Verona Park iyeo

Sung Hoon is the same kind of actor as Lee Minho. His looks are inversely proportional with his acting skills. I already knew this when I decided to watch this drama, because of that I did not expect much from this drama & to be honest the drama did not fall short of my already low expectations too much.

The saving grace of this show is that it's only 5 hours long. So despite there being A LOT of stupid in the drama, there is just no time to expand on those things. So yeah - weird second love interest, weird brother, hysteric mom - in a 16 episode long mini series I would have not been able to bear with all this old school 2005-2010 era crap. However due to the short running time, most of the problems were dealt with in minutes and the love triangle was weak too, because there was just no time for the second lead to amount to anything.

Ultimately I was entertained enough. Veronica Park did carry the show, despite her obviously being a less experienced actress at the time this show has been made. Everyone is right about their relationship starting out as a really toxic one, bully CEO yada yada, but I was pretty much unfazed about that. I just wish they had more chemistry and the writing could have been just a little better. I would have appreciated it, if the relationship progressing moments were less random and arbitrary.

I liked the cat, I wonder how many breeders have that breed in Korea, could it be a product placement? ^

TLDR: If you must watch this, because you are really bored, make sure to watch "The Secret Life of My Secretary" first. It's a much better drama & knowing it makes this one 200% more entertaining.

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I have two minor gripes about this one. Firstly the first two episodes were not only boring, but also the premise is a bit difficult to digest. (Math/statistics major in her final year keeps making REALLY and I mean REALLY stupid life decisions) The second issue is that there is a love triangle around episode 13-15 with the minor love interest acting like a blood hound, still at least they wrapped that up rather quickly. ~

I could nitpick about other things, but ultimately they are not important. This was almost precisely the drama I wanted to watch. It's a very sweet romcom, that is very unusual in how all the problems are solved very quickly in a satisfactory, wholesome manner. It's true that this drama has been heavily inspired by Because This is my First Life. Even though that one has quite a few stronger episodes & objectively way more interesting, more three dimensional characters, I think I prefer Perfect and Casual, because it doesn't have a really really frustrating separation plot and we get a lot more fluffy romance too, with many kisses that still remain meaningful in ways that other dramas with dragged out happy endings can almost never compete with. Other reviewers mentioned that they didn't very much like the side characters & their romances. Personally I think that both of their stories were okay-ish..

I mentioned earlier that this show is very unusual in how all the problems are solved very quickly in a satisfactory, wholesome manner. I have to note though, that there are quite a few heavily teased disastrous plot directions. The creators always dodged these bullets, but binge watching is recommended, because most of the teased bullshit gets resolved in like the first minute of the next episode ^_^

The OST is pretty good, normally I have a hard time enjoying Chinese music, but there were some catchy tunes in this one. The cinematography is very decent too..

TLDR: If you like sugar, just watch this one! If you are easily bored, then just start directly with episode 3.

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Considering the makjang premise this show turned out to be a huge surprise. The typical tropes did not really come into play. The secondary love interests didn't cause too many problems & their existence was a meaningful part of the show, which almost never happens with these triangles & squares. I loved the main love line, it was awesome from beginning to end, although at its core it's quite similar to the love story in Goblin. There was an unusual amount of honesty at unexpected times! The 2 secondary couples were also fun to watch, especially the noona + lawyer pairing. The supernatural element was okay too( not great), it did make the show more interesting, especially early on. The pacing of the story was surprisingly good, almost every episode had some melodramatic parts with a good amount of comedic relief in between. The OST was perfect at creating the mood for almost every scene. I usually don't comment on sound quality, when it comes to kdramas, but generally they use budget microphones and there are a lot of pops & clicks that I can clearly hear with my higher end headphone gear. It's nice that in a drama that touches upon sound engineering I can enjoy the sound & music without those usual annoyances.

