I’ve watched what feels like a million verticals at this point, and I’m at peace with that. I like having an escape, because life is busy. Really busy. And let’s be honest — the world is a dumpster fire, so you find joy and entertainment wherever it’s available. That’s my whole theory. That’s the entire philosophy.
And I’d argue there’s something specifically restorative about this genre in particular. Verticals are stories where the woman who was treated as disposable turns out to be the most important person in the room, and where the man who couldn’t be bothered has to spend forty episodes learning what he threw away. That’s not a small fantasy. In a world that feels increasingly indifferent, watching indifference get properly punished is its own kind of self-care.
Be careful before you judge.
Two of my favorite people working in this space are Shay Dinneen and Erin Orcutt. Both of them are versatile and genuinely entertaining on their own. Put them together and it’s magic.
The chemistry, and why it matters more here
They have the kind of chemistry you don’t reliably get between co-stars — the kind where you already know, before the first episode loads, that it’s going to shine through.
Part of that is what happens off screen. They both have a real social media presence, posting behind the scenes and letting you see the actual relationship between them. They make you laugh, they make you smile, they make you look forward to whatever they’re doing next. And that friendship translates to the screen effortlessly, which is a bigger deal in verticals than in almost any other format.
Here’s why. In a medium that gives you ninety seconds before the cliffhanger, there’s no time to build trust between two characters — the actors have to arrive already carrying it. You can’t fake ease. You can play attraction, you can play tension, but that specific quality of two people who are comfortable enough with each other to be uncomfortable on camera? That comes from somewhere real, and these two have it in reserve.
There’s also a practical dimension people don’t talk about enough. These sets move fast — Orcutt has described the pace as actor boot camp, in the best way. You do not get eleven takes to find a moment. So a pairing that already has shorthand isn’t just pleasant, it’s a production advantage. They can find the beat on take two because they aren’t spending take one getting acquainted. You can see that efficiency on screen as spontaneity, which is a lovely magic trick.
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And it matters because of what this story requires of them specifically. Chloe and Liam spend most of the series in conflict, not romance — the scenes are arguments, accusations, cold rooms. Antagonism is much harder to make watchable than attraction, because there’s nothing pleasant to coast on. What makes their fights fun instead of exhausting is the underlying ease between the performers. You can feel two people enjoying the scene while their characters loathe each other, and that’s the exact tonal register this show needs to survive its own plot.
Which is why you stay invested. They’ve pulled off something most people in this space can’t: you want to see them together specifically. Usually as a viewer you want variety, new pairings, a different face opposite your favorite. Not with these two. With them you want them on your screen, and you know it’ll be good before you press play.
The premise
It Was Always You is a perfect example of the two of them working at full power. You love them and hate them in the same moment, which is a very particular skill.
The official pitch: “Chloe Green divorces her indifferent rich husband, Liam Green, after a three-year contract marriage. But then she discovers she is pregnant and herself the long-lost heiress of the extremely wealthy Miller family with six elder brothers. As Chloe embraces her new life, her suddenly jealous ex-husband starts chasing her, a fake Miller heiress refuses to give up her spotlight and chaos follows at every turn. Love and family have never been so complicated — or so much fun.”
So it’s the age-old story, at least by vertical standards. Boy marries girl to please his grandmother, who simply wants her grandson to be happy.
And I want to flag the irony sitting in that setup, because the show never says it out loud. The grandmother’s entire wish was for Liam to be happy. He responds by acquiring a wife she likes and then dedicating three years to making sure neither of them is. He treats his grandmother’s love as a compliance requirement — something to satisfy on paper rather than a thing he might actually want. That’s Liam’s whole pathology in miniature – he can execute the form of a relationship flawlessly and has no idea what it’s for.
Liam, who is a lot
And Liam takes Chloe for granted from minute one. His mother hates her. He told her at the very beginning that this would never be real, and she accepted that — even though it isn’t remotely what she wants.
That acceptance is the part I keep circling, because it’s the quiet tragedy underneath the whole setup. Chloe agreed to terms that guaranteed her own loneliness, and then spent three years honoring them anyway. Nobody made her keep trying. She just did, because that’s who she is.
