We Are All Trying Here: A Korean Drama About Creative Failure That Feels Like Therapy

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from twenty years of almost. Almost finishing the script. Almost getting the greenlight. Almost breaking through. We Are All Trying Here (모두가 자신의 무가치함과 싸우고 있다), currently airing on JTBC, is a drama about what happens to a person who has been living in that almost for two decades — and what it takes to stop.

The protagonist is an aspiring director who has spent twenty years chasing a debut that has not arrived. The drama opens at his lowest point: the career is not merely stalled but collapsed, and the accumulated weight of deferred dreams has become a kind of personal ruin. The woman he meets is not a savior — she is an overwhelmed producer with her own relationship with burnout — but their collision opens the possibility that self-worth might be rebuilt from the wreckage of ambition rather than in spite of it.

This is territory that JTBC has navigated before. The network has a track record of dramas that treat emotional complexity with more patience than the conventional romantic-comedy formula allows — My Liberation Notes, Be Melodramatic, and now We Are All Trying Here occupy a similar register: quiet, observational, occasionally funny, frequently devastating in the precision of what they choose to notice.

What distinguishes the series is its specificity about the Korean film industry. The aspiring director's twenty-year failure is not generic creative struggle; it is mapped onto the particular economics and social dynamics of Korean cinema — the way debut films function as credential, the producer ecosystem, the festival circuit that can either launch or strand a filmmaker depending on timing and luck. For international viewers with any relationship to the film industry, the specificity translates directly. For those without, the emotional substrate — the person who chose a difficult thing and has been paying for that choice ever since — is universal.

The female lead's dynamic with the male protagonist avoids the rescue narrative that weaker versions of this premise would default to. She is not there to believe in him. She is there, initially, because professional circumstances require it — and what develops between them is less romance-as-cure and more two damaged people accidentally helping each other locate their own floor. The drama earns its title: everyone in it is, in fact, trying.

We Are All Trying Here is twelve episodes currently airing on JTBC, making it a mid-season discovery for viewers who prefer their K-dramas to feel like they were written by people who have read a novel.