Amazon Prime K-drama Battle for Happiness: mothers battle social media addictions in mystery drama,
Lead cast: Lee El, Park Hyo-joo, Jin Seo-yeon, Cha Ye-ryun
Latest Nielsen rating: 0.93 per cent
Happiness is a popular Instagram account, or at least that’s what most of the protagonists in the new drama Battle for Happiness seem to believe.
Availing of their wealth and status and sacrificing their children’s well-being as they fish for likes, Oh Yoo-jin (Park Hyo-joo), Song Jeong-a (Jin Seo-yeon) and Kim Na-young (Cha Ye-ryun) are all mothers living in the swanky “Highprestige” apartment complex, in addition to being social media influencers with thousands of followers.
Social media, much like other addictions, provides these women with brief moments of gratification, but most of the time they’re jonesing for their next fix, which compels them to spend an inordinate amount of their time engineering popular posts.
Jeong-a is the CEO of her own company and a materialist who likes to flaunt designer goods online, while Na-young is a vain and prissy young housewife prone to throwing tantrums.
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However, the member of the trio with the most disturbing social media habit is without a doubt Yoo-jin, who shows herself off as a glamorous and perfect mother online, but in reality is paranoid and traumatises her children thanks to her obsession.
She’s the kind of person who will spend a whole morning making elaborate cookies for her children, which she will then take careful pictures of and post online, before heading around to her neighbouring influencer rivals to give them some, hoping they will share pictures of them and credit her.
Forgotten in this process, her children never get their hands on any of the cookies.
Battle for Happiness, like many high-society dramas, begins with a grisly flash-forward. A dead woman hangs off her balcony in the middle of the night as onlookers gather below, before the police descend on the crime scene.
The suggestion is that this body belongs to one of the three influencers, but which one? The show provides an answer to that question fairly early on, replacing it with another mystery. Why her?
Not a part of the Highprestige clique, but soon to find herself deeply involved in it, is Jang Mi-ho (Lee El), an assistant manager in the marketing department of a large bank. At the beginning of the show she is selecting the winners for an annual social media event and is shocked to discover that she knows one of them: Yoo-jin.
It’s not just the coincidence of the chance encounter that affects her - she shares some sort of dark history with Yoo-jin. Upon recognising her she reflexively utters the word “perpetrator”.
Thanks to the competition, Mi-ho and Yoo-jin’s worlds soon collide, a reunion that Yoo-jin in particular is not happy about.
Mothers focused on their children’s education are a big ratings driver on Korean TV – look no further than this year’s massive hit Crash Course in Romance – but Battle for Happiness belongs to that more focused group of apartment-complex-full-of-tiger-mums dramas, which includes 2022’s Green Mothers’ Club.Members of this group typically don’t have very high stakes and the men are generally sidelined. The protagonists all live in a closed environment and their actions don’t really affect anyone beyond their immediate environment. They may be wealthy but not on the level of characters in shows like The Penthouse; their squabbles don’t usually make the news.
The stakes in Battle for Happiness are particularly low as the show kicks off, which seems to deliberately trivialise its shallow characters’ goals in life. The main thrust of the first two episodes is the staging of a play at the local English kindergarten and the tense battle between all the mothers, who want their daughters to play Snow White.
For Yoo-jin in particular, this becomes a life-or-death matter. She desperately wants her daughter in the spotlight, not for her child’s sake, but to bolster her own social media account. She is liable to do deranged things to give her daughter a leg up, like faking her peanut allergy.
The social-media veneer of these women is so razor thin that they are openly catty to each other as they leave snide comments on each other’s posts, despite pretending to be great friends.
Battle for Happiness doesn’t get many points for originality but its premise will be a familiar one - particular for mothers dealing with twin pressures of advancing their children in a cutthroat society and projecting an idealised version of themselves to the people around them to keep up in the materialist and social-media-addicted rat race of modern society.
The events that have unfurled feel like only a slight exaggeration of how the world works today. While this makes the story more relatable, it also makes for less compelling viewing compared with shows with more outrageous plots.
Standing out against the stereotypically awful high society mothers is Lee El, the My Liberation Notes actress who once again plays a strong-minded office worker who doesn’t bend too easily to social expectations.The show cleverly introduces her forthright personality in an early scene when she goes out to eat lunch alone. Ensconced between wooden dividers in a one-person booth, she receives her tray of food and promptly switches all the items around, for she is left-handed.
This is a small but effective detail and, especially in the absence of major dramatic fireworks, hopefully the show will have more of these going forward.
Battle for Happiness is streaming on Amazon Prime.
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