It’s also where the orphanage backstory does real work rather than just providing pathos. A woman who grew up without a family doesn’t hear “this will never be real” as a warning. She hears it as a price, and she’s used to paying prices for proximity to people. She wasn’t naive about Liam. She’d simply been taught that belonging is conditional and that the condition is usually accepting less.
Liam is cold as ice. His digs at his wife are cruel and calculated, which is the important distinction — this isn’t a man losing his temper. It’s a man who has thought about the most efficient way to make her smaller and deploys it on schedule. He behaves as though she ruined his life, when she’s the one who tried to love him, tried to give him everything he could possibly want.
He made sure to beat her down verbally every single time an opportunity presented itself.
And I think the reason for the cruelty is more interesting than simple dislike. Chloe kept loving him anyway, and her persistence was an accusation. Every gesture she made was evidence that this could have been something, which meant every gesture indicted him for refusing it. So he punished her for the hope. It’s easier to make her stop trying than to explain to yourself why you won’t meet her.
And when she wants to have a baby — when she asks for the one thing that would make this marriage real — the rumors start flying that he’s getting back with his ex, and he turns genuinely vicious. Because he needs to keep Zoey strung along. Her brother is the world’s leading cardiologist, and Liam has a use for that.
Which tells you exactly how he’s organized his life. Everyone in it is an asset with a function. Chloe’s function was appeasing his grandmother, so once that stops being urgent, she becomes overhead.
But watch what he does when she leaves
Except he is very clearly not pleased that Chloe filed for divorce. He goes short and rude with everyone around him, snapping at people who have nothing to do with it.
That’s the tell, and Dinneen plays it beautifully — the man doesn’t get a single moment of self-awareness, but his behavior narrates it for him. He never wanted her while he had her. He simply never planned for a version of his life where she wasn’t there absorbing him. Losing something you refused to value is a very specific humiliation, and he responds to it by making it everyone else’s problem.
What’s genuinely well-observed is that he never once connects the mood to the cause. He’s not sad, as far as he’s concerned. He’s simply surrounded by incompetent people, suddenly, on this particular week. Grief he can’t name has to come out sideways, and Dinneen plays the misdirection without ever winking at us about it.
Zoey and the mother-in-law from hell
Zoey is a manipulative brat, and with the enthusiastic assistance of Liam’s mother, she sets about making their lives even more miserable.
Because his mother invites Zoey to move in. As one does, apparently, when one’s son is married to a woman one doesn’t like.
That’s not a plot twist, that’s a declaration of war conducted through interior decorating. And it’s the clearest picture of what Chloe has been living inside: a house where the other woman gets a bedroom and the wife gets nothing, and everyone involved treats that as reasonable.
The mother deserves a little more scrutiny than she gets, too. She isn’t protecting her son from a gold digger — Chloe is the one person in that house asking for nothing. What she can’t tolerate is that Chloe has no pedigree, which means her objection is class, dressed up as concern. And Liam lets it operate. He never defends his wife to his mother, not once, which tells you the marriage was never something he considered his to protect.
The fight, and whose side he takes
The two of them get into an actual fist fight, and of course Liam takes Zoey’s side. It doesn’t matter that Zoey is plainly in the wrong. It doesn’t matter that she makes it worse by belittling Chloe on her way out the door — and then gets the butler in on it, which is somehow the most insulting detail in the whole sequence.
Honestly? If I were Chloe I’d have knocked Zoey out. I’m not proud of that. I’m just being transparent.
What’s grim underneath the soap of it is the hierarchy being established in real time. It isn’t just that Liam picks Zoey. It’s that the staff understand they’re allowed to pick Zoey too. Chloe isn’t being disliked in that house, she’s being outranked, and everybody on the payroll got the memo before she did.
That’s the loneliest form of mistreatment, by the way — not the loud kind, but the kind that becomes ambient. When the household help feels comfortable participating, the cruelty has stopped being a conflict and become the culture. Chloe wasn’t fighting a person. She was living in a climate.
The orphanage card, and the funniest man in the room
I’ll admit the series leans hard on Chloe having been raised in an orphanage — it’s the lever for everything, and it gets pulled often. And Liam’s genuine surprise that Chloe basically hates him is comical.
