Our temporary holiday from Netflix means I have access to considerably fewer K-dramas at the moment, but there are still a few scattered between the other big streaming services. Anna (2022) started life as a web series and is currently on Amazon Prime Video in the UK. Unusually for a K-drama it’s only 8 episodes long. I didn’t even bother checking online reviews before giving it a try.

This series is most definitely at the more serious, high-quality drama end of the scale compared with a lot of other TV shows from Korea. But it didn’t drag or take itself too seriously, as I found with Misaeng.

Our main character is Lee Yu-mi (Bae Suzy – a huge Hallyu star I know mainly from Uncontrollably Fond), a young woman from a poor background who tells a lie that should have been small and insignificant but instead changes her life entirely. It also changes the tone of the show from straight drama to psychological thriller.

Yu-mi’s parents run a tailor shop in an old-style market. During her childhood they are losing more and more customers to cheap ready-made clothing, so money is tight. At a young age Yu-mi attracts the attention of the English wife of an American soldier stationed in their town. This Englishwoman spends a lot of time with Yu-mi, teaching her English, piano, art and paying for her to attend ballet classes. After a couple of years of this unasked for attention, the soldier and his wife leave, and so must all those extracurricular lessons. Yu-mi is left with a love for the arts that is impractical in her family’s circumstances. This sometimes makes her seem bratty and ungrateful.

Even so, she is popular and performs well at school so that it looks likely she can go to university in Seoul with a scholarship. Then in Yu-mi’s final year of high school, everything falls apart and she winds up living alone in Seoul.

It’s here that the lies begin. Unable to tell her parents that she has failed to graduate high school, she claims that she has a place at a Seoul university. This leads her to a student there, Ji-won (Park Ye-young, who had a small role in Abyss), who introduces Yu-mi to her friends at the university’s student paper.

A few years later, Yu-mi gets a job working as a maid/general dogsbody for Lee Hyeon-ju (Jung Eun-chae), an ultra-rich woman who runs an art gallery. Here, Yu-mi is exposed to those beautiful things she fell in love with as a child. She also sees clearly for the first time the contempt that rich people have for the less well off, including their own employees.

When things once again fall apart, Yu-mi sees an opportunity to build on her earlier lie and claim the life that she wants. But she doesn’t anticipate that she will attract attention that could prove dangerous.

Though Yu-mi’s initial lies are fairly small, there is always a degree to which they are selfish. Her parents are working extremely hard to pay for her to live in Seoul while she is supposedly attending university, to the detriment of their health. When she loses her job for Lee Hyeon-ju, she has enough money and acquired knowledge that she could probably finally get that degree. Instead she compounds the lie in a way that makes innocent people complicit.

Yu-mi is beautiful and quietly charming, but she can be aloof to the point of being hard and cold. As her new life brings her initial success and riches she displays a cruel streak. And even when she shows compassion, it is minimal unless for selfish reasons.

If a lead character who is inscrutable doesn’t appeal, then you might find like me that the heart of the drama lies with Ji-won, Yu-mi’s friend from when she first moved to Seoul. Ji-won becomes a journalist and spends most of the series trying to unravel the lies surrounding Yu-mi. She is passionate and outspoken – altogether easier to like than Yu-mi.

Though Yu-mi does have relationships, there is not really a romantic storyline in Anna. The drama also doesn’t repeat scenes – a common K-drama device that can get irritating. Another bonus is that men behaving badly (of which there are a few) are definitely shown as being bad guys.

Anna is certainly a melodrama, not a realistic drama, but along with the gloss and glamour there is a harder, grittier tone than most K-dramas and no silliness. I found it just as compelling as the shows that use outlandish plot twists to keep you watching. The acting is excellent, the score is restrained and even the glamour is kept to a more realistic level than in most K-dramas.

One small point to finish: the version of Anna on Amazon is the director’s cut. This is worth noting because when Anna was originally aired online by Coupang Play, it was heavily cut, becoming just 6 episodes long. Writer director Lee Joo-young complained that she had not consented to these cuts. In fact they changed the show so much she asked for her name to be removed. A few months later Coupang Play released a special extended edition of Anna that turned out to be the original director’s cut. This is the form that Amazon has licensed.