Triple

I’m honestly not sure what I think of Triple.  I think I may hate it.

And yet.

It’s also done by the same team that made Coffee Prince, so there’s a possibility that my hopes for fun and hilarity going into this show were a bit unrealistic.  Some scenes are fun, but there are also parts where the show utterly fails to keep my interest.  I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but I am seriously considering just skipping ahead to the last episode to see how it ends, and calling it quits.  The show already falls into a genre where you’re either going to love it or hate it, because it’s all about “one girl’s dream to become a professional figure skater”.  Or at least that’s what it says it’s about.    I loved watching Ekaterina Gordeeva growing up, and I still have a soft spot for watching all kinds of ice skating.  So no, the parts of show depicting one girl’s struggles to conquer figure skating are not what I’m having an issue with.

My problem is this: The over-arching plot of the show actually seems to be about multiple bizarre relationship triangles, more than anything else.  Figure skating becomes like a prop that the show will pull out occasionally by the time we reach episode 6. I wanted skating to be the central theme that everything else orbits.  Maybe the writers thought they should minimize just how much figure skating people were being forced to watch.    But does it make sense to dive head-long into multiple troubled relationships in what (to all appearances) should be a comedy?  And treat them seriously instead of humorously?    Honestly, this show is very soap opera-ish.  As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t have a lot of patience for extended relationship triangles.  They make my teeth hurt.

I’d have to draw a diagram to tell you exactly how many love triangles this show currently has going; I’m not even sure.  At least three.  No, Four. Or– Five?  Like I said.  A diagram.

And as predicted, I am losing patience and fast forwarding through more and more scenes.  If you LOVE relationship triangles and long drawn out discussions where everyone throws their emotions around, no one understands each other, and no one is honest about anything, this may be the show for you.  I just want to start knocking heads together until someone actually does something interesting.  Like (possibly) the ice skating I was promised.

This barrage of relationship stupidity has even managed to trump my love of an ensemble cast, because I just can’t bring myself to care.

Anyway, the premise of the show is this:

Lee Haru, played by Min Hyo Rin, wants to move to Seoul to get a good coach and seriously begin figure skating, so she can be a pro like her deceased mother.  The only problem is, the only person she knows in Seoul is her older step-brother Shin Hwal, played by Lee Jung Jae, who wasn’t home that much even when both her mom and his dad were alive.  Their parents were killed in the same car accident. She went to the countryside to live with her biological father, and he kept the old house. She writes him every holiday, and he never writes back.

She goes to Soeul to convince him he should let her live with him for a year, so she can have access to the ice rink in Seoul. But when she gets there, it turns out he lives with two other roommates.   The roommates, Jo Hae Yoon played by Lee Sun Gyun and Kang Kyun Tae played by Yoon Kye Sang, are actually all for letting her move in, but the step brother is totally against it.  Plus Haru’s new coach turns out to be step-brother Hwal’s estranged wife, who roommate Kyun Tae has a crush on, and we are off and away with the beginning of the relationship circus.  Roommate Hae Yoon has an off-and-on again relationship with a co-worker who seems to like her love life to be more casual, and is always hanging out with a different guy.   To top it off, Haru begins developing romantic feelings for Hwal, while fending off the attentions of the gold medal speed-skater who’s inexplicably decided she’s his girlfriend.

I’m probably still forgetting a rival relationship or two, because I still don’t care.  You can see how there’s very little room for the sports drama I was expecting to develop.  All these relationship woes take up so much of the screen time.  In fact the rivalry I was expecting, between Haru and her childhood skating nemesis is still just sitting there, with barely any attention paid to it at all.

In reality, this is another show where my expectations didn’t match what I got.  I wanted to watch a sports drama, with some romantic comedy thrown on top, and I got a full-blown melodrama with some sports themes and occasional humor sprinkled on top.  Not my cup of tea, but it you’re fond of heavy-handed relationship dramas, and can deal with the figure skating veneer, this might still be the drama for you.

Please support the Korean cast and crew by watching Triple at official sites. You can find it here:

Dramafever

Triple originally aired on MBC.

