Drama Review: I Need Romance 3 (2014)

Grade: C+

Category

Workplace romance

What it’s about

This light melodrama revolves around a chilly, no-nonsense career woman who experiences an emotional awakening thanks to a younger man from her past. Sharing the spotlight are her two coworkers—one the office newbie, a wide-eyed innocent who’s uncertain about her romantic and professional future; the other a man-eating career woman who ends up with an unexpected personal life when a no-strings-attached relationship results in pregnancy.

First impression

Our relationships with dramas really are like romances. You can spend forever with someone but never feel anything for them, while other times just a glimpse of a stranger can make you swoon with the force of your attraction. These polar opposites pretty much sum up my response to The Prime Minster and this third installment in tvN’s I Need Romance series. The Prime Minister just isn’t my type—it’s a typical Kdrama with a painfully obvious plot and not even the vaguest correlation to any person, place, thing, or emotion in the real world. On the other hand, just two minutes of I Need Romance leave me giddy with love for its strong voice and naturalistic environs. (Also, its leads have totally amazing chemistry even before he has graduated from diapers.) I’ve always been a fan of the frank, realistic INR dramas, and I’m pretty sure this one will be no different. So you’re on hold for now, Prime Minister. See you in 8 weeks when my new boyfriend leaves town.

Final verdict

Downplaying the strong female friendships that anchored the first two installments in the I Need Romance series, this show turned out to be a slightly sexier version of the standard-issue Kdrama love triangle. There are some interesting things here, including an oblique challenge to prejudice against single mothers and an insanely cute male lead with all the emotional intelligence of a second lead. But beyond that, INR3 was a whole lot of meh.

Drama Review: Smile, You (2007)

Grade: C

Category

Romantic comedy, home drama

What it’s about

After her wedding is derailed by the revelation of her dad’s bankruptcy, Seo Jung In is forced to move in with the penny-pinching family of her dead grandfather’s faithful chauffeur. From the beginning she doesn’t fit in: the chauffeur may be kind to her, but his long-suffering daughter-in-law and henpecked son resent her presence. And then there’s Hyun Soo, the chauffeur’s clueless, gawky grandson, who turns out to be nursing an 8-year crush on Jung In’s sister. Just when Jung In thinks things can’t get worse, they do—her spendthrift family looses their home and squeezes into the chauffeur’s tiny house, causing even more drama.

First impression

It sure is a difficult transition to go from the movie-quality filming and sets of Love Rain to the chintzy, weekend drama production values of this show. I usually stay away from home dramas because I don’t have the patience for their mammoth running times, but I’m hungry for more Jung Kyung Ho after watching Cruel City. I’ve read good reviews of Smile, You, and have my fingers crossed that it won’t be too broad and silly in spite of its genre.

Final verdict

My feelings about Smile, You are exactly divided between love and hate.

Drama Review: They Kiss Again, 2007

Grade: C+

Category
Taiwanese romantic comedy

What it’s about
This sequel to 2005’s It Started with a Kiss follows Zhi Shu and Xiang Qin as they settle into married married life and try to find their places in the world.

First impressions
They Kiss Again starts off a lot like its predecessor—add one part goofy, I Love Lucy-style antics; one part adorable, fanficy love story; and one part taciturn male lead, and you’ve got it exactly. Playing spot-the-grin is quite fun—Zhi Shu might not be fully domesticated yet, but he obviously finds his new wife to be quite amusing. He keeps hiding smiles whenever she does something silly.

Final verdict
The first half of this drama was a pleasure to watch. Its setting and characters were cozy and familiar, and it did a great job of surrounding its lead couple with a constellation of family, friends, and colleagues who provided interesting, almost free-standing, plots for each episode. It was funny and silly and cute, and the couple scenes featuring Zhi Shu and Xiang Qin made my heart go pitter-patter.

Drama Review: Mars (2004)

Grade: C+

Category

Taiwanese romance melodrama

What it’s about

In spite of their many differences—he’s popular and an experienced ladies’ man, she’s painfully shy—a pair of broken college students find themselves drawn together. As their relationship progress, they must overcome their tortured pasts. (And a boatload of crazy, too.)

First impression

As of episode 2, I really like this sweet love story that revolves around a timid, victimized girl and her rebellious classmate. The only thing I could ask for would be better streaming options—every site I can find has the same low-quality video with English subtitles at the top of the screen.

Final verdict

The best thing about Mars is its approach to its lead couple: instead of treading water for 21 episodes of will-they-or-won’t-they wheel-spinning, it actually allows them to have a real relationship. The script deals candidly with two haunted people establishing a serious relationship and learning to navigate life together. (As this drama is Taiwanese, not Korean, it even tackles the issue of sex in a mature way.) Throughout the show, their characters grow and change, but they always have powerful chemistry and believably love each other.

Drama Review: School 2013 (2013)

Grade: C+

Category

Light high-school melodrama

What it’s about

A pair of teachers whose philosophies are apparently at odds manage Victory High’s toughest class, facing bullies, academic underacheivers, and demanding parents.

