There's Nothing Dramatic Here

*Fangirl squealing* Our dashingly handsome gumiho is back! This time transported — against his wishes — to a tumultuous time in Korea’s history. Main cast: Lee Dong-wook as Lee Yeon, the gumiho who went through hell and back due to his love of a human girl. Kim Beom as Lee Rang, Yeon’s half-fox half-human younger bro who is always bickering with him, like all younger brothers do. Kim So-yeon…

Story in a Nutshell Show opens sometime in the late 1980s at one of South Korea’s countryside villages, where Jin Young-soon (Ra Mi-ran) is a hardworking young lady doing both deliveries and accounting work for her boss. We get a special appearance from Jo Jin-woong as Choi Hae-shik and a good portion of Ep 1 follows Hae-shik’s courtship of Young-soon, their married life and how their simple…

Ok, maybe not a villain, but Kim Byung-chul has always taken on roles of the deceitful character that it is hard not to subconsciously peg him as one in Dr Cha. However, he plays a smaller “villainous” role here — that of a philandering husband. Ironically, as the narrative progresses, it seems like In-ho hasn’t totally written off Jeong-suk or stopped seeing her as his wife, cos from his…

Sorry, I actually forgot I have yet to give the review for this drama. But as the commenters have mentioned, this drama is a gem. I love everyone in it, other than the neurotic Yeong-ju, whose behaviour and motivation are unfathomable. I get it that she is upset and insanely jealous having fallen from riches to rags — and possibly losing her then-boyfriend, Jeong-guk, to a “competitor”. But hey,…

I took some time catching up on Island, cos I waited for Season 2 to air before binge-watching (ok, that was an excuse….there were other nicer shows on-air in the same time frame actually). In a nutshell, the storyline spans across centuries, where Tamra (the old name for Jeju-do) was beset by demons (termed as “lust demons”). 2 young boys (Van and Goong-tan) were captured and trained as demon…

Story in a Nutshell Baek Jin-hee and Ahn Jae-hyun headline this new KBS weekender as our main OTP Oh Yeon-doo and Gong Tae-kyung respectively. Yeon-doo is an up and coming Korean language instructor in a private cram school (think Choi Chi-yeol in Crash Course in Romance) but her career is cut short when she finds out she’s pregnant. Her employer fires her after a colleague exposed her as an…

Talk about a mid-life crisis… Main cast: Uhm Jung-hwa (from Our Blues) as Housewife turns medical intern, Cha Jeong-suk. Her pivotal moment to return to medical practice comes after a health scare (which also reveals how selfish her closest family members are). Kim Byung-chul (from Goblin) as Dr So In-ho, Jeong-suk’s husband and also the Chief Surgeon at Gusan University Hospital. Min…

Please…can I have Season 3? Tbh, I found Season 2 to be a better watch than Season 1. The plot was better scripted and the stringing together of the various revenges taken on by Rainbow Deluxe Taxi led up to the same Big Bad Guy — aka The Bishop (played with lotsa flair by veteran, Park Ho-san). Although I was rather sad that Ha-joon’s redemption arc ended with his suicide. He’d make a pretty…

Until today, I find the title of Delivery rather weird. Cos Young-min isn’t delivering anything, he ferries ghosts and helps them resolve their regrets, which then sends (not “delivers”) them on their ways to the After Life. I believe the translation of “deliver” in Korean (or Chinese) to English probably caused this conundrum. Whatever the case, Delivery turns out to be not so a bad watch. The…

Special mention that this is a film produced by my home country, Singapore! And yes, for our foreign friends who watched this movie, we do talk like that over here — the official name for this “language” is “Singlish”, which is a all-over mixture of English, Mandarin, Malay, Tamil and thrown in with dialects from various Chinese/ Malay/ Indian cultures. If you don’t live and stay here long…

Another quick 12eps offering from JTBC, this story is quirky and filled with just as quirky characters. Main cast: Cho Seung-woo (from Stranger) as pianist turned divorce lawyer, Shin Sung-han. Although it is an odd career switch, Sung-han appears to excel in his new profession. Han Hye-jin as Lee Seo-jin an ex-radio DJ, who was fired from her job due to a leaked sex tape. Kim Sung-kyun (from…

Blooming started out as pretty promising, we have a group of young people, who are unconventional in their times — a quasi forensic pathologist (Myeong-jin), a female detective and her sidekick (Jae-yi and Ga-reum) and a Crown Prince who does not begrudge their statuses and befriends them. The narrative pace was also pretty fast and unlike most other sageuks, we started off with the red-robed…

The title…is quite paradoxical — but in the context of this drama, kinda make sense. Main cast: Joo Won (from Gaksital) as Hwang Dae-myung / Skunk. Sloppy civil servant by day, Dae-myung’s alter ego comes out at night, to retrieve national treasures hoarded illegally by the rich and powerful. Lee Joo-woo as Choi Min-woo, the rookie of the Cultural Heritage Team in the police force, tasked to…

This drama actually flew under my radar for weeks, until I decided to take a look at it. Other than the first episode, which was a little drier and slower paced, once Ha-ru (Jung Yong-hwa) and Myung-se (Cha Tae-hyun) are thrown together to work as a crime-solving pair, the pacing picks up, together with the hijinks and bromance. If anything, Brain is worth watching for the (b)romance between the…

I’d just go with the flow for this sageuk rom-com, it’s cute and light, even though the debut eps don’t give us much of a background as yet. Main cast: Shin Ye-eun (from Yumi Cells 2) as Yoon Dan-oh. The youngest daughter of the esteemed, scholarly Yoon family, who fell into debts after her parents death and her elder sister lapsed into madness (?). She turns her family home into a boarding…

Tbh, if there’s something more exciting to watch on screen, this show won’t be my top one…but well, it’s a low season. Main cast: Yoon Chan-yong as Soo Young-min, who lost his mother in an accident and took over her job as a taxi driver to support his granny. Bang Min-ah as Kang Ji-hyun, previously a police officer, now a ghost. She is also privy to the knowledge that the “accident” that…

…Han Gye-jeol in Kokdu. Like come on girl, it has been MORE than 10eps (I struggled), and your subconscious is already yelling at you that the person in front is NOT Do Jin-woo, but why are you still insisting and behaving as though he IS? I cannot… really. Any other female leads in other fantasy dramas would have smelled something is off from ep4 (max 5) onwards, given that this “Do Jin-woo”…