It’s comical specifically because of what Dinneen does with it. He plays Liam as hesitant, almost stuck, a man who opens his mouth and then can’t locate the sentence. And the line delivery is so good that you end up loving him anyway, which should not be possible given everything he’s done. That’s the trick of the performance: he makes Liam’s emotional incompetence read as funny rather than sympathetic, so you’re laughing at him instead of forgiving him, and you stay engaged without the show having to pretend he’s a better man than he is.
It’s also a very smart solution to a structural problem this genre rarely solves. Verticals routinely need a male lead to be unforgivable for thirty episodes and then romantically viable for the last ten, and most productions handle it by simply pretending the first thirty didn’t happen. Dinneen handles it differently — he plays Liam as arrogant but not malicious in his self-understanding, a man whose cruelty comes from never having examined a single thing about himself. That’s a much easier gap to close later, because growth is available to the oblivious in a way it isn’t to the genuinely vicious. He builds the redemption arc’s foundation while still fully committing to being the worst.
The brothers, and the twist
When Chloe leaves, a man pulls up and tells her he’s there to bring her home.
And the reveal lands: her brothers are Zoey’s brothers. Zoey was adopted when Chloe went missing as a child. So the woman who moved into her house and made her life unlivable has been occupying her actual life this whole time, by accident and then very much on purpose.
Which is a genuinely elegant piece of plotting, and it retroactively sharpens everything Zoey has done. She wasn’t just being cruel to a woman she disliked. On some level she knew, or feared, that Chloe’s existence made her provisional — that she’d been given a family as a substitute and could be returned. Every attack was a woman defending a place she never believed was hers. It doesn’t excuse a single thing. It does explain the desperation.
Her brothers are all home, and what I liked is what they admire about her — that she wants to earn the family name rather than ride their coattails. It’s a nice inversion. The rich family isn’t offering her a rescue, they’re offering her a starting line, and she takes it.
And that’s the real gift, structurally. Chloe doesn’t get saved by money. She gets something she has never once had: people who assume she’s capable. Three years in the Green house taught her she was tolerated. Ten minutes with the Millers and someone is telling her to go win a competition. The wealth is set dressing. Being believed in is the actual inheritance.
My one standing complaint about this trope
It is genuinely wild to me that in every version of this story, the moment the biological daughter turns up, the adopted one apparently stops mattering.
Like — she was your sister for many years. She grew up in that house. Somebody raised her. The tidy thing these plots do is make the adopted daughter monstrous so nobody has to feel complicated about discarding her, and I always notice the shortcut. It would be so much more interesting if Zoey were awful and still loved, because that’s how families actually work. But we’re taking this stance here, I guess.
And there’s a thematic cost to it, which is why it bugs me beyond the fairness question. This is a show about a woman learning that love shouldn’t be conditional. Then it hands us a family whose love turns out to have been extremely conditional the whole time, and asks us to find that satisfying. You can’t build a story around blood being destiny and also around chosen family being real. It wants both, and it gets away with it purely because Zoey is so much fun to hate.
And the banquet scenes
I also have to talk about the banquet scenes in these things. There is always a banquet. There is always a man in a bad suit.
This one included. Chloe steps in to stop a waiter from being harassed, and the guy is deeply gross about it, and Chloe gives absolutely no fucks — she informs him that she will be educating him on decorum, personally, right now.
That’s the moment the show tells you who she is, and it’s smart placement. She doesn’t stand up for herself first. She stands up for a stranger on the clock, because she remembers what it’s like to be the person in the room everybody feels entitled to. Three years of Liam’s calculated cruelty didn’t make her cruel. It made her allergic to watching it happen to somebody else.
It’s also the first time we see her use a voice she’s clearly always had. She wasn’t meek in that marriage — she was withholding. She had this in her the entire time and chose not to spend it on Liam, or couldn’t afford to. Watching it arrive fully formed the second she’s somewhere safe tells you exactly how much of herself she’d been holding back, and how much that cost.