Naturally this drama isn't perfect. The plot has some weaker points, such as the way our MC accepted death, or how pulling the investment has led to jail time, I mean that is pretty outlandish if you think about it. The sound engineering procedural parts looked awesome, but this is not how they do it in real life, they do make the sounds in a similar way with all kinds of props, but the scenes aren't reenacted in real time, but rather if there are 20 seperate sound sources they record those 20 sounds separately & then merge/edit them in post, plus the step sounds are looped, there is no need for sound engineers to run for minutes on end during recording.

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With a few exceptions all the older dramas I've watched sucked. This one is pretty good for its age. Park Shinhye + Jung Yonghwa combo worked out quite great, which came as a surprise, since I did not like Yonghwa before, but as it turns out he is a much more talented singer than I thought & his acting was okay too.
The story with the big play & the villains doing things to make things harder just isn't good, the writers did not try real hard to make it interesting and relatable, luckily in this genre this isn't a major issue. There is a love square, but it's very weak, the second leads don't cause many issues, this is very applaudable for a 2011 drama really. The secondary characters could have been more interesting, but there were a few rather funny ones, so it's okay.
I liked the music, my only gripe is that it was quite repetitive at times.

I wanted to watch a lighthearted romcom, this mostly delivered, if not for the 40 minutes of forced separation makjang in the last episode, I would have probably rated it a 9.

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This is a great show. The first half reminded me of the american TV-show Lois&Clark, for obvious reasons. I loved that show as a kid, Healer's take on this theme was good enough to keep me entertained as an adult. The second male lead was also a bit similar to Lex Luthor early on. The second half is not as good, but it is still head and shoulders above the average Korean action/thriller flick. I always felt that Hallyu cannot compare to american thriller shows like The Americans, or Person of Interest. The action/thriller part of Healer doesn't quite match up to them either, but it's certainly interesting enough. Thanks to some kdrama tropes & the pretty romance this can be considered a different genre though, something the American shows cannot really match either. It's certainly lightyears ahead of Descendants of the Sun, to the point that all the action/thriller scenes in DoTs can be considered a joke in comparison. It's nice that there was no triangle, or other relationship shapes, that was a pleasant surprise. The main actors were all very good, there is some surprisingly good acting from Park Min-young, this is probably her peak as an actress. I loved her in Secretary Kim, but she is MUCH MUCH better here. This is the first time I've seen Ji Chang-wook on screen, but he seems like a very good actor too, he did very well with his fake personality and everything. Obviously there was sizzling chemistry, no surprise there.
To mention some negatives, I really did not like the "tense music track" that was playing all the time, it's a pretty bad earworm too. Also there were some cartoon-ish villains that we could've done without, there were some moments that felt pretty fake too. Also the last episode felt pretty rushed.

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I liked the romance & the main leads, the second leads and many misc characters as well. The OST was also okay. I liked it that they didn't overdo the triangle in this one. The reason why it's not 10/10 is because the surrounding story is just not very interesting. This whole delivery business vs. big evil corp thing was extremely typical & for the most part boring and 50%+ of the drama was about this. Other reviewers mentioned that they could empathize with the problems that these youths had to face in "helljoseon", but I found many of these outlandish and unfathomable, it's a bit too much drama logics for me. It's not really slice life, but fantasy, which is fine, but they tried to sell it as slice of life.. The ending was also a bit unsatisfying & although it was a happy ending, it was extremely rushed.

For comparison's sake SooBin's most recent drama "Where Stars Land" is very similar in structure & the level of the comedy & flaws in general are also similar, but the life at the Inchineon Airport was WAY more interesting, I liked that show a lot more for that reason.

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I watched My Girl (2005) for the first time just now in 2018. I've seen a lot of rave reviews & people were claiming that this was an important work that contributed to the start of the Korean Wave, have I watched this in 2005 I would have probably liked it too, but now having seen so many amazing dramas it just didn't work for me that well. There are good things naturally, the main pair have good chemistry & their interactions are fun throughout the drama. Lee Da-hae was awesome, even with that hair. I've seen most of the other Hong Sisters dramas & this is probably their least polished work. In the early episodes the pacing is extremely slow by 2010+ standards & even though there were some extremely funny moments I have felt bored about half the time. Later on as the melodrama kicks in everything goes to shit, as usual with the Hongs, but this time it was even more frustrating than what happened in Jealousy Incarnate. This drama has the most annoying side characters ever. Both second leads were the worst, the Father was acting like a certified retard throughout the series & this Grandfather character once again caused a 2 years long forced separation plot that was way more dragged out and was way more annoying than in Pinocchio. In some of the other works by the Hongs they had some pretty decent endings, here the last episode is a super frustrating and meaningless cliche-melodrama fest up until 15 minutes to the end, then one of the shortest happy endings happen in kdrama history, not satisfying at all.

