Min Ki-soo (Lee Jong-soo). Through recurring dreams, the four begin reliving past lives in which the same two people keep finding each other across different centuries.

The drama is built as an omnibus. Six modern-day episodes bookend and interrupt four two-episode arcs set in the Joseon dynasty, the Goryeo dynasty, the Japanese colonial period, and a prehistoric era. Each era had its own writer and, in the case of the Goryeo segment, its own director: three directors (Yoo Jung-jun, Kim Do-hun, Park Jae-beom) and five writers (Joo Chan-ok, Gu Seon-gyeong, Go Eun-nim, Seo Sook-hyang, Kim Hyun-jong) split the workload. In every era the same four leads reappear as new characters bound by the same attraction.

The Goryeo segment, casting Park Ye-jin as the courtesan Ja-un-yeong and Ryu Soo-young as the Mongol general Kasar, became the arc viewers responded to most, built around a romance that history would not let survive. The other four eras drew a rougher reception, with some reviewers singling out Lee Jong-soo and Jang Shin-young's performances for criticism even as Park Ye-jin and Ryu Soo-young's pairing carried the show.

Next wrapped its run without resolving the fated-love arc its own premise had promised, and Korean viewers criticized the ending as abrupt. What lasted longer than the drama itself was the response to its two leads: Park Ye-jin and Ryu Soo-young's on-screen chemistry drew enough of a following that the Korean fan community DC Inside merged their separate fan galleries into one joint board, which has stayed active for years after both actors married other people.