What to Watch After We Are All Trying Here: Three K-Dramas That Hit the Same Note
If you stayed for quiet healing, these three follow-ups keep the ache gentle and the company meaningful.
We Are All Trying Here lands because it treats loneliness like something people survive together, not something one grand speech can fix. Park Hae-young’s 2026 tvN / Netflix drama moves slowly, with tenderness, isolation, healing, and found-family warmth carrying its nine episodes. Its comfort comes from restraint: platonic-deep connection, small redemptive movement, and the sense that people can still become shelter for one another. If that is the part you want to keep sitting with, start here.
1. My Mister
Same writer and same quiet ending as We Are All Trying Here. 2018, tvN.
This is the direct next watch if We Are All Trying Here left you wanting the same emotional weather, only deeper and longer. Park Hae-young also wrote My Mister, and the overlap is not cosmetic. Both dramas care about isolation, tenderness, healing, and the strange relief of finding one person who does not ask you to perform wellness before they sit beside you.
The premise is simple enough to feel almost plain: a 45-year-old engineer and a 21-year-old temp at Saman Engineering become each other’s only safe place. That is why it fits so cleanly after We Are All Trying Here. The relationship engine is platonic-deep, the pacing is slow-burn, and the ending is redemptive-quiet. Nobody needs a fantasy rule, a revenge plan, or a huge external hook to make the pain legible.
Pick this if the thing you loved was the hush. Pick it if you wanted people bruised by ordinary life, moving toward each other without turning that movement into noise.
2. Reply 1988
Similar tenderness and redemptive-quiet warmth, from a different writer. 2015, tvN.
If We Are All Trying Here gave you the healing, but you want more daily warmth around it, go to Reply 1988. Lee Woo-jung’s 2015 tvN drama follows five childhood friends and their families sharing one Ssangmun-dong alley in Seoul from 1988 to 1994. The register is roomier than Park Hae-young’s: more neighborhood noise, more family texture, more joy-nostalgia woven through the ache.
The taste match is still real. The mood tags overlap where it matters: found-family, tenderness, and healing. The ending is also redemptive-quiet, so the aftertaste stays gentle instead of explosive. The difference is pacing and scale. We Are All Trying Here is slow-burn and inward. Reply 1988 is ensemble-ambient, giving you a whole block of people whose lives keep brushing against one another until home starts to feel shared.
Pick this when you do not want to leave the comfort score behind, but you need more laughter, more parents, more meals, and more people filling the frame of the heart.
3. Goblin: The Lonely and Great God
Similar slow-burn tenderness, but in a fantasy-romance register. 2016, tvN.
This is the variety pick. Goblin: The Lonely and Great God is not trying to give you the same grounded world as We Are All Trying Here. Kim Eun-sook’s 2016 tvN drama begins with a 939-year-old immortal goblin who needs his human bride to end his curse, then finds her in a high schooler who can see ghosts. That is a very different door into loneliness.
But the taste connection is still strong if your favorite part of We Are All Trying Here was slow-burn tenderness. Both sit with grief and longing before offering relief. Both make isolation feel old, stubborn, and difficult to explain to people outside it. The ending type shifts to bittersweet, and the relationship engine moves into fated-mates romance, so this will not scratch the exact platonic-deep itch. It is here for viewers who want the same ache made larger, stranger, and more mythic.
Pick this if you want tenderness with fantasy rules around it, and if a bittersweet ending sounds acceptable after a redemptive-quiet one.
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What you actually want next
If you wanted the closest emotional sibling, pick My Mister. If you wanted the healing to become neighborhood warmth, pick Reply 1988. If you wanted the loneliness translated into fantasy romance, pick Goblin: The Lonely and Great God. The real choice is how much quiet you still want. Stay with Park Hae-young for restraint, move to Lee Woo-jung for found-family comfort, or let Kim Eun-sook give the ache a supernatural shape. Or browse by mood at quizfandom.com/find-your-next-kdrama.