The OST had some pretty great tracks though, so thumbs up for that!

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The first few episodes were excellent & I really got into it, but shortly after that the the story progression crawled to complete halt, I did not feel the comedy anymore & in each episode I kept asking myself when will he find out, when will all this pain end? There is a reasonable happy ending, but as many have said there are unanswered questions and overall it does not make me forget all the frustrations I've had before, nor is it satisfying enough to give the drama a very high score. I'm not surprised that the ratings tanked in Korea.
I watched this over the course of 2 days, I strongly believe had I watched only 2-3 episodes a day I would have enjoyed it a lot more. I guess there is a limit how much frustration one can deal with in a day.

I feel that this show was a huge missed opportunity. They had a great story to tell & a truly outstanding cast, but there were problems with writing & directing. Chae Soo Bin could clearly act like the perfect Robot, but for some reason, when she was only pretending to be one it felt so unconvincing. It should have been convincing at times and then going out of character for comedic or dramatic effect, but this did not really happen. They could have expanded more on the genuine Aji3, her escape was one of the highlights of the show, but she barely had any screen time. I was waiting for a necklace related scene during the ending, also a big disappointment.

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It's a bit funny how in the drama 'Touch Your Heart' Inna was basically playing actress Oh Yeon Seo, someone who has been criticized for her bad acting a lot over the years. In this drama however Inna has a very similar character that Oh Yeon Seo herself portrayed before in the same author's work 'Mad for Each Other & Oh Yeon Seo was a much better fit for this I think, so we have kind of gone full circle in a sense.. Don't misunderstand she has done a decent enough job, but it's just a bit weird and ill fitting. Of course -unlike Yoo Inna- Hwang Chan Sung was a massive weak link in the drama overall. So to summarize, the drama is AT BEST average in the acting department.

The writing & the pacing of the script are objectively bad. There is no way around this, there really are a lot of problems & some astonishingly bad lines in the earlier episodes. Although I suppose the drama's saving grace are also lines, because here and there there was some brilliant dialog that really resonated with me. (a very smart intern writer's work perhaps?) Looking at the plot delivery It's not hard to see why it's more than a little bad. The first 5 episodes are completely about FL's mental breakdown/breakup, after that we get a relatively average, but serviceable romcom & then following that there is a rushed weird mess in the final two episodes that culminate in a 15 minute long, substance-less happy ending.
The characterization is also a hit and miss. Bora and Lee Soo Hyuk's characters are okay, but there are quite a few side characters that are just horrible, weird or just extremely two dimensional. (Uri, Yu Jung etc..)
Also the obsession with confessions is a weird theme for a drama to have, I don't really know what to think about this..

Can Love Triangle haters watch this? Maybe, though the previous love interests do stick around..

People like bashing the drama for that one admittedly very insensitive Auschwitz comment. While this is fair, I think it's more of an ill researched analogy that came from ignorance rather than anything else.

Overall the drama is a weird amalgamation of multiple genres. I don't really understand who the target audience is suppose to be. Sad-melo enjoyers will like the first 5 episodes, but will probably be very disappointed with what comes after, romcom lovers might not even hold out long enough to reach the 5-7 romcom episodes & then either of those groups would be at least somewhat disappointed due to the final two episodes.
Maybe the problem is just me, since the 10/10 reviews just keep on coming..