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Liam, drugged and jealous
Then Zoey drugs Liam, and he goes chasing after Chloe — jealous, because she’s at the banquet with another man.
A man who is, in fact, her brother. Which he doesn’t know, so his reaction is at least internally coherent, but I need him to calm all the way down regardless. Because this is the part that gets me: he had three years to be jealous. He had three years to want her. He never once picked up the option. It takes another man’s arm on hers for the feeling to become available to him, and even then it isn’t love arriving — it’s ownership noticing it’s been misplaced.
There’s something sharp about the fact that it takes being drugged for him to act on any of it, too. Even his feelings need an excuse. Sober Liam has spent three years constructing an entire architecture to avoid admitting he wants his wife, and the only way through it is chemical. That’s not romance. That’s a man whose defenses are so total that he requires an external event to feel anything on schedule.
The design competition
The Miller brothers encourage Chloe to enter a design competition, which is exactly the right kind of support — not a handout, an opportunity she still has to win.
Naturally, Liam’s sister and Zoey decide to make it miserable and try to get her thrown out. Her brother Fred shows up and shuts it down, then takes her to lunch. Liam follows and is insanely jealous, and then accuses her of being after the Miller brothers for money.
Which is spectacular projection, and worth pausing on. Liam married Chloe as a transaction. He’s been maintaining a relationship with Zoey purely to secure access to a cardiologist. He is the only person in this story who has ever treated people as currency — so when he looks at Chloe with a wealthy family, the only motive he can imagine is his own.
And note what he’s really objecting to. It isn’t the money. It’s that someone showed up for her. Fred does in one afternoon what Liam declined to do for three years — stands between Chloe and people being awful to her — and Liam can only interpret that as competition, because he has no framework for a man protecting a woman without expecting to be paid in something.
Zoey commits to the bit
Zoey is the world’s worst person, and she earns it here. She has photos of Chloe with her brothers, so she sends them to Liam’s grandmother — and the grandmother has a heart attack.
Then she leverages it. While a woman is dying, Zoey’s terms are that they sign over five percent of the company’s shares.
Liam is about to do it. Which is its own indictment — he’s so accustomed to solving problems by paying whoever is squeezing him that he doesn’t even look for another door.
Chloe calls Charles. He comes immediately and takes on the surgery.
That’s the whole character contrast in one beat. Zoey monetizes a heart attack. Chloe just makes a phone call and saves the life of a woman whose family made her life hell for three years. Nobody asked her to. She had every reason not to.
The grandmother is the only person in that house who ever wanted Chloe there. She’s the reason the marriage existed. So Chloe isn’t being saintly toward her enemies — she’s protecting the one person who was decent to her, which is both more believable and more moving than pure selflessness. She’s not above the grudge. She’s just very precise about who it belongs to.
Two minutes and one introduction
Chloe reintroduces herself as the Miller sister, and within roughly two minutes — because apparently that’s the going rate in verticals — Grandma is fine.
But Chloe isn’t. She goes weak and starts to go down, and thankfully she’s already in a hospital, so they’re able to save her and the baby. Emotional distress.
And of course it is. She’s spent three years absorbing cruelty and calling it a marriage, then walked into the middle of a crisis caused by the people who inflicted it and fixed it for them. The body keeps the tab even when you refuse to. That she collapses only after everyone else is safe is the most Chloe thing in the entire series.
It’s also the one moment the show lets her be fragile without her permission, which is why it works. Chloe never asks for care. She has to be physically unable to stand before anyone in that building thinks to check on her. Every woman who has ever been the reliable one in a room recognizes that scene immediately.
What she wants when she wakes up
When she comes to, she asks for Liam. And what she wants is to end the marriage.
Because he’s finally figured out how much he loves her, now that he’s losing her. He wants another chance.
As though those get handed out freely.
Liam’s realization is real — I don’t doubt it for a second — and it is also completely worthless, because it arrived only when the alternative appeared. He didn’t discover his feelings. He discovered scarcity. And Chloe, who spent three years begging for the version of him now standing in front of her, understands that the man who needed to lose her to want her will need to lose her again the next time he gets comfortable.
