Drama Review: Nice Guy (2012)

Grade: A-

Category

Revenge melodrama

What it’s about

A young man out for revenge falls in love with the stepdaughter of his first love, a woman who betrayed him after he gave up everything in his life to protect her. Makjang and madness ensue.

First impression

From its very first scenes, this drama is a high-octane thrill ride that promises a wealth of soap-opera-style pleasures. Murder! Intrigue! Evil stepmothers, shrewish young women and manipulative young heroes-disguised-as-villains! Seriously...what’s not to like?

Midterm exam

Final verdict

No matter how much I love Korean drama, it’s a rare thing to come across a show that I would feel safe recommending to anyone, no matter what their personal interests. Nice Guy is one of the few shows that fit this bill—it does most everything right, and the things it does wrong are easy to overlook. It’s a near-perfect mix of the things Kdramas do so incredibly well: romance, intrigue, and melodrama. And unlike most television shows (whatever their continent of origin), it even rewards thoughtful viewing and deep consideration.

With its carefully structured plot full of subtle reveals, exciting reversals, and ambiguous, nuanced antiheroes, Nice Guy’s script takes what might have been a vehicle for soap-opera makjang and gives it real emotional heft. On the surface, its story contains the same old hoary elements that come up in all melodramas: miserable childhoods, tragic illnesses, and chaebol power struggles. (Amnesia, every drama writer’s magic-bullet plot device, makes a few fortuitous appearances, too.) But these things are just window dressing: this show’s true soul is found in its characters and their journeys. On the voyage from degradation and desperation to strength and wisdom, they clash again and again, nearly destroying themselves and each other.

It’s the viewers’ good luck that this deeply flawed group of characters is brought to life by a stellar cast that delivers almost universally spectacular performances. From Song Joong Ki’s steely-eyed “nice guy” to Moon Chae Won’s fiery heiress and Park Si Yeon’s beautifully damaged, ruthless social climber, its actors regularly say more with a single look than could be contained in a thousand pages of dialogue.

Nonetheless, Nice Guy is not perfect. Its first half was dragged down by dissonant, cartoony elements in the Choco/Jae Gil storyline. And by the last stretch of episodes, the complicated plot started to feel more like an intellectual exercise than an emotional one. The finale also left a little something to be desired, as far as I’m concerned. It didn’t really resolve the workplace storyline (I guess the winner was the person driving the nicest car in the coda?), and for a show that’s all about the importance of taking responsibility for one’s actions, the male lead got off the hook awfully easily. (For more involved, spoilery discussion of the coda, scroll down to the cut line at the bottom of this post.)

While it might not be my favorite show ever, Nice Guy is still one of the finest examples of its species: dark and drawn to the things that break us, it explores the horrible things people will do to save themselves, and the precarious ways they can earn redemption for them.

Random Thoughts

• Episode 3. Kudos to this show’s makeup department for using Ma Ru’s wounds as an excuse to lovingly highlight Song Joong Ki’s delicate, finely wrought features. That’s the kind of craftsmanship I can get behind.

• Episode 8. So they made a huge deal about her leaving with nothing in the previous episode—and now she has a car all of a sudden? What? It was even specifically mentioned that she left her car keys behind at home...did she carjack some poor ajumma?

• Episode 12. The harmonica. LOL. The harmonica...did Ma Ru pick up some mad mouth harp skills in the pokey, or what?

• Episode 14. I appreciate that narrative demands that the good guys don’t win until the last minute, but must they always be such idiots along the way? How could Ma Ru not be smart enough to have someone physically verify the person they were meeting? This bumbling might turn me team Jae Hee after all.

• Episode 14. I’m in mourning for poor Eun Gi, who started out a spitfire and has since lost every iota of personal agency. On the bright side, at least she’s still allowed to speak, which is sort of more than you can say for the heroine of Will It Snow at Christmas, an earlier drama written by Nice Guy’s screenwriter.

• Episode 15. Only in Kdrama fandom would knowing that someone opened their eyes during a kiss be a spoiler of a Dumbledore-dies level of awfulness. And yet, they included this very moment in the next episode’s preview.

