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| Classic K-drama lyric. |
Maybe I was just on a road to be disappointed by all my shows this month. It's not unusual for a K-drama to start strong and then completely collapse. But some real bummers this month and some bad takes on consent and homosexuality.
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Doctor Slump
Reuniting stars of fan fave The Heirs, this series about career setbacks, mental illness, and living a different path in Korea's competitive society should have been a slam dunk. And it was for about 10 episodes. But it could not deliver on its second half.
Yeo Jeong-woo (Park Hyung-sik) and Nam Ha-neul (Park Shin-hye) were high school rivals both planning on going to medical school. He was more social and outgoing and she was all about her studies As adults, the each found a certain amount of success. Yeo Jeong-woo was a famous, popular plastic surgeon, seemingly on top of the world. Nam Ha-neul had struggled more and was an anesthesiologist suffering under an abusive boss at her hospital who was blocking her advancement. But both of their careers came crashing to a halt at the same time. Yeo Jeong-woo is accused of making a medical error which leads to the death of a patient. Nam Ha-neul finally loses it on her boss and quits her job. She discovers she is experiencing depression.
Suddenly, their lives intersect again when Yeo Jeong-woo moves into the building owned by Nam Ha-neul's family. Coming face to face again with each other while both is suffering a profound loss of identity and in the midst of mental health struggles, they latch on to each other. She sees how isolated and lonely he is, despite his bubbly social exterior. He sees how she hides her feelings and suppresses her own wants for the sake of others.
When both of them are at rock bottom, they discover they are not alone there and having a new friend, someone who fully understands how bleak this is, is what helps them both get back on track. And a romance blossoms.
The show does a good job demonstrating the stigma around mental illness in Korea. When Nam Ha-neul first tells her mother she is depressed, her mother denies it. But the show does not leave it there. The family learns to cope with her diagnosis and tries to eventually understand. Nam Ha-neul says early on, “I’m the type of person to save my favorite food until last” and she comes to realize she has done this in all aspects of her life. She has put off love, happiness, and any sense of self to achieve her goal of becoming a professor at the hospital. So she sets off to change that with the help of Yeo Jeong-woo.
I gobbled this all up but once the couple comes together the show does not know what else to do. As per usual, there's a nonsense criminal plot thrown in, which was over the top. They give more air time to the second lead couple (Yoon Park and Gong Seong-ha are very cute) who are single parents who are kind of a mess at parenting their own kids and end up helping each other.
But the show utterly loses its momentum and the threats to the couple at the end range form the briefly deranged to the stupid. It's too bad because Park Hyung-sik Park Shin-hye look like they are having fun together and their characters seeing and acknowledging the others personal pain is quite meaningful at the start.
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Wedding Impossible
I was willing to go with the convoluted marriage contract plot of this show, but then some really shitty gay politics and prioritizing straight people's feelings really derailed a show I was enjoying. I cannot talk about it without spoilers so this is a very spoiler heavy review.
Lee Do-han (Kim Do-wan) is the grandson of a conglomerate. He's avoided his family and any associations with the company for many years. He was the product of his late mother's long-time affair and has always been made to feel less than by his older half-siblings. His younger brother, Lee Ji-han (Moon Sang-min) has for years tried to get his brother to be seen as the candidate to take over the company. Finally, it seems like that is happening when the grandfather insists that Lee Do-han marry another conglomerate's daughter. But Do-han has a secret. He is gay.
So his long time bff, Na A-jeong (Jeon Jong-seo) agrees to enter into a contract marriage with him so he can avoid the conglomerate marriage. Unexpectedly, the grandfather approves of Na A-jeong and now Do-han and Na A-jeong find themselves on the road to a wedding neither of them want. But Lee Ji-han is furious and wants to interfere so that the conglomerate marriage happens. He threatens to make Na A-jeong fall in love with him and then he falls for her.
The plot is a bit strained by what got me hooked on the show was Moon Sang-min's performance. He is trying to interfere because he wants to heal the rifts of their family and see that he and his brother are treated with respect. He is also the little brother who wants his big brother to stay nearby so they can be a family. Do-han has lived abroad and avoided the family. After the loss of their mother and father in a car crash, they have kind of been on their own with this miserable chaebol family always resenting them.
Moon Sang-min has this uncanny ability to look like a lost child while being a very, very tall man. You don't doubt his sincerity in wanting to just be close to his brother, who has clearly been pushing everyone away. But his performance is achieving more than the script. The storytelling is random and hiccupy with a lot of narrative whiplash. But he was breaking my heart.
Na A-jeong willingly goes along with these plans. She has been Do-han's beard in the past, voluntarily. She steps in to protect her friend. This has been their dynamic. So it is not out of character for her to do so again here.
