here and trying

Fated To Love You: I'm condemning myself right out of the gates. This show literally begins with a sex crime and is about a chaebol and a temp marrying each other to legitimise an accidental pregnancy. It was made in 2014 but looks like it came out in 2004. Everything about it is arrant cringe.

But it’s beautifully right about one really important thing. Our leads genuinely like each other. Not attracted; not infatuated; not bewitched body and soul. They *like* one another. And why shouldn't they? They’re both sincerely good people. He’s can’t help but love and care for the people who cross his path. She’s courteous and thoughtful to a fault. And they get that about each other almost immediately!

It’s inexplicable how hard the drama pushes their and our buttons in spite of that, almost as if to challenge us to flinch from the bizarre-to-offensive ridiculousness that transpires on screen over 20 episodes. But the things it gets right are things very few others get right. And in Jang Hyuk and Jang Na-ra it brings us the most sparkling chemistry I think I’ve ever seen—two perfectly matched movie stars whose primary goal is to have fun riffing off each other. (I’ve gone on about this show elsewhere; and one of the things that draws me to Dali & Gamjatang is that there’s an echo of the core dynamic of FTLY at work between the leads in that show, too: they’re two very different people who just seem to like each other.)

Chicago Typewriter: Putting another this-shouldn’t-work love story up top. No one could be blamed for tuning out of this show in the first two or three or four episodes. No one could be blamed for finding Han Se-ju an asshole and Jeon Seol a ditz. This is not a show in which the writer cares about going meta with these tropes. Her desire for you to care about her leads lands like a hammer-blow — and it’s not two leads, but three. It’s the triad that makes the show. This love story is about three people who belong together in a way that supersedes all doubt, all skepticism––and the rules of space-time.

In Chicago Typewriter, love and truth are the same thing. The truth is writeable, or at least, there’s no writing without the truth––and so love is writeable too. Our characters––a writer, a ghostwriter, and a reader––have to find a way to arrive at that truth, to write their own destiny. It’s true that, at the end, two of the six characters we’ve come to know and love are left alone in their time and place with each other. But that’s not really what the romance is about. It’s about them making a world possible, both in the pages of Se-ju’s books and in historical time, in which Shin Yul/Yu Jin-oh, their beloved third, can make a home with them, and in them, and in art that can never be created in isolation.

If FTLY wink-nodded at us with its nonsense set-ups, Chicago Typewriter wants us to believe in them, intensely and with desperation. It will only work if you believe in it as hard as the writer apparently does, and if you care for it the way the actors did. This show lives in its lead performances, and there’s some miracle of delicacy and judgement in almost every scene. Yoo Ah-in plays two utter assholes; but the thing he gets right that almost no other asshole male lead does is to play Se-ju and Hwi-young as only a fraction as hard on everyone else as he is on himself. They’re not sad men looking for coddling; they’re brave men waging a war against time, in more ways than one. (The feelings I have for Se-ju and his approach to writing as labour need a separate post.)

Crash Landing On You: I’ll tell you exactly at what point this show convinced me that love is real, and it doesn’t even feature the two leads. It’s in the third episode, when the homeless little boy to whom Se-ri’s supplied food and blankets races over to where he’s left his starving baby sister huddled in a makeshift shelter. It’s a bright day in the middle of a busy market; the women are selling their wares, the popcorn man is delighting the local children with his noisy contraption, and an almost-lullaby comes over the soundtrack: Do you remember the songs we used to sing together? Do you miss the seasons in which we walked together? Can you hear me? Do you miss me?

I don’t think the only reason CLOY works is because Ri Jeong-hyeok and Yoon Se-ri are the secondary lovers of the show, but I do think the primary reason it works is because the main leads are the Koreas––the source of its power is the departing Korean memory of yearning for those on the other side of the border. That’s why they can’t be together in any conventional way at the end. There’s no point in getting Jeong-hyeok and Se-ri together as long as the Koreas are apart.

You may argue that it doesn’t feel very audacious to do this in a show which glosses over so much reality to create its picture-perfect scenarios, its dewy love scenes, its often-broad comedy, and its ultimate acceptance (and whitewashing) of the military-intelligence infrastructure of both states.

And you’re right; it isn’t radical. But it feels right. It convinces some part of you that no pamphleteering or history writing is designed to reach (and, as an aside, I think its outstanding use of music is a big part of that, and under-discussed as far as I’ve seen). Also, as someone who grew up in a divided part of the world, among the last generation of refugees with memories of homes and friends they never got to see again, as someone with friends I made in better years who I may not get to see again for a long time––I think it’s harder than many of us can imagine to justify telling this story, without irony and without hedging your bets.