First impression

This curiously teacher-centric school drama has yet to develop a strong pull for me. The first few episodes have done a fine job of setting up story lines for the rest of the drama—the college entrance-obsessed teacher versus the one who wants to teach the kids to think, the bully versus the bad boy with a heart of gold, the badass school chick versus the world—but none of the characters feel particularly compelling as of yet, and neither does the show’s overarching plot. Based on what I’ve heard, though, the secret ingredient has yet to be added to the mix: Kim Woo Bin’s magnetic troublemaker Heung Soo.

Drama Review: Cheongdamdong Alice (2013)

Grade: C

Category

Romantic comedy with a side of light cultural commentary

What it’s about

After a life of unthinkable privation (oh, no! She can’t afford a Birkin bag?!?), a hardworking Kdrama girl vows to do whatever it takes to marry into Seoul’s posh Cheongdamdong neighborhood. Various degrees of soul selling ensue.

First impression

Ah, the perils of really loving a currently airing show: all I want to do is watch the next episode of Flower Boy Next Door, but I have to wait an entire week for it to air. In the meanwhile, shows that might seem perfectly acceptable under other circumstances just won’t do it for me. Take Cheongdamdong Alice: it feels slick and spendy, but ultimately hollow when compared to lived-in, contemplative nature of FBND. Park Shi Hoo is cute and Moon Geun Young is as darling as ever, but the design-wannabe storyline is starting to feel awfully threadbare. Barring an injection of depth and humanity in the near future, Cheongdamdong Alice isn’t looking like a winner for me.

Drama Review: The Thousandth Man (2012)

Grade: C+

Category

Supernatural romance sitcom; 16 half-hour episodes

What it’s about

Gu Mi Jin is a nine-tailed fox who lives in human form with her newly human mother and sister. Like so many other Kdrama heroines, she’s desperate for love, but she’s got bigger plans for her soulmate than couples rings: she’ll die in three months if she doesn’t eat the liver of her thousandth man. Naturally, not just any guy will do, so she's on the prowl for “the one.”

First impression

My first-ever drama short is proving to be a goofy, upbeat romp with the added bonus of an intriguing central concept. It’s light as air, but not necessarily in a bad way.

Final verdict

Episodic and insubstantial, The Thousandth Man brings the mythical gumiho into the modern urban world, surrounding its family of foxes with spas and playgrounds and the petty concerns of humans. There’s little otherworldly magic about them, and being a gumiho seems to largely involve superhuman speed and the ability to spontaneously turn into a femme fatale, suddenly sprouting a pleather catsuit, glamorous red fingernails, and a smoky eye suitable for a night out on the town.

Like most Korean sitcoms I’ve seen, The Thousandth Man’s production values aren’t especially different from straight-up Kdramas. There’s no laugh track and it looks like every other show on the air. But in addition to shorter episode running times, it seems that most Korean sitcoms feature lots of characters, each with a little snippet of story that’s only explored on a superficial, comedic level. Even the impending death of this show’s heroine is mostly played for madcap laughs rather than the angsty tears that would be inevitable in a drama version of this story.

There are moments of sophistication here, notably seen in Gu Mi Jin’s appreciation of how much the people, geography, and language of Korea have changed in her thousand-year life. Unlike our current crop of time-travel dramas, The Thousandth Man acknowledges how fundamentally different everything in the world has become, “changing more in the past 90 years than it did in the past 900,” as one character puts it. The show even goes so far as to make Gu Mi Jin’s Joseon-era journal utterly uninteligable to people who haven’t specifically studied old Korean. The story also touches on another gumiho who’s so jaded and tired of living in the world she’s not even sure she wants to live on as a human. (In my dream drama retelling of this story, she’d be the lead.)

On the other hand, the show’s mythology could have used more development: It never manages to explain how the gumiho family has managed to live for so long without anyone noticing that they don’t age. It also never really clarifies what becoming a human means for a gumiho. When they eat that final liver, do they start the clock ticking on a normal human lifespan? Could they have babies? Do they lose their eyeshadowed alter egos? And what’s the big deal about becoming a human anyway, when the only drawback of being a gumiho is a taste for organ meats and nine lovely (but easily concealed) tails?

The Thousandth Man also suffers from a frustratingly naive and uninteresting female lead. She refuses to eat the liver of any man who doesn’t love her and volunteer to be consumed, but the show leaves her almost totally out of the transaction. Her emotions and motivations—beyond whatever starry-eyed Joseon chick-lit she read growing up—are at best glossed over. What must it be like to make someone love you and then kill them, genuinely believing it’s the noble thing to do? Dull emotions are shown as one of the side-effects of gumiho-hood, but for me this isn’t sufficient to explain away the serious issues surrounding the female lead’s diet.

Far more compelling than Gu Mi Jin are her boy-crazy, former-fox sister and their pragmatic mother, who loves and wants the best for her girls, just like moms everywhere. These two get less screen time, but they still manage to be the most memorable thing about the show. Also high on the fun-o-meter are a series of Joseon flashbacks that show Gu Mi Jin and her sister as girls.

For someone who’s drawn to romantic comedies, I suspect The Thousandth Man would be a fun twist on the standard plotline. For melo-obsessed me, it was like a plate of salad to a gumiho: I could get it down, but it wasn’t what I really wanted.

