This show is glossy, snappy and zippy, with a touch of irreverence, and overall very slurpable and fun to watch; narrative arcs don’t take very long to resolve, and they are effectively engaging, such that I’d happily finish an episode, and feel ready for another.
Beyond the slurp factor, I think what lifts Show to the next level, is that it demonstrates a great deal of heart.
From our core team, to some of the patient arcs, that heartfelt quality manages to peek through the gloss and irreverence, making this story world and these characters linger with me, beyond the ending credits.
My friends, this is the review that almost never was, not because I almost didn’t watch this show, but because I wasn’t sure how to go about this review, and I almost gave myself permission to just.. not write it a review. 😅 Almost.
If you’ve seen the show, you might have an inkling of why I feel like this isn’t a straightforward review to write, heh.
In the end, though, I thought that there would still be value in adding my two cents to the collective wisdom of the drama community, so here I am.
If you’re familiar with my taste in dramas, you’d know that this isn’t a genre that I would typically reach for.
Even though I have a great deal of fondness for both Han Hyo Joo and Joo Ji Hoon, I was honestly ready to sit this one out – that is, until a fair number of you started squeeing about the chemistry between our leads, over on Patreon.
That, and the fact almost everyone seemed to fan themselves over how hawt 🔥 Joo Ji Hoon is in this, made it pretty much a given that I would succumb to FOMO and press “play” too, heh.
Now that I’ve emerged on the other side, I’m here to report back on how this drama experiment went, for me.
In case you missed it, we have yet another guest post series to enjoy, this month!
Unlike our previous guest post series, this one was kind of an accident, almost. I have Ele to thank for this one, because it was her innocent question about something, that made me casually talk about the off-the-top-of-my-head, hypothetical possibility of a guest post series on love, in the month of February, in honor of Valentine’s Day.
So many folks on Patreon responded enthusiastically to this idea, that I felt that it would be remiss of me, not to actually make it happen, come February.
And so, here we are. This month, we will enjoy a total of nine guest posts from patrons on Patreon, on the topic of love stories. The brief is pretty flexible, in that, each writer is free to go deep, or go wide, on anything around the topic of love stories in Dramaland.
Today’s post (our seventh!) is brought to you by Martina! Martina’s observations of characters and relationships are consistently tinged with deeper understanding and appreciation of nuances than most, because of her professional background in psychology. What a treat, then, that Martina turns her lens on my gateway drama, Goong, for this post! Thank you, Martina! ❤️
Show takes a while to settle, suspension of disbelief is required, and the legal stuff is there more as set-dressing than to actually drive our story forward, but if you like it when characters get more of the spotlight than story events themselves, and you don’t mind glossing over various plot point resolutions, then this might work for you.
Once our story gets into its groove, it feels quite similar to a caper film, with plot developments and resolutions painted in broad, rather campy, irreverent strokes.
It took a while for our characters to grow on me, not least because of the morally ambiguous characterization our writers choose to give them, but I did grow fond of (most of) our characters by Show’s end, which is a plus.
Both Kim Hye Soo and Joo Ji Hoon give fantastic performances, and together, they basically carry the entire show, while sharing a very sparky chemistry.
A live-manhwa-meets-contract-marriage-meets-sageuk-meets-fusion-fantasy sort of mashup, Goong is something of a modern classic in dramaland.
Despite its multiple elements, Show is cute and adorable a lot of the time, and manages to serve up some very lovely, melty OTP moments through its run.
On the downside, with its mostly raw and inexperienced cast, plus some starkly melodramatic tendencies, the watch can feel uneven at times.
Even so, it’s quite a lovely watch, given the right lens.
If Mask had a report card, and I was its teacher, I would write on it something along the lines of, “Mask displays strong potential in many areas, but seems to have a short attention span and does not work to maximize his potential.”
That, and maybe also, “Mask would do so much better if he would seriously apply himself.”
Yes, this does kinda-sorta sound like what I recently said about High Society, but I think because Mask managed to show more real potential, the disappointment here feels, well, more real, too.
I mean, for a good stretch, I actually really enjoyed watching this show.
So a funny thing happened. Liebster season snuck up on me when I wasn’t even looking.
When the first signs popped up, hinting that Liebster season was upon us again, I hardly took notice. I was all like, Well, I had a good go at that last year, and it was a heap of fun.
Surely after 9 whole Liebsters, though, no one’s going to want to ask me more questions about myself. Right?
Wrong.
When I wasn’t looking, those Liebsters seemed to multiply in a little room all by their sneaky little selves. Almost like they had a will all their own. And now, I have a serious heap of questions to answer *starts sweating bullets*
I plead hectic Real Life schedules as the reason that I delegated the job of answering the Liebster questions to Future Me (hey, after watching so many time-travel dramas, you gotta learn something, right?)
So here I am, Future Me (er, now Present Me?) to the rescue! Let’s see if you guys can stick with me all the way to the very end, eh? I promise to make this as pain-free as possible 😉
And, thanks to all you sweethearts who nominated me – I feel like I’ve been rained on by showers of lurve ❤
So today Stephanie posted on her blog Crazy for Kdrama a post titled Second-hand Crack. In it, she describes her experience re-watching Smile Dong Hae, and finding that it just wasn’t as cracktastic the second time around.
That really resonated with me, coz as some of you may know, I’ve been marathoning Beautiful Days for review, and that review’s been taking a while to actually get written.
The reason is pretty much the same as Stephanie’s experience with Smile Dong Hae. I’d loved Beautiful Days on my first watch, and had devoured it pretty quickly.
Fast forward several years, and now that I’m watching it for the second time, I still find it pretty engaging, but it’s just not as cracktastic as I had first found it.
Which begs the question: What exactly makes drama crack stay fresh / turn stale?
