I couldn’t do it, you guys. I couldn’t finish Hyde, Jekyll, Me, despite my good intentions.
Let the record show that I really wanted to like this drama. And when I slowly started to realize that this wasn’t such a great drama, that I’d originally planned to stick it out to the end, if only for Hyun Bin’s sake.
I mean, this was Binnie’s drama comeback after what felt like an eternity, and I do certainly have Binnie Appreciating Eyes, so surely I could’ve sucked it up for him?
Um, turns out I couldn’t, after all. 😛
THE WRITING
The writers of this show seemed to be gunning for a fairly typical kdrama fantasy world, which in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Tonally and in its execution, Show felt familiar right away.
On the upside, Show felt more accessible; it felt like familiar territory and it wasn’t hard to get acclimatized. On the downside, Show felt formulaic and therefore less fresh, also pretty much right away.
I hoped that things would improve, but alas, they did not.
Besides regular lapses in logic, dramatic tension was also lacking much of the time. And this, when there was a mysterious & dangerous perpetrator threatening the characters. That’s something of an accomplishment, right, to make even a murderous plotline boring?
Also, maybe it’s just me, but The Funny also didn’t land successfully, for me. There were more than several occasions when I knew that the scene unfolding on my screen was supposed to be funny, but I just didn’t find it entertaining nor amusing.
Sadly, no matter how I adjusted my lens, Show felt far from compelling, and the small nuggets of stuff that I found entertaining felt fewer and more sparse as I progressed through the episodes.
CHEMISTRY BETWEEN THE LEADS
When I am disappointed with a show’s writing, I look for other things to keep me going. One of those things is OTP chemistry.
If the OTP has great chemistry, I’ve been known to hang in there for the chemistry alone, never mind if the writing is a gigantic mess (2011’s Lie To Me comes to mind. So Very Terrible, but So Much Sizzling Chemistry!).
The chemistry between Hyun Bin and Han Ji Min in this show was.. not great, unfortunately.
I’m not sure why it was, but Han Ji Min felt rather.. cold in this role; more cold and less engaged than other roles in which I’ve seen her do better. I really enjoyed her performances in Padam Padam (2011) and Rooftop Prince (2012), for instance.
I even thought she shared a pretty solid antagonistic chemistry with Hyun Bin in The Fatal Encounter (2014).
What happened here? I have no clue, to be honest.
The effect that this had, though, is that all the couple moments that Show served up – whether it was between Ha Na and Seo Jin, or Ha Na and Robin – felt contrived, and failed to feel truly swoony.
Instead, it felt sorta hollow; like watching two people simply going through their paces, like they would during a rehearsal.
HYUN BIN
With both the writing and OTP chemistry not doing much for me, the only thing I had left to hold on to, was Binnie on my screen. Sadly, much as I like Binnie, I guess I don’t like him quite enough.
Make no mistake, Binnie worked hard to make it work.
Despite his highly assy tendencies, Seo Jin’s character started to show whispers of layers as we got deeper into the show, and that made him interesting, at least. Plus, when he was allowed shades of vulnerability and emotion, those made him sympathetic.
Robin, on the other hand, came off as quite a one-note sort of character, which made sense, in a way, since Robin’s just an alter.
It was easy to tell Seo Jin and Robin apart, but it didn’t feel like Binnie was being given a lot of room to show his range.
Ultimately, neither Seo Jin nor Robin felt like truly compelling characters, and even with Binnie on my screen, after 6 episodes, it felt like there was just too little to keep me going, in this show.
I wouldn’t say the 6 episodes I watched were terrible, but I did eventually find myself plodding through each episode really, really slowly. In something like 10-15 minute chunks at a time.
When that kind of thing happens, I usually take it as a sign that Show isn’t working out for me – and that’s how I ended up dropping this one.
Sorry I didn’t love you enough to survive this one, Binnie. Maybe next time? 😛
Sigh.. Still so pretty, though..