Random thoughts

• Episode 2. Did Anna Nicole Smith teach us nothing? The obvious answer here is to find some old, practically dead guy who will be so happy to hook up with a hot girl that he’ll give her anything—including his liver. Or, failing that, meeting Sisyphus, who could have donated all thousand livers himself.

• Episode 4. I hope the female lead’s wardrobe isn’t an indication that 80s fashions are coming back into style. I already spent one decade dressed like Stacy from the Babysitters Club, and it was more than enough.

• Episode 4. Isn’t the cute basketball player a little young for the lead's sister? 985 years is a pretty significant age difference for a noona romance, after all.

• Episode 4. On what planet does it make sense to only eat the livers of good guys who are willing to die for love? Wouldn’t a thoughtful gumiho exclusively eat bad-guy liver, Dexter-style? I guess this show's lead is looking to Darwin out the sweet portion of Korea’s male population. Pity, because as Song Joon Ki knows all too well, there just aren't enough nice guys in this world.

• Episode 7. The thousandth sign that I watch too much Kdrama? I’m starting to recognize where things were filmed. And I don’t mean, “Oh, look...there’s Namsan Tower!” It’s more like “I think I know that shrub.” Case in point: the male lead’s house in this drama was also used to film I'm Sorry, I Love You.

Watch it

Hulu

Drama Crazy

You might also like

My Girlfriend is a Gumiho, for its cute and funny gumiho shenanigans

The episodic romances of Twelve Men in a Year

Drama Review: Sang Doo, Let’s Go to School (2003)

Grade (general): D

Grade (if weighted for the indefinable quality sometimes called “heart”): C+

Category

Light melodrama

What it’s about

Clearly influenced by Winter Sonata and its ilk, this melodramatic comedy revolves around tragically separated childhood lovers. Their paths inevitably cross as adults, but a chasm of life experiences still keeps them apart: the girl (winningly played by the always charming Gong Hyo Jin) has grown up to be an upstanding schoolteacher with a doctor boyfriend, while the boy (played by the smoking hot Rain) has become a semi-moral single father-cum-gigolo who romances married women and takes their money to care for his ailing daughter. Having dropped out of high school after they lost touch, Rain’s character eventually becomes a student in the class taught by his first love.

First impression

Nowadays, the production values for the typical Kdrama are on a par with television anywhere else in the world. Back in 2003 when Sang Doo aired, that wasn’t really the case—it’s stunning how amateur everything about this drama seems, from the acting to the direction to the script. And yet...I still totally enjoyed the first episode, which was goofy, improbable fun. What’s wrong with me?

Final verdict

It seems mean-spirited to judge yesteryear’s dramas by today’s standards. But that doesn’t step Sang Doo from feeling like fifth-grade gym class compared to today’s Olympic-caliber Kdramas. The acting (particularly on the part of the supporting cast) is atrocious. On the bright side, the production values are  slightly improved over what we saw in 2001’s Winter Sonata. For example, microphones dangle into the frame only every few episodes, rather than in nearly every scene, and you hardly ever catch random members of the production team crouching behind furniture during interior shots. Then there’s the plot, a hodge-podge of drama clichés that includes everything from (multiple) birth secrets to cancer to families struggling in the grip financial tragedy. Throw in a standard-issue love triangle and a side of law breaking, and you’ve got the same old template a hundred other dramas have been built on, before and since.

And yet, there’s something so likeable about this drama that it’s hard to complain too much. The single-father plotline is sweet, and acts as the impetus for Rain’s best work in the show—he and the actress playing his daughter have cute chemistry, and some of their scenes together are genuinely moving. (Her illness, however, is totally nonsensical in the way of Kdramas. She’s stuck in the hospital for the show’s entire running time without actually being sick, as if the writers were worried that caring for her would get in the way of the male lead’s shenanigans.) The actors playing the leads both do decent work, and their love story actually has some real-life weight to it. And rather than relying on irredeemable bad guys to propel its plot, Sang Doo actually highlights the evolution of its secondary characters into actual human beings and offers up a nice little bromance, years before the term would even be coined.

Do I suggest that you drop what you’re doing and immediately watch Sang Doo, Let’s Go to School? No, I do not. Do I suggest that you give it a shot if you’re ever wondering what comfort-food inanity to watch as you recover from the flu or some minor surgery? I think maybe I do.

Random thoughts

• Episode 1. I love that Drama Fever’s new video player allows you to change the subtitle format. The next innovation they need to introduce is some sort of pick-your-hero’s-hairstyle feature that would automatically cover over the once trendy, now tragic haircuts that make old shows so hard to watch without collapsing into fits of giggles. Just what is Rain wearing on his head throughout this episode? It’s hard to believe that it might actually be hair, and that someone might actually have caused it to look like that on purpose.

• Episode 3. So it seems that Korean love hotels sometimes feature sex-specific furniture, which look like an X-rated version of the chrome-y, safety-handled Nautilus weight-training machines at the gym. Frankly, there is not enough bleach in the world for me to feel okay about the existence of the “sex chair.” (Or its handy laminated instruction manual.)

