April-May 2026: Grown-Up Love, Petty Princes, and Epic Suffering

 

Welcome Back BTS. Las Vegas May 2026

Maybe not the best dramas I've ever seen over April and May but certainly some of the plottiest (complimentary). 

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The Practical Guide to Love 

Sometimes I feel like dramas don't know what to do with Han Ji-min. In this drama, she is supposed to be some sort inexperienced noona finally getting to dating late in life and going through a series of bad blind dates. She ends up on two dates that start out bad but have potential. 

At 43, it seems a little ridiculous for Han Jim-in to have to be so infantile in a dating drama. Like come on. Give her material that is worthy of her. 

Here she plays Lee Ui-yeong, a very successful purchasing agent at a top end hotel. She has focused on her career and never made time for love. But she decides it is time to give it a try and fully commits herself to an endless series of blind dates. On one date, she meets Song Tae-seop (Park Sung-hoon) who immediately talks about marriage and seems kind of closed off. On another, she experiences a kind of awkward tension with Shin Ji-soo (Lee Ki-taek) and actor who was just filling in for someone else on the date. But it turns out there is a spark of chemistry with Ji-soo, yet he is very immature. Meanwhile, she comes to see Tae-seop as having hidden depths. 

The drama just loses steam because there is not really a rivalry set up between the two men. The relationship with Tae-seop gets very gooey, very quickly. And there's basically no dramatic obstacle to the romance. 

Honestly the secondary storyline's around Ji-soo's father and stepmother is more interesting than the primary romance. 

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Rooftop Prince

Watching this throwback drama from 2012 was a good reminder about why K-dramas are so addictive even if the older dramas are Problematic with the capital P. 

A time-traveling drama where Yong Tae-yong (Park Yoo-chun)  is a chaebol heir avoiding his family business and living in the US. He briefly meets waitress Park-ha (Han ji-min) but his cousin, Yong Tae-mu (Lee Tae-sung), comes to town and distracts him...and then pushes him overboard from a yacht.  Tae-mu is always being overlooked by his grandmother and he thinks if his beloved cousin is out of the way he can inherit the business. 

Back in Joseon, the Crown Prince Lee Gak (Park Yoo-chun) loses his wife (Jeong Yu-mi) in a mysterious accident and then is thrown through time with three of his followers Song Man-bo (Lee Tae-ri), Woo Yong-sool (Jung Suk-won), and Do Chi-san (Choi Woo-shik). They end up on the titular rooftop where Park-ha lives. Confused by this modern world they have ended up in Park-ha tries to help them survive. The Prince believes if he can solve the msytery of his wife's death he can return to Joseon. When he sees Hong Se-na (Jeong Yu-mi) who just happens to be the secretly girlfriend of Tae-mu as well as Park-ha's evil stepsister, he thinks it's the reincarnation of his wife and he persues her. As an additional twist, Se-na works for Tae-yong's grandmother who then thinks the Crown Prince is her grandson who has finally returned to her. 

There is soooo much plot in this show but that's actually what makes it so deliciously nommable. Just lies after lies. Buried family secrets. Mistaken identity. And a lot of people conniving their way through life. While folks like Park-ha are just sincere and kind and get walked all over. And you want to see the baddies get punished. But they will do anything to succeed. You want to see Park-ha dry up all her tears and be loved like she deserves to be.  And each episode leads to more and more questions. How did these Joseon guys get here? Will Park-ha realize the depth of her sister's evil? Will Se-na's secrets be found out? Will Tae-mu figure out this is not Tae-yong? What did happen to Tae-yong? 

Compulsively watchable from start to finish even with bad hairdos and some leaps of logic. 

The downside is a leading man (who in real life had a bunch of scandals) who is arrogant and yelly and we are supposed to want him to end up with the sweet Park-ha. It's a stretch. Sure he's a prince so he's self-absorbed but there comes a point where you want him to have ANY dimension. 

And again justice for Han Ji-min. 

And it turned out there were plot parallels with the other throwback show I watched this month. 

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Beautiful Gong Shim

Beautiful Gong Shim is a 2016 drama about another grandmother sad over the loss of an heir and favoring one grandson over another. But really it is about a put-upon girl who is always getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop. But her life starts to turn around after meeting a strange lawyer and a sweet chaebol. 

