'Heavenly Ever After' pop-up blurs line between afterlife, daily life

Visitors take a look around a pop-up for JTBC's drama "Heavenly Ever After" at The Hyundai Seoul in Yeongdeungpo District, Friday. Korea Times photo by Park Jin-hai

By Park Jin-hai

• Published May 17, 2025 2:01 PM KST
• Updated May 20, 2025 3:11 PM KST

Drama blends heart, humor, mystery in whimsical yet Korean setting

As JTBC’s weekend drama “Heavenly Ever After” continues to gain popularity, a pop-up experience at The Hyundai Seoul in Yeongdeungpo District offers fans a chance to step directly into the series’ whimsical yet profound vision of the afterlife.

As seen in the drama, upon entering, visitors answer their preferred age, place, people or things they want to remember in the afterlife, and traits of their character. The "Heaven Immigration Inspection Counter" is equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) that provides guidance for those who have just "immigrated" to heaven.

Then, after taking photos in front of the gate and choosing the physical age they want to live as in heaven — child, youth, middle-aged or elderly — the AI monitor shows them what they would look like in the afterlife. For those who registered in advance, they can also receive their heaven resident ID card on the spot.

Passing through the gate, they can sit in a chair to reflect on their life, just like in the drama, or participate in a lucky draw by scanning a barcode, similar to how the main characters ordered food with their virtue points in the show. Winners can receive the foods that appeared in the drama, which are currently available as ready-to-eat meals at GS25 convenience stores, as prizes.

“I often watch dramas that depict the afterlife because I like them. Compared to the American drama ‘The Good Place,’ this one feels a bit different," said Kim Min-seo, 17, who visited the pop-up with her friend. "I liked that it portrayed not only romantic love between men and women, but also sacrifice and warm humanity.”

On one side, there is a scale that measures the weight of one’s sins and chairs placed in "Tongue-Pulling Hell," where the tongues of those who have lied are pulled out and cut according to the weight of their sins. On the other side, the entrance to Hae-sook (Kim Hye-ja) and Nak-joon’s (Son Suk-ku) house is recreated.

Park Sung-hye, a 48-year-old housewife from Guri, Gyeonggi Province, said, “We usually think that only truly bad people go to hell, but after watching this drama, I realized that sin is relative and the boundary between heaven and hell isn’t that great. Even in the show’s setting, if you come to heaven and still do wrong things like swearing or vandalizing and receive six grape penalties, you end up going to hell. And seeing that conflicts between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law from earthly life continue even in heaven, it made me think that maybe heaven isn’t really heaven after all.”

She added, “Although it was made by the writer and director of ‘The Light in Your Eyes,’ if that drama was a serious version, this one seems to talk about fate and karma in a more comic and lighthearted tone.”

"Heavenly Ever After" is an afterlife story blending heart, humor and mystery. The drama begins with a unique premise that the afterlife is not so different from the world of the living. In many ways, heaven is portrayed as an extension of life on earth, where people live at their chosen age, have jobs and accumulate virtue points. These settings draw certain parallels to the NBC drama "The Good Place."

The means of traveling between heaven and hell is a train in "The Good Place," while in "Heavenly Ever After," it is a subway. Heaven is managed with modern technology and both dramas feature main characters — Hae-sook and Eleanor — who don’t seem like the type to belong in heaven, raising the question of whether they arrived there by mistake. There are also similarities in the comedic episodes that occur whenever the protagonist does something wrong.

Korean interpretation of afterlife, humanism

However, "Heavenly Ever After" stands out for its distinctly Korean portrayal of the afterlife and its fresh combination of humanism and elements of mystery.

The depiction of hell in this drama overlaps with the hit webtoon-based-film "Along with the Gods," which described hell based on various Eastern philosophies such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and shamanism. The King of the Underworld, or "Yeomna Daewang" in Korean, appears, along with different realms of punishment: the Boiling Cauldron Hell, where murderers suffer in molten metal; the Hell of Blisters, where violent offenders are frozen solid for 200 million years; and the Tongue-Pulling Hell for cheaters and liars, where their tongues are pulled out and cut according to the weight of their sins.

The drama tells coming to heaven is not the end of story and if people make mistakes, they can be sent back to hell. Its premise is that the moment of death is not a final ending, but a new beginning connected to your previous life and that heaven is a place where you can do what you couldn’t accomplish before. Ultimately, it also includes the perspective of reincarnation, where you are eventually reborn into another life.

Above all, the drama is infused with a uniquely Korean, melodramatic humanism. Hae-sook, who is criticized for being ruthless as she supports her family in place of her injured husband by working as a debt collector for her entire life, secretly helps others — like when she visits an elderly man collecting recyclables to collect his debt, but instead, seeing him about to take his own life, she gives him two ears of corn and tells him to eat one tomorrow, giving him the reason to live.

Another touching scene is when Nak-joon, the heavenly postman, delivers a bankbook saved by a deceased mother to her abandoned children, stirring the emotions of viewers.

As the mysterious woman Som-i (Han Ji-min), who has lost her memories and whose past hints at a troubled relationship, adds tension to the drama, the show deftly conveys the message that the connections between people are the true gifts of life and that “you are the sum of all your good and bad relationships.”