It's just when she starts to have feelings for Ji-han that it all falls apart. It threatens the grandfather's succession plan, Do-han's safety, Ji-han's relationship with Do-han, and hurts her family in the process who didn't know it was a fake marriage. There's no easy way out.
But somehow as things are falling apart, Ji-han blames Do-han for being "selfish" in entering this marriage contract and hiding. He's trying to make some claim that Do-han has trapped A-jeong (who entered the contract willingly). But he is also arguing that Do-han "coming out" is the fair thing to do here. That's where I got angry. It's not like Do-han can be out in Korea without major complications/risks/harm.
Do-han did not ask to be the conglomerate candidate to takeover the company. He didn't want any of this. He truly thought the grandfather would reject Na A-jeong and they could run away to America and just kind of be free--or as free as he could imagine himself. But then everyone got trapped.
The fact that the storytellers here make no space for Do-han's feelings and pawn them off as selfishness just pissed me off. Then the grandfather accuses him of being selfish for trying to come out and live authentically. Ji-han sort of apologizes later but I was not accepting his apology.
While Do-han's sexual identity was truly just a plot point to tell the story of Ji-han and A-jeong's unexpected romance, it's not okay to blame him for his actions without acknowledging the societal issues that made him hide in the first place. The show prioritizes and valorizes the straight couple's love/needs while not at all validating the reality of the gay character's situation.
Infuriating. I am not looking to Korea for great LGBTQIA+ representation but I don't have to keep watching a show that is making these kind of statements.
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More Than Friends
If someone completely re-writes this show, it could be a gem of friends to lovers journey. But as it was written, it was full of bad ideas about consent, stalking, and just unnecessary complications.
Lee Soo (Ong Seong-wu) and Kyung Woo-yeon (Shin Ye-eun) were friends in high school. Woo-yeon had a crush on Lee Soo and confessed to him twice, but he just wanted to be friends. She decided to end the friendship and never see him again.
He went abroad and became a successful photographer. Meanwhile, she has been hung up on him for years. When she gets drunk, she leaves him long confessing messages on voicemail about her feelings. But it turns out that is no longer his number.
The number belongs to On Joon-soo (Kim Dong-jun) the head of a publishing house. Woo-yeon, works as a calligrapher, and ends up getting an assignment from On Joon-soo. He then puts it together that this is the woman who has been calling him.
Lee Soo and Woo-yeon end up on a book assignment together from On Joon-soo. Lee Soo remains cold and kind of a jerk and it feels a little abusive the way he keeps inserting himself in Woo-yeon's life. Woo-yeon tries to move on. On Joon-soo starts hitting on her and then suddenly Lee Soo gets competitive about Woo-yeon's attention. But it's still not love. Lee Soo has divorced parents and this has fucked him up forever about relationships and commitments.
The best part of this show was that Lee Soo and Woo-yeon are photographing and writing about neighborhoods around Seoul and these sequences were beautifully shot and do make you want to wander down alleyways with someone you have a crush on.
The other good part of this show was Woo-yeon's friend group and the struggles of her female friends and their relationships. Those stories were better told including one of the very poor girl who has been dating her boyfriend for 10 years, but won't get married to him because she worries she will drag him down with her family's financial problems. So she suffers as a put upon daughter-in-law under his cruel family, because she doesn’t have status.
But the two men fighting over Woo-yeon got tiring really fast. Woo-yeon punishes Lee Soo in ways that seem out of character for her. Kee Soo's relationship hang-ups are poorly presented and he does come off as a jerk so much of the time you wonder what did she ever see in him. And there are so many men in this show who show up when they have been asked to stop.
This could have been done better and without these egregious consent issues.
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1% of Something
Quick take: I was working through a list of older K-dramas people recommend. This one popped up on the list. It's a contract dating/marriage story with some very dated attitudes.
A grandfather meets a kindly school teacher, Kim Da-hyun (Jeon So-min) and decides that she should marry his asshole chaebol grandson, Lee Jae-in (Ha Seok-jin) because the grandson might become a better person if he knew this lovely woman. None of this really addresses that this poor woman would have to marry a jerk but she would get a fortune as the grandson will inherit the company if he plays along. The grandson finds out about this change to the will and goes to meet this teacher. They hate each other immediately. But he tries to negotiate that they fake date for a while to appease the grandfather.
I appreciated that Da-hyun called out Jae-in from the start on his bad behavior and rudeness. She is not a doormat. But he learns to be slightly human and she falls for him. He is aggressive and is supposed to be the player to her “never dated before” innocent. But he does a lot with out her consent and is not actually apologetic. Definitely a show from a while ago (2016). I could suspend my disbelief for some of this, but it might not be worth digging this one up.
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