I occasionally like a more grounded K-drama – less glitz and designer clothes, more money troubles and friendship drama. Twenty-five, Twenty-one (TvN 2022) really hit the spot for me. It’s a coming-of-age drama that reminded me a lot of Reply 1988 – which is no bad thing.

Like the Reply series, we have two timelines. In 2021 a teenage girl, Kim Min-chae (played by Choi Myung-bin), is reluctantly attending a ballet exam. She does badly and in a pique runs off to her grandmother’s house where she find a diary of her mother’s from 1998.

Cue the story of Na Hee-do (teenager played by Kim Tae-ri, who co-starred in the excellent film The Handmaiden; adult played by Kim So-hyun, who is a major musical theatre star). Hee-do was a child prodigy in fencing but, now in her penultimate year of high school, has failed to live up to the early promise. She has developed an obsession with Korea’s top fencer Ko Yu-rim (played by Bona) – a girl her own age, also living in Seoul. When Hee-do’s school axes its fencing team due to the IMF crisis, Hee-do manoeuvres her way into Yu-rim’s school and its fencing team. But Yu-rim’s friendship is not easily won.

During this time, Hee-do repeatedly bumps into local young man Baek Yi-jin (Nam Joo-hyuk, from Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-joo and Start-Up) and befriends him. His family has gone from riches to rags thanks to the IMF crisis and he’s now working several odd jobs, while his parents have been forced to separate to shield his mother from his father’s creditors. Yi-jin is sweet and charming and Hee-do is clearly attracted to him from the start. But Yi-jin is very aware of their four-year age gap and tries to maintain a clear boundary.

Ye-jin happens to be old friends with Yu-rim and is frustrated that the two girls don’t get on. But initially he has his own problems to sort through. Hee-do does make friends at her new school – class president Ji Seung-wan (Lee Ju-myoung) and her childhood bestie Moon Ji-woong (Choi Hyun-wook), a popular boy who is both class clown and most fashionably dressed.

Much of this TV show is taken up with fencing training, which is intense. Yu-rim and Hee-do attend at most half their school classes as they spend several hours a day training. They are under a lot of pressure but thankfully there is none of the physical violence and bullying I have seen in other 20th century sports dramas, including Korean ones.

This is the first K-drama I’ve seen that depicts Covid. It’s not a plot point, just part of the landscape of 2021. The same way that certain fashions (shell suits! My god I had almost forgotten shell suits) are part of the depiction of 1998. Some of the historical setting does play a role in the plot: pagers and pay phones are key. And as well as the IMF crisis, there are other world events depicted.

But for the most part this is about daily life for a small group of people. It’s about parents and children; about single mothers who have careers; about the pressures of being an elite athlete; and the inevitable K-drama romances.

Above all it’s about friendship. Which it’s easy to forget in some of the middle episodes that concentrate more on romance. But for me the show starts and ends with Hee-do and Yu-rim. The way their relationship develops from one-sided near-obsession to animosity to friendship is as beautiful and gripping as any romance I’ve seen in a K-drama.