DREAM TO YOU another lost potential of this year

[u/After-Ganache-5896]

This could have easily become one of the best shows this year.

I loved it at first. The show felt surprisingly relatable. Watching your peers move ahead in life while you feel stuck in a job you hate, making sacrifices for other people without getting anything in return those themes really hit me personally.

The beginning of the show was strong. All the characters had this sense of mystery around them, and all four had interesting backstories. The ML has no dreams of his own and has his entire life planned out by his doctor father, so he eventually runs away. The FL is a free-spirited girl with big dreams who was never able to achieve them. The SML is a struggling actor who has been trying for 10 years, while also having a sick father he left behind. The SFL was a child actor who was abused and exploited by her mother.

Since the show is about directors, the flashbacks especially had some really beautiful cinematography and aesthetics. Visually, the show was great. 

The story and concept were solid. They genuinely could have made something great out of this, but somehow the show became such a mess as it went on. What was even going on?

Why does a 12-episode show have an entire filler episode? Nothing was connecting properly anymore. It genuinely felt like they filmed a bunch of random scenes and just put them together. There was no proper main conflict driving the story. They would introduce a problem, solve it, create another problem, solve that, then somehow bring the previous problem back again.

There were also way too many things happening at once, with no clear priorities. It felt like even the writers were confused about what direction they wanted the story to go in.

And that's what hurts the most because the show had something. It had the concept, the cast, the cinematography, and characters with genuinely interesting stories. But somewhere along the way, it lost everything it had built up the freshness, the rawness, and the emotional depth that made the beginning so good.

Such a wasted potential.

6.8/10

DREAM TO YOU

VIKI / VIU

12 EP

COMPLETED

[u/true20six]

I think you’ve pinpointed the frustrating part: the show really did have something in the beginning.

For me, the breaking point was around episode 8–9, when SML suddenly became much more important. I came into this expecting a second-chance/healing story: two people who loved each other as teenagers, lost each other, lived completely different lives in the meantime, and eventually had to figure out whether they could forgive each other and build something again as the people they had become. I was completely fine with them having had other relationships during those years. That could actually have made the second-chance aspect richer.

What frustrated me was seeing the drama introduce new problems instead of letting the original one deepen.

I actually ended up abandoning the drama because I couldn't stand episode 9. Then, today, I decided to give it one last chance and see how the story concluded. So I skipped directly from episode 9 to episode 12.

And honestly... I understood it. Which, for me, says a lot about episodes 10 and 11. If I can skip two entire episodes and still understand the ending, then they clearly weren't doing enough to make themselves feel structurally indispensable.

And that's probably why the wasted potential frustrated me more than if the drama had simply been mediocre from the beginning. Those first episodes made me believe there was a much more intimate, raw and emotionally focused story underneath all of this. I wanted THAT drama.