• Episode 16. In life and in television I’m all for people getting what they want most, but I can’t even consider the possibility of Choco and Jae Gil ending up together. They have cute, sibling-style chemistry, but he seems way too old for her and they’re a terrible physical fit. The thought of them really kissing makes my skin crawl a little...but I still suspect the show might be headed that way.

• Episode 16. The only other show I’ve seen by this screenwriter is Will It Snow at Christmas, which I also really liked. It’s interesting that the two dramas have similar plot structures—each has three separate, nearly self-contained story arcs, as if someone hit the reset button mid-drama. This show’s beginning was all about Ma Ru’s obsessive love for Jae Hee, its middle was about Eun Gi’s struggle with amnesia...and now we have to wonder what the final four episodes will hold. Lots of twisty-turny betrayals and a happy ending, I hope.

• Episode 16. So I just realized what the combination of Song Joon Ki’s little, girlie face and his rough man hands reminds me of. The cover of Tiny Fey’s Bossypants. 

• Episode 17. The icing on the Nice Guy cake? Seo Eun Gi having a nervous breakdown as she wanders around in her wedding dress, like Miss Havisham’s long lost Korean granddaughter. Well played, show.

• Episode 19. All the acting in this show is good, but the bench scene in this episode is actually stunning. For that one moment, we see the true Ma Ru, with all his flaws and graces etched right into Song Joon Ki’s suddenly not-so-handsome face.

• Episode 20. The cherry on the icing on the Nice Guy cake? The fact that the finale’s opening credits have a different ending than the ones for the rest of the episodes. It’s like every single thing about the drama has evolved during its run.

• Episode 20. I think the coda is filmed in one of the (gorgeous) spots prominently featured Padam Padam—the bakery and vet’s office are in the very same building, even.

Watch it

Drama Fever

Viki 

You might also like

Screenwriter Lee Kyung Hee’s other dark melodramas, including Will It Snow at Christmas?; I’m Sorry, I Love You; and A Love to Kill

The sexily twisted psychological drama of Que Sera Sera 

The end. 

I like a happy ending as much as the next hopeless romantic, but the Nice Guy coda left me feeling cheated on behalf of the lead characters. Throughout the show, I wasn’t even really sure what might constitute a happy ending in the world of Nice Guy: Ma Ru and Eun Gi happily married? Ma Ru finding some way to die with dignity? All the principal players moving to foreign countries and never seeing each other again?

While nominally happy, what we ended up with wasn’t what Ma Ru and Eun Gi deserved. They were robbed of the true fruits of their twenty episodes of suffering: happiness that is hard earned, not granted, and the acquired wisdom to mature beyond their personal issues and relationship roadblocks. All of their misery was for nothing, because amnesia acted as a deus ex machina to solve their problems. It was a magic pill that took away everything bad and hard and replaced it with lollipops and sunshine. That’s lovely and all, but what’s a life without both good and bad? (For a dark drama that did a better job with similar concerns, watch the wonderful Que Sera Sera.)

There’s also the issue of Eun Gi. Although the writer worked hard to make it clear that Ma Ru was still Ma Ru—he lost his memories, not his knowledge, and even without them his voiceover was an eerie repetition of what had gone before. But what about Eun Gi? She was once in a similar situation herself—how could watching the person she loved lose his past fit into this shiny, happy finale? Ma Ru had never indicated to her that he was ready to leave his old self behind, even though he shared that fact with the viewers. Wouldn’t a truthful ending to this story at least involve Eun Gi trying to help him remember his life and bring him back to himself? She had felt betrayed when she realized all the details the people around her withheld about her old life, once her own memories returned. How could she turn around and presumably do the same thing Ma Ru? With this fast-forward, treacly finale, we’re led to believe that Eun Gi just accepted the new version of Ma Ru as he was, his personality sanded down to uniformity to remove his sharp edges and prevent splinters.

That, to me, seems like the greatest betrayal of all.