Lots
of things affect how much I enjoy the dramas I watch. Some of them
are objective, like the production values and the quality of the
acting and the plot. My preferences are also colored by subjective
things, including how much I like the actors and whether I find the
drama’s topic interesting.
Lately
I’ve been thinking a lot about something else that influences how
much I like a show: how much other people like it. Now
that I’m watching some dramas as they air, I spend the wait between
episodes reading what bloggers have to say about what’s going on. Sometimes this extracurricular consideration has a positive influence, like when I was watching Flower Boy Next Door. The online discussion of every subtle detail and tiny
shading of motivation encouraged me to slow down and really
appreciate the show as a stand-alone work of art, not just another in
the long string of Kdramas I’ve glutted on during the past year.
People
on the Internet also really like
Jang Ok Jung: Live in
Love, the series I’m watching
now. Everywhere I go, someone is squeeing about the chemistry between
its leads, its beautiful scenery (inclusive of said leads), or its
clever re-imagination of historical fact. Even the blogger at
The Vault has some not-entirely-negative things to say about it, which is
practically unheard of when it comes to fusion sageuks.
In spite of all the good buzz, most of this show has been at best okay for me. Nothing about it is terrible: the cast is doing fine work, the visuals are wonderful, and the story is moving forward at a decent clip. My gripes are more with the spirit of the thing than its execution.
Kdramas always start out extra punchy and high concept to grab viewers’ attention, so I didn’t worry when the first
few episodes gave me whiplash by veering between dark melodrama and
fluffy impossibilities. But after the hard work of making a strong impression was done, the show settled into standard-issue sageuk territory. It lost its distinctive voice to the same ten guys in fake beards who plot world domination in every sageuk. The people who made Jang Ok Jung decided to turn recorded history on its ear by recasting a traditional villain as their leading lady, so why didn’t they go all the way? As a counterfactual history of a maligned woman, the story seems awfully content to follow the standard, guy-centered sageuk tropes. Early on, at least Jang Ok Jung got to stretch beyond the boundaries of being someone’s woman: The show played with anachronism by allowing her to design the kind of Western-style summer dress you could buy at the mall today. But now she’s just stuck in the palace, walking through the same plot lines featured ten years ago in Jewel of the Palace.
And the fast moving-plot comes with its own failings, too. Instead of using events to show us its character’s hearts, the script relies on easy exposition. Jang Ok Jung says she makes clothes to make men fall in love, but we see no evidence to this effect. She says that clothes are like armor when she speaks to the King, and then the drama wastes the perfect opportunity to show us this when she dresses like a boy in a subsequent episode. It never bothered to give the experience a soul, skipping over all the slow and boring parts like putting those clothes on and coming to realize just how much power they had over the person within them.
Last week’s episodes took a big step toward becoming what I hoped this drama would be all along—a
powerful, doomed romance between a commoner and a king who feels the
heavy weight of his crown. But having abandoned the playful essence that set it apart from every other drama on the subject, I worry that it’s all downhill from here.
Jang Ok Jung isn’t
the first drama I’ve reacted to differently than most of the
drama community, and I bet it won’t be the last. Here’s a rundown
of a few other shows I missed the memo about.