• Episode 5. Does this doctor ever actually doctor? Or does he just hang out with preschoolers and teach them snide songs calculated to insult their parents? He’s winner of the award for worst Kdrama doctor of all time, methinks.

• Episode 6. Wait. The father of your child has never seen you naked? That must have been. . . awkward. I suspect the sex chair was not involved. [Finale note: OH! I get it.]

• Episode 6. Another Kdrama girl said she’d “take responsibility”! That makes three, out of all the hundreds of hours of Korean television I’ve watched.

• Episode 9. I’m happy to report that even at my darkest moments, I have never once considered using a Kate Hudson movie as inspiration for my life plans. Unlike this drama’s heroine—poor thing.

• Episode 9. Note to self: the next time you feel tempted to become obsessed with a foreign country’s television, please make sure they don’t eat dog meat before doing so. You’ll be happier in the end.

Watch it

Drama Fever 

Good Drama

You might also like

Hello, My Teacher, for its schoolyard high jinks (not to mention stars Gong Hyo Jin and my boyfriend Gong Yoo) 

Review: 12 Men in a Year (2012)

Grade: C+

Category: Urban rom-com

What it’s about

After breaking up with her longterm boyfriend, Na Mi Ru—a reporter at a women’s magazine—finds herself forced to write a column about dating men of each Western astrological sign. The extensive, “hands-on” research required could ruin her reputation and leave her single forever—or introduce her to her true soulmate.

First impression

A light and airy take on contemporary urban life, this show splits the difference between the zaniness of Queen In-Hyun’s Man and the candid naturalism of the original I Need Romance. I could do with a less love-obsessed heroine, but props to tvN for staying away from the safe, comfortable dramaland of the big networks and keeping it real(ish).

Final verdict

Overall a fun, involving watch, this show is at its best when it’s following Mi Ru on her quest to meet and date men from each of the twelve astrological signs. It creates a slew of amusing characters, breezes into their lives for an episode or two, and them leaves them behind. Unfortunately, though, 12 Men in a Year has a lot in common with its female lead: it sucks when it comes to building a lasting relationship. All too often the show’s boundary-breaking central plot and great supporting cast (especially Tanya, the quirky best friend), are downplayed in favor of the abrasive, unlikable female lead and her cold-as-ice relationship with her ex-boyfriend. Unlike so many Kdramas, though, 12 Men in a Year keeps you guessing until the very end about where Mi Ru’s heart truly lies. (And as an added bonus, it’s a smorgasbord of toothsome male actors.) The finale was almost what I needed to overlook 12 Men’s  sins, but it didn’t quite hit the necessary notes: I wanted more passion for the written word and a stronger sense that the women involved had triumphantly shrugged off the shackles of the status quo. Instead, the closing felt a little half-hearted and route.

Random thoughts

• Episode 2. Now that was a good reason to wail “otokae” and dance impotently around. This show is a funny, youthful-but-mature change of pace. How did it fail to get noticed when it was originally airing?

—Newsflash, sweetie: You’re an alcoholic, and you deserve to be fired.

• Episode 5. So the column the female lead is writing seems to be a two-page spread consisting of 150 words’ worth of easy platitudes and trite clichés. I can see why the reading public is eating it up...or maybe not.

• Episode 6. Pinch me—I think I’m dreaming. Either that, or I just watched an episode of a Korean drama about (1) a woman’s right to enjoy physical intimacy and (2) a woman’s right to say no to said intimacy if she so chooses. I guess another possible interpretation is that the finale is the show’s way of reminding us what happens when girls step out of line and misbehave...but we’ll just pretend the last ten minutes didn’t happen, shall we?

• Episode 8. As far as I can see, this show only has two weaknesses. Unfortunately, they’re big ones: Neither lead has any charm, grace, or depth, and when you put them together, they’re like a black hole where chemistry goes to die. On the bright side, the supporting cast is wonderful—especially the female lead’s no-nonsense best friend and police-officer mom. Plus, the plot is diverting fun: when it’s focusing on Sophia’s column, it’s zippy and entertaining. If only the lead actors and characters had been worthy, 12 Men in a Year could have been a truly great drama.

• Episode 15. Wait. So Tanya actually owns some sort of home tattooing device? That’s not a great way to spread hepatitis or anything.

Watch it

Kimchi Dramas

Drama Crazy

You might also like

Both I Need Romance and I Need Romance 2012, for their candid, believable take on modern love

Drama Short: Iljimae (2008) Review

Grade: C+ 

Category: Action sageuk

What it’s about 
An exploration of the complex web of cruelties and family ties that lead to the making of a Robin-Hood-style vigilante who stands up against the nobility on behalf of Joseon’s everyday people. 

First impression
After a bunch of rom-com wheel spinning, I’m ready for a nice, juicy sageuk. This one seems to fit the bill in unexpected ways—there’s arterial blood spurting in practically every scene. The production values may not be par with something like the spectacular Princess’ Man, but it’s still a soapy historical treat. 