Oh! My Lady

I’m pretty sure that this show was made specifically so older, married ladies like myself can feel reassured that even if their life (and marriage) completely goes to crap, they still have a chance of landing the popular, handsome, younger guy.   However, I still had a lot of fun watching it, so I guess I should just applaud how well they gauged their target audience and try to look the other way. I actually started watching this show because I was looking for something else with Choi Si Won in it after King of Dramas. He had so many laugh-out-loud scenes in that series that I was curious if his other work was like that too. Apparently yes.

Choi Si Won plays Sung Min Woo, an over-the-top, hammy actor that keeps getting cast even though he’s really bad, because his fans only care about how his kiss-scenes look.  He contends that he doesn’t actually have time to work on his lines, because his manager keeps setting up so many fan meetings.  His manager contends that without the fans, no director would waste their time trying to get him to look good, because his acting is horrible.  Either way, judging by the screaming fan girls wherever he goes, right now Min Woo doesn’t have much to worry about.

Chae Rim plays Yoon Gae Hwa, an unemployed single mother who’s trying to get extra work as a house keeper.  Her last employer didn’t actually pay her for her work, and she had to beg her ex-husband to take their daughter back for a while, because she couldn’t pay rent.  She desperately wants any kind of work, and promises a housekeeping agency she’s happy to take their tough jobs or problem clients– whatever they can send her. They give her a no-questions, hush-hush upscale private client who wants absolute discretion and privacy.   The agency told her no one would be there while she’s cleaning, but Min Woo comes home early, surprising her. She thinks he’s an intruder, and beats him up with the vacuum attachment.

Once he’s finally convinced her he lives there, she scorches the shirt he’s supposed to wear to a fan meeting because she’s interrupted by an urgent call from her daughter.  Min Woo’s manager finds out, and she’s pretty much immediately fired.  Not daunted, she goes to a new interview for interning at a production company.  She lets slip that she’s met Min Woo, and the director tells her if she can bring him in as the lead for their new musical, they’ll give her a job.  She needs the work, but sadly she has as much chance of convincing him to star in the musical as she does at getting her old apartment back.

She’s stubbornly staking out Min Woo’s apartment (trying to decide how she can convince him) when he gets a small child dropped on him by an ex-girlfriend, along with a note claiming it’s his.  By the time he realizes what’s happened, his ex has completely disappeared.  He has no idea what to do with such a small girl-child– totally not one of his areas of expertise–and whether the kid is actually his or not, if the media gets wind of this, he’ll be in scandal-city.  Since his attempt to anonymously turn the child into the police as lost totally fails, he ends up needing someone to take care of her without alerting the press.   Gae Hwa half-blackmails him, half-helps him out, and she & Min Woo strike up an unlikely partnership.  She’ll babysit the little girl while they look for his ex, and he’ll cooperate with the production company about the musical, so she can finally get a job and make some money to get her own daughter back.

A feel-good family show at heart, this series starts with the two main characters completely isolated, and then slowly transitions into what it means to have people around you to rely on for help and support.  It also shows how when Min Woo allows himself to care for those around him, he slowly starts to grow up and become a better, more centered, person himself.  Gae Hwa in contrast, let her first husband completely dominate her life, and slowly learns to take control of her own life for herself and her daughter–and Min Woo’s daughter too.   Even if that means bullying Min Woo around a bit sometimes.

This show completely embraces the idea of “A Comedy of Errors” which means it’s often slapstickey and cheesey, but at the same time, it’s a very uplifting and family-affirming show.  The writers have also found tons places for Choi Si Won eye-candy moments as well; they find all kinds of reasons in this show for him to take his shirt off.  Those looking for fanservice will not be disappointed.  All in all, this show makes no excuses for being a silly, comedic romp, targeted toward the older female audience, but also catching the younger female audience by flashing lots of Choi Si Won’s skin.  Even when I saw exactly what they were doing, I couldn’t be offended because the show is outrageously funny.  And lets face it, Choi Si Won is just down-right charismatic.  Totally worth the watch, even though it is firmly, unabashedly in the guilty-pleasure, fluff category.

