Because This Is My First Life

October 9, 2017

Nam Se-hee (Lee Min-ki), a programmer whose primary relationship is with his mortgage, needs a housemate. Yoon Ji-ho (Jung So-min), a screenwriter fleeing her family's marriage pressure, needs a place to live. A contract is proposed. The Mapo apartment establishes the drama's world.

October 9, 2017

The terms of the contract marriage — the specific rational architecture Se-hee builds around a decision that has emotional consequences he hasn't accounted for.

October 16, 2017

Se-hee's household rules and Ji-ho's gradual, amused subversion of them.

October 16, 2017

Se-hee's cat — the only creature he has permitted to be emotionally important — and Ji-ho's relationship to it as a proxy for her relationship with him.

October 23, 2017

Ji-ho's screenwriting — her professional ambitions and the social pressure that has made her feel like a failure despite genuine talent.

October 23, 2017

The Sangam-dong digital media city used for Se-hee's workplace — the rational, structured IT world that is genuinely foreign to Ji-ho's more intuitive emotional vocabulary.

October 30, 2017

Ho-rang and Won-seok, and Soo-ji and Sang-gu — the drama's secondary couples, each embodying a different version of what their 30s relationship dilemmas look like.

October 30, 2017

Se-hee and Ji-ho at their midpoint — the contract marriage becoming something neither can categorise.

November 6, 2017

The specific difficulty two very rational people have naming what they feel — the drama's most intellectually honest treatment of adult emotion.

November 6, 2017

Ji-ho's family's response to the contract marriage — the social pressure it was supposed to relieve becoming a different kind of pressure.

November 13, 2017

Se-hee's first genuinely unguarded emotional moment — the drama's most earned scene.

November 13, 2017

What happens when the contract's original term expires — and what both parties discover about what they actually want.

November 20, 2017

Their choice to continue — not because of the contract but despite its expiration.

November 20, 2017

Ho-rang, Won-seok, Soo-ji, and Sang-gu each reaching their own versions of the drama's central question.

November 27, 2017

What the Mapo apartment has become — the mortgage, the cat, the space two people share.

November 27, 2017

The finale. One of tvN's most quietly perfect romance dramas — a show that treated its 30-something characters' specific anxieties with intelligence and warmth.