But yes, the boy-girl romance! A big part of why it feels right is because the leads got it right. I was talking to @drivingsideways the other day about the turbocharged star power of Jirisan (also a separate post) and it made me think that if you do have two huge stars co-occupying the screen, then you’ve got to let them generate the level of chemistry Hyun Bin and Son Ye-jin have with each other. It doesn’t have to be romantic––Cho Seung-woo and Bae Doo-na have shown us otherwise, thank you Stranger–– but you’ve got to use all that voltage somehow. It’s very rare that co-leads actually get to do that! (See Jun Ji-hyun and Lee Min-ho in Park Ji-eun’s previous drama, Legend of the Blue Sea, which is inert after its dazzling first episodes, only to spark to life briefly when JJH gets to play off Jo Jeong-suk’s stupidly wonderful cameo a third of the way in.) I love that Hyun Bin stepped back to let Miss Son have the time of her life and that she stepped up, practically bolting our eyes to her in every scene in which she appears.

It’s weird to say but this is the show of which I feel most protective on this list, which feels unnecessary because it’s also the biggest and most unambiguous hit. I predict it will age awkwardly; I do think (and hope) that it will seem timid as other shows, reacting to it, go farther in exploiting the radical potential of romantic love. But I love the baseline of mutual respect and delicacy CLOY laid down for its lovers from enemy nations, who separate even though they ought never to have been apart and whose bond can’t be broken even over the absence of a lifetime.

Hyena: It's honestly amazing to me that we don’t talk about this show 24x7. Actually, okay: maybe it doesn’t work for a lot of people. If you’ve never spent years taking pride in your work in a way that’s antithetical to what pride means to others in your profession; if your profession isn’t dominated by social capital; if you’ve never tried to make yourself heard in a room with people whose fathers all went to school with each other, you might not be particularly interested in the conditions of which Jung Geum-ja is a product, and to which she is a reaction.

Then again, maybe you are keenly aware of how these things work, and got put off by the high-key shenanigans that envelop this drama, which, in an early and major misstep, tries to play this dead-serious character for laughs. It’s awkward and silly, until you get to the point where she’s clowning for a party full of abject idiots, humiliating herself in order to gain their attention because she needs their business––and suddenly it’s like hearing nails on a blackboard.

There’s so much to Geum-ja, and Hyena is so much her story that it feels weird and unusual to classify it as romance. But it is, and it was meant to be, because Hyena is also the story of the guy whose dad went to school with all the other guys' dads––and it’s about some core of decency in him that’s survived the immersive brainwashing to which rich, clever men who’re meant to rule the world are subject from the minute they’re born. Geum-ja humiliates Hee-jae on their first encounter in a way that’s honestly disquieting even though you’re on her side.

But the thing is, you’re in no doubt about why he forgives her. Half the show is about him coming to terms with the fact that she’s defeated his intellect––and the other half of the show, in an unexpectedly delicate way, is about her coming to terms with the fact that his instincts about her were always right; and that he loves her for something he saw in her that has nothing to do with her manners or her morals or even what she says her name is. Kim Hye-soo and Ju Ji-hoon have so much chemistry you can practically smell the SBS broadcasting regulations burning. You believe them: you believe that they know what’s good for themselves and for each other, and you believe they’ll survive, and perhaps even that they’ll help others survive. I love them so fucking much (and once again, you should watch this just so that you can read @elderflowergin's fic about the show!)

Into The Ring: This is a proper rom-com, there’s a storyline and chemistry and half-tropey half tongue-in-cheek cuteness, and yet it feels like the love story works because the show treats it as a side story. There’s a Cold Comfort Farm-ish dynamic to Gong-myung showing up when Se-ra needs him, while Se-ra basically goes about being the hero (and the villain?) of her own life. Into The Ring *is* very much about Se-ra’s journey. But through her, we see, something in this quiet, decent, damaged man unfolds and starts to blossom. Their generosity to one another is treated so lightly––with a kind of generosity in the telling itself. And that elevates Into The Ring in a really unobtrusive and sweet and heart-warming and undemanding way. This is an uproariously funny show, but its comedy in the classical sense comes from the relief and reassurance it delivers you: that people in love can be good for each other.

Her Private Life: I have no clue why this doesn’t make drama romance lists more often than the almost-identical-yet-vastly-different Park Min-young vehicle, What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim? What's Wrong With Secretary Kim? is a half-hearted attempt at a tropey drama rom-com that coasts on the fact that most people in the world find Park Seo-joon handsome. In Her Private Life the dreamboat is a proper dreamboat. The heroine’s first love is the world she’s created for herself as a fangirl; and the romance is in how the man who loves her helps, rather than hinders her happiness at being a fan. The enabling goes both ways, as their adventure helps him recover his own relationship to art and solve a painful mystery in his past. I think the criticisms of that part of the show are valid, but also overblown––the trope that consumes the last couple of episodes is in heavy rotation in k-drama, but it’s there and it works for a reason. I don’t think I can believe in Ryan Gold’s artistic talent, but I *can* believe in his deserved and earnest happiness with Deok-mi at the end, and likewise hers with him.

I have a close-to-ironclad squick about workplace romances (even Se-ra and Gong-myung work for me only because they have a pre-existing relationship outside of work) but I didn't think about it more than once or twice in this show. And, okay, I have to admit that them quoting Zizek to each other as pillow talk was one of the deepest and most hilarious pleasures I have ever had watching dramas.

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