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I'm giving this a 10/10, because I loved watching this from beginning to end, perhaps with the exception of e13.
With that said objectively this is quite bad. We could give it an award for "the most cheesy lines ever", I mean really it's insane how bad the script is. I guess you could say that this is the ultimate guilty pleasure, because I know that it's bad and yet I couldn't hate it for a second. As a huge fan of Goblin I love Inna & Dong Wook, but their acting in TYH is the worst it has ever been. Inna is an amazing actress, she's been awesome in everything before, including variety TV, but I think this cheesy character was too far outside her comfort zone. Their chemistry wasn't nearly as good as in Goblin either, I don't know, it just felt off. Honestly I don't even understand myself why I liked this so much, I mean it's so cheesy at times that it causes physical pain. I guess the feeling is not entirely dissimilar, when I listen to that "We Built This City" cover that came on in Grey's Anatomy that one time. Perhaps I'm just shallow & I just enjoy everything my favorite idols appear in??? (this would be a first for me)
They had to drop the stalker ark prematurely, because of real events in Korea, but I did not mind really. I mean sure it's sad that they had to scrap the script from episode 13 onward, but it might have turned out more entertaining this way. I imagine that originally the second lead couple was meant to fight alongside JungRok vs. the stalker guy and that was the whole point of their story, to make the legal proceedings more interesting and fun in the last episodes, but I think the melodrama all of this meant to cause could have ruined the show for me, I don't know. I liked the ending a lot, the last episode was especially nice, despite the heavy product placements. (eating Subway sandwiches, while charging a Samsung phone with yet another Samsung phone!)

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The drama's okay, but it's not some hidden gem downrated by China haters.

The Good:
⌲ The OTP romance is relatively strong. (but this is only about 30% of the drama)
⌲ There is no triangle worth mentioning.
⌲ The format of getting into various psychological cases is nice. (almost case of the week-like)
⌲ Standing up to a toxic parent is always great to see in a cdrama(, but typically doesn't pass censorship.)
⌲ Overall the drama is a quite well made quality production.
⌲ The interesting symbolism (here and there)

The Average:
⌲ There are a lot of abrupt kisses that felt really strange & awkward.
⌲ The secondary couples are fun, but they barely had any screen time.
⌲ The individual cases are a hit or miss, there is a lot of procedural mediocrity everywhere.
⌲ The varying usage of hypnosis
⌲ Many things are over-explained, though this is the norm in this genre.
⌲ The 10 minute long breakup due to noble reasons
⌲ While the OTP romance is generally good, the writers have pulled the brakes in a very unnatural way to stall the couple's natural progress.

The Bad:
⌲ Second ML's plot is horrible + his cartoon villain persona could not be any more stereotypical.
⌲ The final episode is really underwhelming, in fact this is one of the most boring final episodes I have ever seen.
⌲ Going abroad to study is naturally a must..
⌲ Shao Ning's involvement in his love interest's treatment is a wee bit creepy.

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I like mature romances & I especially like noona romances, so I had high hopes for this one. While I did enjoy the romance & what little comedy there was, I found the rest quite disappointing. For starters I really dislike the setting, more specifically the whole private school thing, it’s almost as if this drama is -despite the negative things that happen there- an advertisement for that horrible horrible industry. Also if that wasn’t enough, I think the whole mystery killer thing is kind of bad. To me XYZ’s sudden transformation into a cartoon villain is not a well planned whoah moment, but rather a sudden shift in live writing. (yes there is some seemingly clever foreshadowing, but things could have gone in multiple directions nonetheless) Also I think this drama has way too many annoying moms. Just one is too many, but here there seems to be an army of them..

To talk about some positives as well, it’s very nice that FL kind of looks her age, or rather what a hard working 40ish cook/restaurant owner could actually look like. While the chemistry with the ML is not that great, they do look great together! Also there is not really a breakup, nor a love triangle for them. I feel if I used my fastforward button more liberally, then I could have enjoyed the drama a lot more, focusing just on the romance aspect.

I did not like the ending either. Sure the happy endings for the couples were nice, but it's extremely annoying how suddenly all these evil characters got mini redemption arks..

So yes, as of writing this review this stands on 8.6, so the drama is HUGELY overrated in my book. While the romance is good, it’s not even close to good enough to carry the show, so I decided to settle on 6/10 as my final rating.