 Final verdict
If only the whole thing was as thrilling as the final four episodes, this would have been an excellent drama. As it is, though, the bulk of Iljimae lacks the gonzo charm of Tamra, the Island and the cinematic grandeur of Princess’ Man. It’s doomed to the middle ground: not quite funny enough to be a comedy, not quite moving enough to be a drama. The mysterious murder of the male lead’s father provides a healthy dose of narrative tension toward the show’s beginning and end, but unfortunately much of the drama consists of flabby, comedic midsection that feels both unnecessary and tonally disjointed. Add to that a plot so dense with serious, laughable holes that I have to suspect the script was actually written by chimpanzees with typewriters, and Iljimae has some serious failures to overcome.

It turns out, though, that its well-cast group of likeable characters is almost enough to do the trick. Particular standouts are the show’s loveable-lunk adoptive fathers and its second male lead, the source of some much-needed gravitas. Iljimae is also a drama that knows to make the most of what it has to work with—lavishly choreographed fight scenes, tragically conflicted loyalties, and mustache-twirling bad guys (literally, in a few scenes). Overall, a diverting if not entirely satisfying way to spend twenty hours. 

Random thoughts
• This show doesn’t so much beggar belief as bugger it—the coincides and implausibilities are stacked ten deep. 

 • Have I mentioned that I'm a sucker for sageuks in which smutty books are a major plot point? Such fun, and an incredibly different vantage point on the past than we Westerners ever take. 

 • Sweet Jesus, is this ever a Korean boy buffet. Not to put too fine a point on things, but I’d like to be the filling in a Lee Joon Ki/Park Shi Hoo sandwich of brotherly love.


• Episode 3. Huh. This is like Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, Korean style. How many more awful things could possibly befall my beautiful Lee Joon Ki? (I guess they’re going to spend the next 18 episodes answering that question, aren’t they?) 

 • Episode 8. I definitely have a case of second lead syndrome here. The goofy lead is too clownish for the thoughtful, smart girl he’s going to wind up paired with, while her forbidden, not-quite-romance with her not-quite-brother is sweet and lovely. I almost died of swoon when he lit all those lanterns for her. 

• Episode 13. Is that a leopard-print bow cozy I spy? I had no idea those Joseon warrior types were so fashion-forward! 

—When I was in high school, we gym-class slackers always chose to do archery because that was the only sport that sucking at automatically got you embraced by the hot gym teacher. Clearly, the writers of Iljimae had similar experiences—they wasted no time in getting Park Shi Hoo to give the female lead some bow-and-arrow lessons. Rawr. 

 • Episode 16. This show suffers from one of the most serious afflictions of dramas these days: NEPSHS (Not Enough Park Shi Hoo Syndrome). Well-meaning but doomed to cause disaster after disaster for the people he cares about, his weighty silence steals every single scene he’s in. 

• Episode 18. Dude. Are there airholes in that iron mask? I really don’t want this to turn into a snuff drama... 
Watch it
Dramafever 
Good Drama  


You might also like  Tamra, the Island (for the funny) 
Princess’ Man (for the epic melodrama, and/or Park Shi Hoo)

Drama Short: I Do, I Do Review

Grade: C

Category

Workplace romantic comedy

What it’s about

A high-powered shoe designer discovers she’s pregnant after a one-night-stand with a younger man, who just happens to be a professional knock-off artist specializing in luxury brand shoes.

First impression

This middling rom-com is part Baby-faced Beauty and part Me Too, Flower. Talk about unholy combinations—why didn’t they just go ahead and throw some Secret Garden in there to ensure that I’d really hate it? I’m even immune to its eye candy: the male lead isn’t my type, and I loathe high heels. (In fact, I quite happily buy most of my shoes at a store called Farm Way.)

Final verdict

Although as mediocre as they come, I Do, I Do is not completely without charm: it has its moments of sweetness and humor, and the cast is reasonably likeable. Having said that, though, this drama is also flawed in a way weirdly similar to its classmate Big. Rather than building shows around the elements that made their plots unique and compelling—body swapping in one, and a single, career-first woman who suddenly finds herself pregnant in the other—these shows chose to spotlight what made them average. For Big, the stumbling block was writers who overestimated the appeal of its central romance and decided to chuck all of the other story elements in favor of it. In the case of I Do, I Do, the true heart of the series was obscured until the very end by time wasted on repetitive office politics. Both shows also managed to be structurally unsatisfying in pretty much every way possible—their overarching plots failed to sustain momentum, and on an episode-by-episode basis they didn’t even bother trying to achieve any sort of narrative tension. Big and I Do, I Do also closed with events that, from a storytelling perspective, should probably have happened by about episode 8. (But you’ve got to hand it to I Do, I Do—at least it didn’t have the second male lead playing the baby in the final scene.)

If only this show had embraced its true premise rather than watering it down with standard Kdrama workplace shenanigans, it might have been the moving story of an independent woman rising to the challenges of unexpected motherhood. As it is, I Do, I Do is an empty exercise in form over function that has neither a heart nor a soul. 

On the bright side, if you’ve recently been concussed and are in the mood for an easy-to-watch drama that asks nothing of you (but also gives nothing in return), you could probably do worse than watching I Do, I Do. Like watching Big.

