I've had a bit too much time on my hands and have been watching too much TV. Some shows were not even worth finishing. I'm listing them for completeness. But 12 shows in one month is too many (ethe shortest month with only 1 extra day) and I was scraping the bottom of the TV barrel at times.
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| Marry My Husband asking the important questions. |
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Just Between Lovers (aka Rain or Shine)
I looooved one of the central concepts of this show but as so often is the case it started to lose momentum over time. But there's a sweet, weepy melodrama here even if it's stretched out too much.
Both, Lee Kang-doo (Lee Jun-ho) and Ha Moon-soo (Won Jin-ah) were involved in a terrible accident when they were teens. They were in a mall collapse and survived. But in the same accident, Kang-doo's father and Moon-soo's little sister both died. They have lived with the after-effects of this trauma for years--some physical and some mental.
Then they both find themselves working with the company that is trying to rebuild on the site of the mall collapse. The project is led by the same family who was involved in building the mall, including the architect's son, Seo Joo-won (Lee Ki-woo). Kang-doo and Moon-soo end up working together on a project to memorialize the mall collapse at the building site.
I have written about the complexities of memorializing tragedies before. I was surprised a drama was tackling such a topic. This is by no means the central conceit of the show--it is simply a plot machination to bring the couple together. But it does become part of their healing process. Each of them have their own experiences in forgetting and remembering--as do their bodies which still suffer from that day. Pain manifests in different ways and even Moon-soo's grieving parents who have separated have their own ways of "coping." And then there is the survivors' guilt which they are both processing.
Kang-doo is this interesting set of contradictions. He can beat people up for money but he's just this broken kid who is craving love and affection. And he finds a new family of sorts with a loan shark who becomes his lovingly bullying grandmother, a mothering but also needy woman who runs a club, and a mentally challenged man who becomes his de facto little brother.
Moon-soo spends all her time taking care of her alcoholic mother and her relationship with Kang-doo becomes the first thing she does for herself, as she wonders if she should be able to live well when her sister died.
There's a terrible melodramatic score and I think the material could have been written and directed better. But at least for the first 10 episodes this did feel like a unique take.
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My Demon
Despite some really awful costume choices, I was initially curious about this drama that was getting a lot of buzz. But it did not live up to expectations.
A potential heiress, Do Do-hee (Kim You-jung) is somehow mysteriously connected to a demon who says he is the devil (Song Kang). He loses his powers and they suddenly transfer to her (via a tattoo that leaps from his wrist to hers). He needs to touch her wrist to use them. So, they end up in a contract marriage each hoping the other can help out with problems they are facing but as they spend more time together, he starts to see the point of humans (creatures he has always disdained). He comes to have feelings for Do-hee and wants to do everything in his power to protect her and there are a lot of people out to get her.
Blah blah blah plot. My main criticism of this show is why is her styling impeccable and his atrocious? This show has maybe the worst costume design I have seen in a long time. They have dressed Song Kang in giant lapels, massive shoulder pads, and silk shirts with pussy bows. Something about this unhinged and all over the map soft styling undermines his power and confidence. It’s almost like he’s been put in the same kind of women’s wear as her. But it looks so odd on his very tall skinny body. Like it is constantly fighting with his body. Did they not have faith that he had shoulders? HE HAS SHOULDERS.
And maybe I would not have been fixated on the costuming if I had cared about the plot. But it’s YET ANOTHER past life cursing present life story.
And the late in the show plot twists come out of nowhere and are so incongruous with the characters. Just machinations to make the story move.
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Marry My Husband
While there is zero chemistry in this revenge-romance, it was a soapy enough plot that I needed to watch it all the way through and the twists and turns made it worth the journey.
Kang Ji-won (Park Min-young) is married to the insensitive and cruel Park Min-hwan (Lee Yi-kyung). She is dying from cancer and walks in on him and her best friend, Jeong Su-min (Song Ha-yoon) having an affair and excitedly discussing living off the life insurance they will get when she dies. He ends up killing her in that moment, but rather than dying she is sent back in time to relive the past decade again.
But all the things that happened to her before will happen again...but this time she must manipulate the situation so they happen to someone else. So she conspires with her boss, Yoo Ji-hyuk (Na In-woo) who also has been sent back in time (a BTS reference is how they figure out they are both from the future), to get Su-min and Min-hwan to get married instead. But even with all their planning they encounter some unexpected interference.
This show got me thinking about all the ways K-dramas operate as female fantasy. The ways people watch these shows to escape their lives and maybe their shitty husbands, abusive workplaces, and see validation in the struggles they have with raising their kids and being respected. So even if I didn't believe any of the feelings between Na In-woo (who I consistently find dull) and Park Min-young, I was desperate to see the terrible people around get their comeuppance. It has moments of lighter comedy mixed in with serious melodrama. But the challenge to get circumstances to turn in their favor is hard-earned journey and it does not come without costs to people they care about.
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Knight Flower
Another "widows doing it for themself" drama (a la The Matchmakers). Is this a new trend? Here, the widow, again the daughter-in-law of the Left State Minister, has a different secret pastime. She is not matchmaking but swashbuckling.