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Just watch the original T-drama instead!

As everyone probably knows this is the mainland Chinese adaptation of the Taiwanese drama Meet Me @ 1006. Compared to other Chinese adaptations that I've seen, this one is at least genuinely similar to the source material. They may have changed a great many things, but ultimately we can still recognize the story & censorship did not ruin the time travel-ish ending, not this time.

There are three major things that can be considered improved over the original. For starters the cdrama's cinematography is just gorgeous. The plot of the cdrama flows far more smoothly, the writer did a reasonable job of fixing some of the flaws the original script had. For example Jia Lan knows how to use the Internet, so that's a huge plothole dealt with too.
Da Jun's big plot has been completely cut as well, which is HUGE.

Despite the above I cannot recommend this drama at all, I suggest to just watch "Meet Me @ 1006" instead.
So what's wrong with the adaptation? Well lots of things really. It's normal for cdramas to have far less emotional impact than their Korean, or Taiwanese counterparts, but here the difference is just way too jarring. We go from really intense and lively acting to emotionless Vulcan characters, well almost. The leads had strange chemistry, they had some obviously, but the acting was not very believable so the OTP couple did not really work for me. Also FL's voiceover sounded really weird & ill fitting. She was like 18-19 when they filmed this & the makeup artist did not really do a very good job hiding her baby fat. I'm fine with age gaps, but FL's age does not fit this role, it could not have been any more out of place.
I did praise the writer a little for fixing some of the script's flaws, but there are some negative developments as well. Some people tried to imagine a love triangle involving the same person from different timelines, watching the original I thought this was super silly. In the adaptation however the writer went all in with this, there is a real love triangle between the two He Zheng Yus. This is not too bothersome or anything, but feels unnecessary.
And finally the OST of this is perhaps the worst cdrama OST I've heard thus far. It annoyed me immensely, I did find myself turning down the volume a lot, when I could not take it anymore.

So yeah, just skip this one & watch the original Taiwanese show, if you can!

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A less than realistic guide to YA relationships?

Watching this show I felt that it wanted to educate me too much. It's good if teens, or young adults have access to content like this, which is probably a pretty big deal in Korea, however I cannot help but feel that shows like Dawson's Creek have all that and much more & it's done better, the educational intent is conveyed more naturally etc..
Content like this is not what western audiences watch kdramas for & if we look past all the ehm "messages" there is not a whole lot left. Four hours are not enough to warm up to the two and a half mildly fluffy relationships, despite the actors doing a pretty good job across the board. The sismance did not feel that realistic, also it's weird how in the first episode FL2 seemed to have hated FL3, but the writer did her damnedest to make the audience forget that later. (also Chlamydia is not a virus)

Still there were some entertaining moments, 6/10.

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A high school sports/romance drama pretending to take place at a university campus.

The Good:
-The chemistry between the leads
-The reasonably good acting
-The good special effects (I'm assuming Wang An Yu and co. cannot skate at the level shown in the show, but the CG? sure looked believable)
-The high quality production
-The moms ended up being a lot more tolerable than what I initially thought would be possible.
-The weak love triangles
-The fluff (though there could've been much more of it)
-The race in the last episode was pretty exciting and all anime like.

The Neutral:
-It's a sports drama first & romance drama second.
-The second lead couple's problems
-The silly, but still somewhat restrained villains.
-The (happy) ending is only so so. (reasonable for a sports fan, not so much for a romance fan)

The Bad:
-The overall story is extremely juvenile. (13 year old me would've loved it)
-The sports related subplots were really really silly as well. (don't expect an authentic speed skating experience)
-The production team could've picked a taller more athletic looking FL.
-After about 10-15 episodes it started to get boring. (not the fluff, but the skating)
-It's way too long.
-The leads took forever to get together.
-Coach Ulterior Motive
-The whole assist thing (though I've seen something similar in the Olympics in a running competition)
-Redemption arks
-The unreasonable character rewrites
-Snaky Snakewoman

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