Please support the Korean cast and crew by watching Oh! My Lady at official sites. You can find it here:

DramaFever

Hulu

Oh! My Lady aired in Korea on SBS.

A Gentleman’s Dignity

This show is just non-stop fun from start to finish, and one of my favorites from 2012.   It also won DramaFever’s 2012 award for Most-Overlooked drama of the year.  I’m not really sure why it didn’t get as much play in the U.S.  It could be because it appeals to an older audience (I doubt teens or those in their early twenties are really going to get this one), or just because everyone else’s first impression was, “So, the show’s about four guys that can’t accept they’re growing older and still act like they’re in college. That sounds…like me. I do that every day already.”  I admit it; that was my original reaction to the show description.  Go ahead and watch it anyway– this show is anything but ordinary.

The lack of popularity also might be because the show’s English marketing materials portray the four leads as playboy types.   While one of them is married and might fit that moniker, the rest occasionally try to go out and pick up girls like younger guys, but those expeditions usually end up in spectacular failure.  In fact, the opening scene of the series is them epic-failing at picking up girls.

The story really focuses around those four main leads.  Kim Do Jin, played by Jang Don Gun, is a work-a-holic architect who runs his own small firm.  Im Tae San played by Kim Soo Ro, runs the architectural firm with Do Jin and is a structural engineer.  Their friend Choi Yoon, played by Kim Min Jong has become an attorney, and their friend Lee Jung Rock, played by Lee Jong Hyuk runs a juice bar owned by his rich wife Kim Min Sook, played by Kim Jung Nan.  The four men have been friends forever, and have a tendency to regress to childish behavior when they’re together.

This type of behavior leads Do Jin and Yoon to get in a fight with high school students in episode one.  The high school punks’ teacher turns out to be Seo Yi Soo, played by Kim Ha Neul, who also referee’s for Tae San’s amateur baseball team.  Do Jin’s actually run into her before (literally) but failed to get her phone number.   It seems serendipitous that the woman he’s had a crush on for over a year is appearing right in front of him and already knows two of his friends.  He just wishes he’d realized it was her before he was such an *sshole to the punks’ teacher over the phone.  Yi Soo has actually had a crush on Tae San since they first met, but she’s shut up about it, because he just started going out with her roommate played by Yoon Sae Ah.

Do Jin’s relationship with her is off to  a rocky start, but it’s not near as rocky as Jung Rock and his wife Min Sook’s. Mostly because of Jung Rock’s deplorable habit of taking off his wedding ring anytime he sees a cute girl.   Our first introduction to Min Sook is because she shows up at Yoon’s attorney office demanding a divorce.  Apparently not for the first time.

Not that Yoon’s love life is any simpler.  Tae San’s younger sister has had a crush on Yoon forever and relentlessly pursues him. He tries to keep her as far away from her as possible, since dating a sister– and one much younger than him — would be a breach of the bro-code.

Not to mention the time-bomb that a mysterious boy named Colin (played by Lee Jong Hyn) brings with him from England. It might just be that one troubled teenager can change all four of the guys’ lives forever.

The show is much more about the guys’ relationships with each other than you might expect from all of these love-triangle hijinks.  It’s also about the women who decide to stick around, even once they find out how crazy these four are.  If anything, the show is much more of a Bromance/sisterhood movie mash-up with some romance sprinkled on top. Most of the humor that permeates the show comes from that, as all of the characters comically blunder through their romantic relationships together, often trying to help each other out with varying (and frequently questionable) success.  They usually manage to get through it somehow, even though it occasionally means “All hands go down with the ship.”   This show really embraces what it means to get older, both from the male and female perspective.  The characters deal with all the insecurities and universal contradictions of being an adult in sometimes aggravating, sometimes endearing, but always humorous ways.

This show is highly recommended, and still lots of fun on the re-watch.

Please support the Korean cast and crew by watching A Gentleman’s Dignity at official sites. You can find it here:

DramaFever

Hulu

A Gentleman’s Dignity aired in Korea on SBS.