Eighteen Me Crushing on Thirty Me

About this drama

The premise is exactly what the title says. The show commits without blinking. Thirty-year-old Noah travels back to 2012 Chicago, wakes up in his teenage bedroom, and meets his own 18-year-old self. His cover story: a distant cousin. He moves into the apartment on that lie. The younger Noah is hot-tempered, sensitive, and gradually falling for the mature, caring newcomer, unaware the newcomer is himself. The show works that dramatic irony for everything it is worth. School bullying. Snowy dates. Quiet rooftop nights. Daily cohabitation, all of it threaded with tender, conflicting romantic tension between one man and his own past. The turn comes when the time travel truth is revealed to Noah's mother, and the pair face the cruel limitation of the temporary timeline. There is no clever escape from the physics. The thirty-year-old gets pulled back to his original era. What remains is a long-distance fate spanning twelve years, waiting for the two to reunite and complete their love. Twelve years is the number that gives the ending its ache, because it is not a mystical gap. It is exactly the distance between the two versions of the same man, and the show makes him wait the whole span of it.

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