Random thoughts

• I’ll give this show one thing: it’s an interesting 180 on traditional Kdrama gender roles. Instead of a prickly male lead who needs to be convinced to love someone, Park Tae Kang is a goofy, big-hearted underdog who desperately wants to succeed—a hardworking drama girl who just happens to be a boy. And Kim Sun Ah, wonderfully, is totally cast as the irascible Jun-Pyo type, only without an F4 to back her up.

• Episode 1. I’m all for no-nonsense career girls, but you know what would have been really awesome? If Kim Sun Ah’s character had owned her sexuality and gotten out of that bed totally naked—and totally unembarrassed. Instead, welcome to the standard “But I’m so shy!” moment of post-coital Kdrama anti-bliss.

• Episode 7. So at this point it has become clear that the creators of this show missed a key Kdrama commandment: Thou shalt not combine a dull, go-nowhere plot and a lead couple with zero chemistry. I Do, I Do is the worst of both worlds: all the boring office politics of a workplace drama with none of the episodic rewards of seeing our hero learn and grow, and all of the wangst [wank + angst = wangst] of a romance, with none of the cute lovey parts. Why am I watching again?

Watch it

Dramafever 

My Soju

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Baby-faced Beauty

Me Too, Flower

Drama Short: Kimchi Family (2012) Review

Grade: C+

What it’s about
A family drama set in a traditional Korean restaurant. Food porn ahoy!

First impression

As of episode 5, I really like this show—it’s sweet, sentimental, and just this side of magical realism. Now if only it didn’t make me desperate to eat kimchi…

Final verdict

Overall, this show is nicely done. I don’t think it lived up to the promise of the first few episodes, though—in place of a genuine, nuanced exploration of family relationships, it gives us lots of meaningful smiles shared over vats of kimchi ingredients and approximately zero narrative friction. The drama feels disingenuous and standard issue, especially when the show started off hinting that its female lead had fought so intensely with her father she vowed never to set foot in her childhood home again. (Read full review here.) 

Drama Short: What Happened in Bali (2004) Review

Grade: C+


What it’s about
Downtrodden and impoverished Lee Soo-jung sells her soul (and a few other things of value) to a spoiled chaebol while dealing with her feelings for his sad-eyed rival, a poor man whose hard work and iffy morals bring him professional success.

Initial impression
A slow beginning nearly had me saying annyonghi kyeshipshiyo to this Korean hit, but the plot picked up significantly by episode 10.

Final verdict

A dark, easy-to-watch drama that explores humanity’s less noble impulses: jealousy, greed, obsession, and violence. What Happened in Bali boils down to twenty very long episodes filled with terrible people doing terrible things to each other, with no possibility of redemption in sight. While Que Sera Sera made misery seem sexy, this show just makes it seem … miserable. In short, the Wuthering Heights of Korean drama (only less good). Worth watching if you’re a fan of pitch-black melodramas that focus on overblown tragedies, but maybe not otherwise. (Be prepared for a nasty O. Henry twist ending, if you do watch.)

Stray thoughts
• Everywhere I go, there’s Ha Ji Won. Which is a pity, because I think she’s totally uninteresting: the only time I’ve ever enjoyed watching her on screen was King 2 Hearts.

• Hot leads, but 2004 was clearly a bad year for male hairstyles.

• Episode 9: Man, that was the most soul-besmirching wish-fulfillment shopping spree ever.

Drama Short: Rooftop Prince (2012) Review

Grade: C+

What it’s about
A stuffy, self-important Joseon-era prince and his entourage time travel to modern-day Korea and try to solve the mystery of his beloved princess’ murder. While living with a modern-day girl, they become embroiled in the corporate intrigues of the family company belonging to the prince’s contemporary reincarnation.

First impression
Fun sageuk mystery meets...standard-issue chaebol/poor girl romance. Sigh. Are there really no other plots available, dear Kdrama overlords, especially given the spiffy time-travel raw materials you had to work with?

Final verdict

Saddled with a weirdly unsatisfying ending, this lighthearted romantic comedy is occasionally cute but overall tiresomely average. 

Random thoughts
• The jury’s still out: Park Yoochun, total babe or E.T. lookalike?

• Do Koreans actually hang giant pictures of themselves above their beds? That’s bizarre—although I guess I have no right to judge. I, like all good little Catholic girls, grew up with a sculpture of a crucified guy in a loincloth hanging above my bed.

• At first I thought I was going to hate the Joseon Larry, Moe, and Curly who make up three-quarters of this F4 grouping, but now I totally love them and their goofy clapping.

• Okay. I’ve never been very good at geography, but riddle me this: he fell off a boat off the coast of New York City, and somehow ended up in the landlocked city of Chicago, 900 miles to the west. Did he float up the Eerie Canal? Was the St. Lawrence Seaway involved somehow? UPDATE: In a later episode it’s mentioned that they were sailing on a lake, not the ocean. Which presumably means they drove 13 hours or so upstate to sail on Lake Michigan, rather than just heading to the ocean. Sounds like a great idea.

