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.