What I love is that she asks for him. She doesn’t have a lawyer deliver it, doesn’t ghost him, doesn’t let it happen through paperwork. She wakes up from nearly dying and requests the man specifically so she can look at him while she ends it. That’s not spite — that’s a woman reclaiming the one conversation in her marriage she was never allowed to lead. He set the terms three years ago. She’s setting these.
gives no fucks
What I love most is Erin Orcutt’s Chloe here. She gives no fucks. She will tell Liam exactly what a piece of crap he is and itemize every mistake he’s made, and Orcutt delivers all of it dead serious and somehow hysterical at the same time.
That’s a genuinely difficult register. Play it too broad and Chloe becomes a punchline machine and you stop believing she was hurt. Play it too wounded and the whole thing turns into a slog. Orcutt threads it by letting the humor come from Chloe’s certainty rather than from jokes — she’s not being funny, she’s being extremely clear, and the comedy is watching Liam receive it. You cannot stop rooting for her.
And the reason it lands emotionally rather than just as fun is that Orcutt keeps the earlier version of Chloe visible underneath. You can still see the woman who tried, which means every blistering line reads as something that used to be a plea. She’s not a different person now. She’s the same person who finally stopped negotiating. That’s what makes the bluntness feel like triumph instead of just attitude — you watched her earn every syllable.
Erins characters read as actual people rather than trope delivery systems. The script hands her a wronged-wife archetype and she returns a woman with a specific sense of humor about her own suffering.
And Orcutt and Dinneen play off each other so naturally, in that bantered rhythm they’ve clearly built over multiple projects, that you’re smiling and laughing through the entire drama even while the plot is doing terrible things to people. That’s the reason to watch this one. Everything else is trope machinery. The two of them are the show.
The way they find their way back
It’s the way that at the end of the drama these two find their way back to each other — and the way he learns what he’s always had and how to appreciate it — that gets to me. It’s sweet and gentle, but it’s also realistic that she keeps her heart guarded.
And that guardedness is what makes the ending work rather than cheapen everything that came before. Chloe doesn’t forgive him in a rush of music. She lets him back in incrementally, on probation, watching. Because the injury wasn’t a single betrayal she can decide to release — it was three years of being taught that her love was a nuisance. You don’t unlearn that because a man finally said the right sentence.
So the burden stays where it belongs – on him. His arc isn’t winning her, it’s demonstrating, repeatedly and without credit, that he understands what he had. Not acquiring something new. Recognizing what was already in his house, being offered to him daily, while he looked past it. That’s a quieter kind of redemption than the genre usually attempts, and it’s the reason I believed it — he isn’t rewarded for grand gestures. He’s rewarded for paying attention, eventually, finally, the way she did from the very first day.
The tomatoes and the club scene
Now do I take any of this seriously? No. But I do genuinely enjoy the escape verticals give me. And this one — especially the tomatoes and the club scene — had me laughing until my stomach hurt.
Which is worth naming as a craft point, actually. Both of those bits work because Orcutt and Dinneen commit completely and don’t play them as comedy. Nobody’s mugging. The absurdity is treated as a Tuesday, and that straight-faced commitment is exactly why it’s funny. That’s the trust between them doing the work again — you can only be that ridiculous on camera opposite someone you know won’t leave you hanging.
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The verdict
Fifty-two episodes filled with laughter, brothers, emotion, and just a genuinely good time. It Was Always You was worth the watch.
Nothing in it is new — contract marriage, cruel husband, secret heiress, evil rival, sudden pregnancy. You could assemble this from parts. The plot was never the point.
What makes it worth your time is that two performers with real trust between them took a machine-built story and played it like it mattered. Dinneen makes a man’s emotional bankruptcy funny without ever letting him off the hook. Orcutt makes a woman’s self-respect feel like the actual plot twist. And together they generate the one thing no amount of trope density can manufacture – the sense that these two people are specifically, genuinely reacting to each other.
Which brings me back to my theory. The world is a dumpster fire, and I’m going to keep finding joy where it’s available. Fifty-two episodes of watching a woman decide she deserves better, delivered by two actors having a fantastic time, is joy. I’m not going to overthink it. I’m just going to press play on whatever they do next.
