Jung Sung-Joo ( Secret love affair, A wife's credentials) is my favourite korean drama screenwriter. Once I started watching her dramas I found it very difficult to go back to the ones I used to watch. Everything looks so precise, so well thought, so realistic that you end up questioning yourself on how you were able to accept all that clumsiness that is the main ingedient of the average korean drama. Heard it trough the grapevine is an amazing show that deconstructs the elements at the base of the typical rich marry the poor tale in order to question its moral assumptions. From the start, the stereotype is reversed. Instead of an inexplicable and adamant purely platonic attraction we are confronted with the complex emotivity of two teenagers that cannot distinguish so clearly between the spiritual and the physical. The progression of the story is not that through her unjustified pride the heroine, after having met every possible calamity to atone the sin of her poverty, finally enters the word of the riches. It's exactly the opposite. Even the usual family revenge subplot is treated in a much mature way, without incredibly tragic past events providing material for lenghty heart-rending flashbacks. I particularly like how the corrupted environment of the upper class, an essential ingredients of this kind of play, is not portrayed in the usual exaggerated manichean way. Instead of being pure evil ready to committ all sorts of crimes the characters walk the ambiguous line between a simple moral misconduct and the crime of corruption. Because in the end we do not expect lawyers to act like gangsters, even when they are shady they would somehow try to manipulate the law instead of openly breaking it. Moreover for once is not that everyone is willing to compromise is moral integrity for money ( As dramas have accustomed us to think), but people are moved by complex and intertwined motivations that can make a corrupted person redeem or vice versa. In this respect I noticed that usually people appreciate how moral seem dramas or movies in opposing the poor good characters to the evil rich, seeing in this a portrayal of our society. But firstly I do not think that the good and the evil usually present themselves with such clear distinction, secondly i dislike how the average drama end up teaching us that there is no use opposing the rich ad the powerful because their corruption is so deeply rooted that only ficitve characters with superpowers can oppose them. In Heard it Through the Grapevine, instead, we find a world ( as the one we live in, I suppose) where if you are not to greedy you can choose to be honest, that it is not so worse than being a corrupt rich, and people usually prefer to live honestly so that they can quietly sleep at night. In this respect I find exemplary how the people working for the Han family progressively end up questioning their authority and decide to leave them. There would be much more to say about this drama, as for instance how it portrays the ambivalent power of education and knowledge to both free and bind people, but I think I'll end this review here. Just to finish, I have to say that I find the narrative of this drama very compelling, I thought that every character and every subplot were amazingly interesting and in the end I really enjoyed watching it.