This review contains minor spoilers of the show.
2/5 stars
A dead woman comes back to life to reconnect with her family and friends in the Netflix fantasy drama Hi Bye, Mama!, an unabashedly sentimental look at grief and motherhood that should deeply resonate with its target viewers – while leaving many others bemused and uninterested. If you enjoy ugly-crying at tear-jerkers in all their contrived and manipulative glory, sign up right away.
If it is the metaphysical aspects of the story’s premise that intrigue you, though, you will be disappointed; the show offers no examination of faith nor any serious consideration of the Christian notion of heaven or the Buddhist concept of reincarnation.
The series marks the return to acting of Kim Tae-hee (Stairway to Heaven, Iris) after giving birth to two daughters with celebrity husband Rain. Its 16 episodes tell the intermittently touching, although overly drawn out story of how the protagonist, her loved ones, and fellow ghosts in her cinerarium learn to let go and move on. It’s a plot that would fit a feature film, stretched over 17 hours.
For artist Cha Yu-ri (Kim) and thoracic surgeon Cho Gang-hwa (Lee Kyu-hyung), who met in their 20s through their respective best friends, Go Hyeon-jeong (Shin Dong-mi) and Gye Geun-sang (Oh Eui-sik), it is love at first sight. Yu-ri dies in a traffic accident in 2015 right before she gives birth to a daughter, and Gang-hwa soon remarries, living with his second wife and the newborn Yu-ri left behind.
After watching over her family as a ghost for five years, Yu-ri miraculously comes back to life. (The reason behind this is briefly addressed in the final episode; it’s a letdown.) To complicate matters, she will be allowed to live on as a human if she manages to “get her place back” within 49 days – this must be true because the resident shaman (Yoon Sa-bong) of her cinerarium says so.
As the newly reborn Yu-ri hesitates to reunite with her loved ones (until an avalanche of coincidences – also known as the natural law of K-drama – force her to face every single one of them), Hi Bye, Mama! has some entertaining scenes. In the early episodes ghosts walk through walls with cheesy effects; a random musical number breaks out at the cinerarium; and there’s even a surreal scene of toilet humour.
Yet the fun doesn’t last and the core narrative is a drag. The moral case as to why Yu-ri must “find her place” back as her kid’s mother, her mother’s daughter and, worst of all, Gang-hwa’s wife, remains muddled. It doesn’t help that the second wife, Oh Min-jeong (Go Bo-Gyeol), has been a wonderful stepmother to five-year-old daughter Cho Seo-woo (Seo Woo-jin, a boy), who can see ghosts but can barely speak.
Still grieving, Gang-hwa has found himself unable to return to the operating room and perform any surgery since being traumatised by Yu-ri’s death five years earlier; her return to human form seems to make little difference. Meanwhile, motherly love permeates every action of Yu-ri’s, as she becomes a kitchen assistant at Seo-woo’s preschool, then her pick-up helper, and finally Min-jeong’s best friend.
A key weakness to Hi Bye, Mama!’ s writing lies in the way the narrative always derives suspense from its characters’ delayed responses, or plain inaction. Incredibly, Yu-ri doesn’t meet her own parents until a chance encounter at the midpoint of the series. It’s also infuriating to watch the story grind slowly to a halt in the show’s second half, with characters needlessly withholding information from one another.
As the main cast dilly-dally all the way up to the 49th-day deadline, the show indulges in generic side stories involving Yu-ri’s fellow ghosts, and serves up a panoply of inconsequential snippets about why life is meant to be beautiful in spite of regrets along the way, and repeated reminders that family love trumps everything else – all delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
This isn’t to say that Hi Bye, Mama! is a complete waste of time. Its drawn-out narrative and brazen repetition of the obvious may give viewers who like this sort of thing a cathartic experience. By the time the series inevitably devolves into a lot of weeping, and characters begin to say “sorry” and beg for forgiveness every other sentence, you’ll either be utterly entranced or bored out of your mind.
