Sh**ting Stars was one of those dramas where there was enough humor and romance and likable characters and general cuteness to keep me around, but the story lacked in some important ways.

First, some of the plotlines went in directions I wasn't a huge fan of. For example, I think Oh Han Byul agreed to date Gong Tae Sung a little too quickly considering she'd been so disappointed by him before and still carried a lot of hurt from the experience to the point that she'd put up a wall in self-defense. I was expecting Tae Sung to have to work for it a little bit, but Han Byul agrees to date him rather quickly. There were also a couple of really dramatic subplots, namely Tae Sung's mom abandoning him as a child and his friend's untimely death, that felt very tacked on for the purpose of dramatics rather than meaningful storytelling. If they had tied these two subplots into the drama's overall theme of working in the entertainment industry managing celebrities and the toll being in the public eye can take on the celebs and those who work with them, maybe they would have been more effective. As is, they weren't integrated well, and I kind of zoned out whenever the drama focused on them. It didn't help that Kim Young Dae's more emotional character moments did not work for me at all. Whenever he was being cute or playful or jealous or argumentative (or smoldering, lol), he sold his character so well I wanted to buy plushie versions. But I did not like his way of emoting pain or anger or sadness. It always felt...weird. Even when he was just being more serious, I just wanted those scenes to be over.

And it must be said here that while there was some decent focus on what it's like working in the entertainment industry from the non-talent's perspective, the drama didn't do a very good of maintaining this focus throughout and was even at times very surface-level in this respect. At a certain point, the romance began to overshadow everything else to the story's detriment.

I also have to ask...what happened to the fun sense of humor the drama had in the first half, because the second half was kind of missing it. Of course, that is kind of the rom-com curse. The build-up to the leads getting together is a fun romp, but then they get together, and the romance (and comedy) sometimes loses its spark, and I think this drama is a good example of that. There's a lot of fun early on, but then the leads get together, and the whole thing kind of feels a little womp-womp. (That and I was disappointed by one of the secondary OTP's, as the characters I wanted together did not end up together. I had some pretty major Second OTP second male lead feels, lol.)

My last critique for this drama, which I really can't write this review without bringing up, is the Africa issue. A humanitarian trip to Africa (not a specific African country, but just...Africa) is used as a plot device for the male lead, and it's really just unnecessary. If they had left it in the first two episodes and not brought it up again, you could have chosen to ignore it. Or even better, they could have turned it into a celeb faux-pas where he went on the trip for the optics and it backfired on him. But it kept popping up, sometimes to help move the plot along in some way, and this just kept reminding the viewer of how poorly written and cringy it was.

So I'm disappointed with this drama. I don't think it's the worst drama I've ever watched, and I certainly got lots of enjoyment out of it. And like I said at the beginning of my review, there's some good humor and romance and lots of likable characters and overall general cuteness, so other viewers might have a more satisfactory viewing experience then me. I just don't think it lived up to its potential, and to me, that's a shame.