Fourteen reporters from 10Asia gathered together to vote for what they believed were the best drama, director, writer, and actor in the drama world in 2010. was selected as the year’s best drama with 6 votes, just edging out with 5. As the article mentions, the reporters who submitted their votes are simply writers who diligently and lovingly watched Korea’s dramas over the past year, so their votes are more reflective of personal taste than professional critical opinion. Though they did not win, two reporters also selected Kim Kap Soo [the actor who played Lee Sunjoon's father] as the best actor, and one reporter selected the Jalgeum Four of Park Yoochun, Park Minyoung, Yoo Ah In, and Song Joong Ki as the best actors of the dramas of 2010.
[Translation]
Though KBS’s was “not this year’s most well-made drama, it was the most meaningful” (Yoon Hee Sung). “It didn’t go down the path of naive hypocrisy or malpheumisms packaged in coolness, and in this generation in which it is hard to speak of dreams, it was a drama that showed rare balance and frankness and tossed out the most basic questions necessary for dreams” (Baek Eun Ha). “Besides the outside shell of the romance and coming-of-age stories, it managed to confront and question again and again issues of principles, problems of the time, reform, and intelligence. It was ‘this year’s discovery’ that nobody saw coming” (Cho Ji Young). Indeed, not only the Sungkyunkwan scholars but also viewers and critics fell completely in love with Kim Yoonshik—no, Kim Yoonhee. Of course, one cannot ignore the drama’s weaknesses, including that “the second half deteriorated and the story wasn’t unified from time to time” [...] “But the energy from that [lack of unification] allowed the drama to be a youth, sageuk, and political drama [all at once]” (Kang Myung Seok), turning this opinion into a positive one. More than anything else, this drama asked serious questions about the way we should live our lives, and did so with the voices of young people speaking toward a young generation, and made an effort to awaken our exhausted and emasculated age to the world. Thus our most honest feelings about can be summed up in the words of Yoon Hee Sung: “It wasn’t a drama that made its viewers laugh or cry, but there was no other drama that warmed our hearts like this.”