Nothing ever works out for Gong Shim (Bang Min-a). She is always losing jobs. She's losing her hair. Everyone thinks she is ugly and she thinks she's dumb. Her sister Gong Mi (Seo Hyo-rim) is successful, beautiful, smart and has even turned Gong Shim's room into a luxury closet for all her clothes. Gong-mi is cruel as Gong Shim is kind. Their parents are always praising Gong Mi and dragging Gong Shim. Gong-Shim ends up renting her rooftop room to a neighborhood weirdo An Dan-tae (Namkoong Min) who turns out to be a quirky lawyer.  With a kind of Willy Wonka, weird to be weird quality, An Dan-tae becomes friends with the straightlaced Seok Joon-soo (On Joo-wan) who is the hardworking heir of Star Group. 

Joon-soo's grandmother is the chairman of the company, but she has spent eyears searching for her kidnapped grandson, Seok Joon-pyo. Joon-pyo went missing when he was a child and now he would be an adult. She has always slightly blamed Joon-soo for existing when Joon-pyo is gone. Plus Joon-soo's side of the family is messy. His father is the son of her husband's mistress and is now the CEO of the business and she's been forced to live with him, his vain wife, and Joon-soo. Meanwhile. Joon-pyo's father and mother died. 

Gong Shim tries so hard. She's goofy and awkward. And she absorbs so much cruelty around her. But she perserveres. So of course we root for her against all the odds. 

But the romance triangle kind of fizzles. And I was not really enjoying the Gong Shim flirtation with An Dan-tae who kind of rebuffs her for his own reasons but comes across as cruel on the outside. 

Then the plot really shifts to the mystery of Joon-pyo's disappearance, An Dan-tae's investigation of it, and the machinations of the kidnapper who is trying to keep his involvement a secret at any cost.  

Not as delightfully plotty as Rooftop Prince. 

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Oasis

Oasis was another non-stop plot-plot-plot fest but it veers from fascinating to terrible scene-to-scene. But I needed to see it through. And some of the plot twists were dumb. Some were big swings and misses. And yet somewhere buried in all that is a great performance from Jang Dong-yoon and I had to see if his suffering would ever end. 

Starting in the 1980s in Gwangju, Lee Doo-hak (Jang Dong-yoon) and Choi Cheol-woong (Choo Young-woo) are best friends and rivals in everything. But Doo-hak's family is dirt poor and have "served" Choi Cheol-woong's family for generations. Doo-hak's father (Kim Myung-soo) believes deeply in his fealty to the Choi family and would do anything for them. 

Whatever this peace is becomes unsettled once Doo-hak and Cheol-woong meet Oh Jung-shin (Seol In-a). The two high school boys fall for her immediately. She's no-nonsense, independent, and a spitfire. But she loves Doo-hak and Cheol-woong cannot take this rejection. Just as he could not take it when Doo-hak did better than him in school. So Doo-hak, under his father's command, had to get worse grades to make Cheol-woong and his family happy. But then someone ends up dead. One of the boys ends up in prison. And lives spiral in different directions. Yet this trio of friends keep finding each other, re-connecting, and it is volatile each time. 

This drama stretches out for decades. Doo-hak becomes a gangster. Jung-shin goes into the movie business which is somehow gangster adjacent. Cheol-woong becomes a prosecutor. Their love triangle persists even as their lives and situations change with time. 

There is a backdrop of the political issues of the era including infiltration of student activist groups, government graft as neighborhoods are razed and real estate values soar in Seoul, and efforts to crush labor movements. There is nothing that isn’t corrupt here. Acting, government, gangsters. No character is making choices that aren’t deeply influenced by the people with a boot to their neck. 

So you can imagine there are tragedies, disasters, and agonizing events which befall them. There are also beaucoup family secrets which would kill them if they knew. 

Something about Oasis feels like a bad book adaptation. Like something that if longer might have been a sweeping Pachinko-like epic but here is chopped up into haphazard chapters and incomplete and rushed. This has the potential of a multi-generation epic tragedy melodrama. But unfortunately I found Cheol-woong the weak link. He's not a worthy suitor for Jung-shin and he's not really a believable rival to Doo-hak. Choo Young-woo was also bland. Maybe if he had made a case for his character I would have invested more in the push and pull. But as it stands he was despicable from the start and barely gets redeemed. 

Yet, I needed to see certain characters punished for their horrific misdeeds and I maybe shouted at the TV a lot. 

The series does not succeed on most levels but it's amazing how Jang Dong-yoon sucks me in everytime. 

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Be My Boyfriend

This was a very run of the mill teen dating contract story. But it had such a great romantic plot point. Find yourself a boyfriend who gets the local council to fix the traffic light outside where you live so that you are safe.