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I feel like my drama slump kind of continues. SIGH. There have a been a slew of recent romance dramas but they all started to blur together.
Love Next Door
I could not help but see some parallels between Love Next Door and the recent series, Doctor Slump.
Here, childhood neighbors Bae Seok-ryu (Jung So-min) and Choi Seung-hyo (Jung Hae-in) haven’t seen each other in a long time. Seok-ryu has been working for a prestigious tech company in the US and is engaged. But she shows up unexpectedly back in Korea because, it turns out, she's broken off her engagement and quit her job. Seung-hyo has become a successful architect and has had a crush on Seok-ryu in the past but his timing was always off.
They were both always overachievers and their parents have never quite given them what they need. Seung-hyo's mother is a diplomat who was always leaving him. His father is a workaholic doctor who has also kept his distance. Seok-ryu's parents run a tteokbokki shop and have pushed her to be successful but have not really listened to her.
Now that her life in America has crashed and burned, she's trying to get her parents to let her pursue her own interests. Seung-hyo still wishes he could get his parents attention. There's a lot of inner children who need healing here.
Seok-ryu's ex-fiancé comes back into the picture and with him a secret is revealed. Eventually Seok-ryu and Seung-hyo begin a secret romance which leads to some awkwardness as longtime friends cross the threshold into sex and intimacy.
The secondary romance is between Seok-ryu and Seung-hyo's gung-ho friend Mo-eum who thinks of herself as a superhero paramedic and her Mo-eum's new neighbor, a single dad, Kang Dan-ho.
The ex-fiancé storyline felt like a non-threat from the get-go. The secret that comes out is handled really poorly by all involved. There's chemistry here between the couples and it's a solid drama but I could not help but feel like little set it apart from the other shows I was watching.
No Gain, No Love
This Noona drama attempts to, in a way, deal with the misogynistic culture of Korea and the unfair emphasis on marriage in the workplace. Sadly some of that critique gets lost as the drama progresses and some uncomfortable truths about the concept of family in Korea takes its place.
Single woman Son Hae-yeong (Shin Min-a) wants her work to be recognized and she wants be promoted at the education company she works for. But the company gives bonuses and attention to people who are married. So Hae-yeong tries to talk a local convenience store clerk, Kim Ji-wook (Kim Young-dae) into being her husband on paper so she can get the benefits at her job and win a competition for a promotion. Her ex-boyfriend who she found out was cheating on her has just gotten married and he has stolen one of her ideas to get ahead. So she's looking to get revenge as well and needs this marriage to give her a leg up.
Kim Ji-wook on the surface appears to not like Hae-yeong at all but somehow agrees to the wedding anyway. He cleans himself up and suddenly becomes a handsome groom no one expected. After the wedding he disappears, only to eventually turn up at Hae-yeong's job as a new intern. She's been telling everyone her husband is away and now she's trying to figure out how to keep their fake marriage hidden.
Hae-yeong lives with two women who were foster kids Hae-yeong's mom raised. Hae-yeong never got enough love and attention from her parents because they were always taking in abused children and she thinks she is not lovable. So she focuses on her ambitions over all else.
The workplace dynamics around single people, marriage and what burdens a wife has if her husband makes mistakes at the same workplace get teased out nicely in this drama. And watching mediocre men get ahead simply because they are married men is a big driver of Hae-yeong and the plot.
The drama also has some pretty surprising anti-establishment attitudes in other ways with an ethically non-monogamous throuple that pops up. And there's a bit of random business that involves some dildos (it's all blurred out but I have to imagine that's what they were). But then there are some pretty expected and disappointing points about the foster kids not being Hae-yeong's real family.
In the end, there is an emphasis on following your own path rather than one set by the people around you.
I am a sucker for Noona dramas and Kim Young-dae is appropriately ardent and quietly falling for Hae-yeong. But I cared less about the secondary romance that involved Hae-yeong's boss and her foster sister who is a popular web novelist who writes racy romances.
Serendipity's Embrace
What the hell was this non-drama? I mean truly there was no story here at all and at only 8 episodes it shows.
Lee Hong-joo (Kim So-hyun) is an animation producer and runs into a high school acquaintance Kang Hoo-yeong (Chae Jong-hyeop) while she's meant to be on a blind date with someone else. He's had a crush on her since high school but he's been living in the US for a long time and is not meant to be in Korea for very long. But he can't get her out of his mind. Meanwhile, she's still getting over a romance with an author (Yoon Ji-on) that ended when he walked out on her without any explanation.
That any of this series tries to explain anything about that ex is central to its problem. We deeply do not care about that clingy, creepy asshole (Yoon Ji-on plays a sweet guy in Love Next Door and honestly while I was watching both at the same time I had some mental whiplash).
Ultimately, there are hardly any impediments to their romance and so there's no drama to this drama.
Cinderella at 2am
I could not get into this show at all and never finished it. It starts with a woman being paid to break up with her boyfriend by his rich mother and she accepts and then he spends a lot of time trying to get her back (even though she didn't want to break up in the first place). She's got trauma. He's rich. But he doesn't know about her past and she didn't know he was a chaebol. So this was not a great relationship to root for to begin with.
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