Drama Short: What Planet Are You From? (2006) Review

Grade: C+


What it’s about
A tragic male lead (the stunningly handsome Kim Rae Won) discovers a poor girl from the countryside who looks exactly like his dead fiancée. As she moves to the city and takes a job at his movie production company, birth secrets are revealed and their lives completely intertwine. The lovers decide to be together whatever the cost.

First impression
Call me crazy, but this is just the type of drama I love: It has its feet on the ground and its head in the stars. (Sometimes literally.)

Final verdict

A strong beginning, a realistic vibe, and two of the handsomest male leads imaginable couldn’t save this drama from its makjangy, listless second half. Repetitive plotting, unlikable characters, and a surfeit of teary meltdowns didn’t help the situation, either. None of the relationships felt particularly believable or worth rooting for. (Well. Except the male lead’s relationship with his fiancée in the first episode, which was tender and sweet. Weirdly, the dead girl and her lookalike were played by the same actress, but the two characters had completely different kinds of chemistry with the male lead. The dead fiancée seemed to belong with him, while the younger girl always felt more like a kid sister than a lover.)  

Stray thoughts
• It’s nice to see My Lovely Sam Soon’s lovely Jung Ryeo-won again—that girl can sure speak some English, unlike most other Korean actors.

• Well, that’s one question answered: I will never travel to Korea, because based on episode two they have giant spiders there. I don’t do countries with giant spiders. (Being broke may also have something to do with my lack of travel plans, of course.)

Drama Review: Kimchi Family and Time between Dog and Wolf

Kimchi Family: C+

Time between Dog and Wolf: A+

The funny thing about me and  “quality" is that I don’t always like it. 

The world is positively chock full of undeniably high-quality things that I could happily live without: the works of Ernest Hemingway, the movie Wings of Desire, the vegetable cauliflower. You’re welcome to them…I’ll just be over here reading Twilight while I watch America’s Next Top Model and eat a heaping bowl of Kraft macaroni and cheese. Sure, there’s a time and a place for works of art, but I can be made just as happy by consumable crap with no qualitative merit.

This is why I often take the recommendations of serious critics with a grain of salt. And when it comes to the world of online Kdrama, it’s pretty clear that the webmaster at DramaTic is about as serious and critical as they come—which means I approached the list of best dramas on that site with no slight trepidation. Would a lover of trendy dramas and romantic comedies really enjoy something truly, objectively good? It turns out that the answer is yes, if that thing is number 56 on the list of DramaTic’s best shows of all time: the thrilling, beautifully constructed 2007 drama Time between Dog and Wolf.

I was ready for a change after finishing this year’s saccharine Kimchi Family, and it seemed likely that an action drama beloved by the males of the species would be just the palate cleanser I needed. It turned out that this was true, but not quite in the way I expected: Deep down, under all that fur and fermented shrimp paste, these two shows weren’t so different after all. At heart they’re both about identity and family, and how the two are always inextricably tangled together. (Laughably awful mustaches are also a common theme, regrettably.) With this common DNA, it’s only natural that the dramas faced many of the same decisions—what’s amazing is how different their choices were.

I can see how someone might really like Kimchi Family—at its best, it’s a beautifully produced, big-hearted drama about the power of family and food. I was sold for the first few episodes myself. But what began as a story of foodie magical realism told through the lens of a traditional Korean restaurant and the people who frequent it  quickly descended into a series of makjang plot twists taken right out of the Big Book of Kdrama Clichés. Birth secrets? Chaebols in disguise? Gangsters with hearts of gold? Fatal and/or debilitating diseases? Kimchi Family has them all in spades. (In fact, there are at least two separate incidents of each one of these plotlines—and sometimes more.) What it doesn’t have, however, is any true depth, darkness, or hint of friction between its lead characters. Instead of exploring their interactions and motivations, this is a drama that lines up lots of obstacles and stands back—as long as you keep your characters tolerably busy, its writers seem to have decided, nobody will notice that they exist only in one dimension.

As far as I’m concerned, Kimchi Family’s best episodes were the ones that focused on its core group of characters: the Lee sisters and their uncle Kang Do Shik, as well as the two men who became live-in staff members at Heaven, Earth, and Man, their family’s restaurant. The food is beyond toothsome and charmingly presented as the most important part of the Lee family heritage. The girls’ happiest childhood memories involve learning to make kimchi from their mom, and no wonder—she imbues the process with a palpable sense of enchantment, spinning kid-friendly stories about the ingredients of each recipe. When the narrative begins to widen and explore Kimchi Family’s supporting cast, though, the drama loses its focus on creating indelible characters on a meaningful journey, and instead dwells on over-the-top plot developments and overwrought reaction shots.

Kimchi Family is a fine drama for what it is; my problem is that I wanted it to be something more. Its greatest disappointment is a failure to take advantage of its setup. It began with just the right blend of sweet and tart, after all—during the first few episodes, the younger Lee sister is living in the city and working at a fancy French restaurant, having vowed never to return home to be part of the simple, traditional life of Heaven, Earth, and Man. She’s an exasperated perfectionist who wants to succeed in the modern world, and it seems clear that the writers initially planned for her unwilling homecoming to be a fish-out-of-water story. Somewhere around episode 5, however, any development of her character comes to a screeching halt, to be replaced by a series of meaningful smiles over a vat of kimchi ingredients that she shares with her beautiful, childlike sister.