Jo Yeo-hwa (Lee Hanee/Honey lee), has been the dutiful widow during the day for 15 years. She never even met her husband. He died on the day of their wedding. But she has served her in-laws well as she is expected to do and then she is to just die (preferably on her husband's grave if she's really looking to bring virtue upon her in-laws house). Meanwhile, at night, she puts on a mask and rescues trafficked children and tries to serve justice which is severely lacking among all the corrupt court officials.
In one of her late night escapades, she encounters Park Soo-ho (Lee Jong-won) a newly appointed military officer who finds her Robin Hood routine, at first, criminal. And then he comes to respect the work she is doing (and figures out she is a woman in disguise) and comes to help her. Together, they try to solve the mystery behind the late King's death that relates to both their families.
Honestly, love a romance where the man has the crush and the woman is too busy doing her work to notice. While I'm not sure there was much chemistry between them I did appreciate Lee Jong-won's saucer eyes when he was looking at her lovingly. And we love it when a woman sticks it to powerful men who think they know everything.
With only 12 episodes, the plot fit the arc well and everything ties together. A solid little drama without much fuss.
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Revenant
I am not a scary movie person. This ghost driven story was not really one for me. I thought the real character development (the thing I DO CARE ABOUT) came quite late in the series.
On some level, this drama suggests that it takes possession by a murderous ghost to actually do some self-care. And I maybe started to root for the ghost who had some boomer gripes about kids today.
That was the moment where things got really kind of interesting. There is a cultural issue that the grumpy ghost was getting at. The ghost died in the 1950s. At the time, her rural life in Korea was harsh, her opportunities were nil, and she and her community were barely surviving. But as she jumps bodies into the present, she is furious that she struggled to live and now modern Korea is a world of plenty. Yet, people today are still somehow unhappy. This is not grounds to kill a bunch of people but that psychological leap and the extreme changes in Korean society between the 1950s and now was interesting to contemplate.
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Welcome to Samdal-ri
I wasn't going to review this one because I just fast-forwarded to the end. It's a perfectly acceptable going-home-to-Jeju-and-reconnecting-with-the-people-in-your-past story. But my real comment is that it's nice Ji Chang-wook is back and doing not totally unwatchable dramas. This one started out well but I just wasn't interested enough in the characters when it all felt very inevitable and obvious. There was hardly a love triangle. Also I'm getting pretty tired of "evil" characters doing things that are outrageous without even a mild grounding in reality.
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The Secret Romantic Guesthouse
Honestly, a quick watch with some not great performances but an unusual story for how a deposed prince manages to take back power.
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Captivating the King
I had to stop watching this one half-way through.
I liked the romance at the start. A woman (Shin Se-kyung) disguises herself as a man to gamble over baduk. She uses her winnings to fund rescuing trafficked people. And she falls for the prince (Jo Jung-suk) when she is playing baduk. He is someone she has always admired. But then the prince has a personality transplant when he decides to steal the throne. He ends up sentencing his old baduk friend to death claiming they were never friends and just cuts her off for his newly minted ambition or whatever.
Jo Jung-suk is acting through jaw tension alone and with no other parts of his body. It's exhaustingly boring. Very one note.
I almost could handle the baduk player coming back from death (she doesn't die but he thinks she did) seeking revenge on the prince. BUT THEN SHE FALLS IN LOVE WITH HIM. I'm sorry my forgiveness does not stretch that far. I could not overcome that barrier. I actually wanted to throw up when they had sex. Even if this is somehow part of her revenge scheme (vomit) I was immediately out. So bad choices all around, especially by me for watching this one.
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Love Song for Illusion
Dual-personality/evil spirit nonsense. Just too over the top at times and silly. Park Ji-hoon deserves better material. I stopped watching a couple episodes before the end. Hope it all worked out for all the personalities.
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Doctor Romantic 2
Young people learn to grow up and be more complete humans while also doing a lot of close-up surgery that made me ill to watch. I was in the mood to see more of Lee Sung-kyung's work after her appearance on Suchwita. And she's lovely here alongside Ahn Hyo-seop. They have good chemistry and their romance was kind of hot. But the evil machinations of the people trying to destroy the lead doctor and his hospital wasn't really interesting to me. Sorry.
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A Piece of Your Mind
I should have probably stopped this series early on when a character goes to Norway (without proper warm clothes), because they are sad, and then quickly dies in a snow incident that seems wholly preventable. But this death is what kind of motivates all the other characters who are all sad because of another death that happened years before and also lost love.
Not great if this is what your whole plot depends on to make romance happen. And then there's a creepy AI voice replica situation of the dead girl from Norway going on.
All these actors have done better work elsewhere (Jung Hae-in, Chae Soo-bin).
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| This leather trench coat was a bad costuming choice |
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While You Were Sleeping
This was a quirkier show than I was expecting. Three people end up connected and they each have dreams that predict the future for each other. Once they meet they find out maybe they can stop the inevitable in these dreams from happening.
I actually found the triumvirate of dreaming characters played by Bae Suzy, Lee Jong-suk, and Jung Hae-in to be a fun combination--well two of them anyway. When they played up the comedy and the love triangle of sorts between them it worked well. But I still do not find Lee Jong-suk actually watchable as an actor. And Suzy's character could be anywhere from 12 to 35 depending on the maturity level she was showing in any one scene. It was confusing at times how bratty and immature this grown woman who was a hard hitting journalist was supposed to be.
I got bored by the end by the romance and was fast-forwarding.
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