From that point on, the show gives up any hint of being a sophisticated character study in favor of treacly, makjang busyness: A nice-guy gangster searches for his birth father; an orphan avenges himself on those who have wronged him; a man comes to terms with the child he thought he’d lost forever; and a family grapples with the loss of a loved one, all in the space of 24 scenery-chewing episodes.

To its credit, Kimchi Family never fully plunges into cartoon-land, unlike many other making spectacles before it. Its characters resist outright “bad-guy-ness,” and by the final episode most everyone is believably redeemed. In the end, though, Heaven, Earth, and Man has little more to offer than flavorless kimchi primarily composed of clichés.

Time between Dog and Wolf, on the other hand, manages to be the best of both worlds: It marries whizbang car chases, hot boys, and gangster intrigue with genuine, keenly felt character insights and a moving story of love and revenge. It’s a delicious fermentation of Alias, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and the few redeemable aspects of Lee Min Ho’s deeply mediocre City Hunter. Ultimately, this is a show about the push-and-pull that exists between fathers and sons on the road to manhood. It’s about the choice between defining oneself and being defined by another. It’s about doing right when it’s so easy and tempting to do wrong.

Where Kimchi Family succumbed to plot for the sake of plot, the twisty, adrenaline-filled storyline of Time between Dog and Wolf exists not to fill time, but to put the show’s characters through their paces. It twists and turns them, looking at them from every angle imaginable before finally melding them into complete, multi-dimensional wholes.

This drama is peopled not by “good guys” and “bad guys,” but by nuanced, fully drawn characters that sometimes happen to be more good than bad, and other times more bad than good. The ultimate example is Mao Liwarat, the show’s lead gangster and one of its two most powerful father figures. He’s a cold-blooded killer who loves his daughter and carefully mentors his followers, treating them with respect and effortlessly fostering their loyalty. He’s a bad guy, all right, but thanks in part to the measured, weighty performance of Choi Jae Sung, one I wanted redeemed, not dead. (Weirdly, Choi was also in Kimchi Family: he played a distant but cuddly uncle who…wait for it…just happened to be a retired gangster known for his brutality. Did his role in that show predispose me to like him in TbDW? Maybe.)

Although Time Between Dog and Wolf is largely a boy’s club, it also features women—smart women who stand on their own two feet, whether they work at a Korean intelligence agency or quietly wear the pants in a household funded by their gangster husband. Just like their male counterparts, they’re more than I usually dare hope for from a Korean drama.

I can’t say the same for Kimchi Family, even though it seems to be a show geared toward women. Its girls all fulfill traditional roles: they’re teachers and mothers and suppliers of comfort. God help them if they have plans in life beyond docile housewifery, because Kimchi Family certainly won’t—it will instead paint them as cold, cruel abandoners of children who are worthy of forgiveness and nothing more. Also, note that chef in particular is one of the things Kimchi Family don’t allow its women to be. Professional chefs, after all, are men; a woman at the stove is nothing more than a mother. Although Heaven, Earth, and Man is owned by the Lee family, neither daughter has been groomed to take the helm after their father. By the end of TbDW, in contrast, it’s a principled, savvy woman who’s leading the entire intelligence agency.

Time between Dog and Wolf is the exact opposite of Kimchi Family on another front, too. TbDW is beautifully but economically done, with few examples of the hammy overacting (Song Il Gook, I’m talking about you) and baroque direction that characterize pretty much everything about Kimchi Family. In that show, one 10-second reaction shot is never enough: instead, it has to drag out for forty or fifty seconds, giving the actor plenty of time to cycle between four or five different expressions. Its every scene is full of bizarre, unnecessary camera angles: all the zooming and cutting to point-of-view shots from behind random scenery gets distracting after a while. There are even instances when the two halves of a split-screen phone conversation each suffer from multiple, separate cuts and angle changes. (This actually reminded me of a moment in one of the Naked Gun movies when a camera zooms in on an actor, then zooms in some more, and finally zooms in to the point of smacking him in the face. It’s a miracle the cast of Kimchi Family survived, really.)

Instead of feeling self-indulgent and pointless like much of Kimchi Family’s camera work, Time between Dog and Wolf’s direction is calculated to bring the viewer into its characters’ minds: After sustaining a head injury the male lead loses his memory. In the moment he realizes he’s a stranger to himself, there’s a point-of-view shot of the actor looking into a mirrored sun-catcher, which blurs and distorts and replicates his face to the point of unrecognizability, to both him and us. And this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to meaningful filming techniques—it’s clear that somebody really thought about this show, and worked to film it in the most compelling, appropriate ways.

Then, of course, there’s TbDW’s big finale. It’s one thing to cry at the end of a drama, but it’s another to get goosebumps. An epic shootout staged in a house of mirrors, it’s the show’s final, greatest comment about personal identity and the power of fatherhood.

That, my friends, is some tasty kimchi. If number 56 on the DramaTic list of best dramas is this good, the mind boggles at how fabulous number 1 must be.