Misguided educational program for Korean highschoolers!?

This is basically 3 unrelated short stories bundled up in a 7 episodes long anthology..

Act 1:
You would think that a story that involves porn/masturbation addiction would break kdrama convention, but unfortunately that is not the case. High school dating is still a no & honestly the message that wetdreams are preferred over masturbation is just plain wrong. Also the way how this almost-relationship started is very male fantasy like and unrealistic. 5/10

Act 2:
This one is much better than Act1, but it's not amazing. For starters it was supposed to be a friendship to lovers story, but the friendship is barely shown & it's not even for a lack of time, since there was more than enough time to focus on naked upper bodies and such. I don't even think it was that well acted out really, the chemistry between the leads is not all that great either. Also in one scene FL is worried about her mismatched underwear, fastforward a few minutes & she is not even willing to allow kissing, come on now! 7/10

Act 3:
I'm not exactly sure what this is supposed to be about. It felt aimless and strange to me. I don't think this was worth watching at all. Perhaps the main theme is bullying, but it's not very impactful, even if someone liked watching that kind of thing. 4/10

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It's romance, not a romcom.

This has been a pretty interesting drama. It's quite unusual in many ways. When I reached the half way point I've been thinking that it's the perfect blend of fantasy and reality. We've seen characters & situations that cannot possibly be real, but at the same time I did not find either the realness or the absurdity of the plot immersion breaking. Unfortunately this delicate balance is broken somewhat in the later episodes. There were some unnecessary skits that felt out of place. It's not that the later episodes weren't good, but at times I felt like I'm watching a different drama compared to when I started. I guess to some extent the writing can be blamed too. I've been thinking that perhaps the writer realized around ep9-10 that she has ran out of ideas and a lot of padding's been added instead of content that I wanted to watch. Then again the writing is on a very high level throughout the drama, it's just that there were some recurring themes that I don't really like, such as parents "owning" their children etc. There is a lot of intelligent and wholesome dialog in the drama & also the complete lack of love triangles is extremely praiseworthy. Perhaps the problem is 100% me, because I'm just never satisfied with anything. I could also nitpick about the ending, it reminded me a lot of Be Melodramatic. Objectively it's decent, but I just don't like the idea of open ended kdramas and the characters really shouldn't discuss what a happy ending is in their last scene, that is just too immersion breaking for me, but that seems almost fotm these days. I was prepared to bash the writer for ruining the second couple's story, but considering their last 2-3 scenes their conclusion is up to our imagination..

Everything else is fantastic.

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So here is the drama i've been waiting for the most for a long time now. So far the story did not progress anywhere, we pretty much only had world-building (and some banter) in the first two episodes that I've seen. I feel that there is no hook for me, other than the writer's name. I remember, when I watched the first episode of Goblin & I was already hooked by the birthday cake scene. Very pretty people are not enough by themselves to entertain me..
I'm pretty neutral about Minho, but I don't feel that he was ever a good actor & I really hope that this drama has more substance than his face, his acting so far has not been very convincing. I like Go Eun quite a bit, but I'm not yet sure about her character in this one.

Anyhow I'm hoping that things will go up from here, a 9/10 final review is still on the table. It's not going to be another Abyss, right!?

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edit: After seeing episode 3-4 I'm really hopeful. The story is finally on track & I'm kind of hooked, I'm genuinely looking forward to episode 5. MinHo's acting seems to have improved, perhaps he got more into the character as the filming has progressed. The world building stage seems to be over and I loved the teaser & how episode 4 ended.

edit2: I enjoyed episodes 5-6. I guess the only thing that's really lacking is humor, there is not a whole lot of it, but nonetheless I'm still excited about next week.
Here is me being nitpicy >>>
The writer is not the best at writing realistic warfare scenarios as we have seen in DoTS, we had some of that in ep6, probably it was an effort to jab at Japan due to their ongoing trade dispute. It's not great when real world politics have an effect on the entertainment industry like this, but I've seen much worse in Chinese works, hopefully there will be no more of this in future episodes. The second Jung Tae Eul detective Kang Shin Jae childhood origin story was completely unnecessary, feels almost like a byproduct of live filming/live writing. The drama had to be preproduced due to all the visual effects, but it's possible that the script was only written week by week as the filming went along, I hope that I'm wrong, because weekly writing almost never leads to a coherent script and that is pretty important for a high concept series to work.
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Final edit: "next week" came a little late, I had the time to binge the last 10 episodes over the course of a week. I'm disappointed overall. The romance got serious really abruptly, but Minho's acting was probably the worst it has ever been. Kim GoEun makes all these really lively animated faces & cries a lot, but Minho has no emotional range what so ever, their most epic scenes are completely butchered by Minho. I think it's safe to say that his bad acting killed the drama for me. The story goes real slow in between e6 & e12 and that would have been fine, if we had some cool romance, but Minho sort of ruined that, what else remains from the drama doesn't amount to very much.
I guess Kim Eunsook kind of borked the script, but objectively the script wouldn't even be that bad. With a better director & without Minho we could have reached the level of W, well too bad..
I heard folks discussing that the OST was really good, very similar to Goblin. Well, I'm not saying it's bad or anything, in fact is perhaps slightly above average, but to me this comparison doesn't make any sense. I feel that the 15th best track on the Goblin OST double cd is more valuable than all the soundtrack that TKEM has. It's pointless comparing them.

I just finished watching the last episode, which was probably the best episode of the drama and because of that I decided to give a final score of 6/10, but it's probably too high..

I almost forgot, good God the ad placements were terrifyingly bad. At times it felt like the entire drama was just an advertisement. There were some product placement scenes that straight up made no sense. I mean FL drinking something & then praising it is something that could actually happen, but Nari's supercars..

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It's okay, if you are in the mood for some moodiness.

Honestly this is nowhere near as bad as the makjangish and super silly setup would suggest.
I have two big problems with the show.
The first is that the OTP romance is not very believable. I think acting shortfalls are definitely part of this issue & the chemistry was just not enough for me to fully immerse myself in their relationship.
The second is that the ending is extremely low effort. There was all this crying/suffering/hardship & then everything just worked out senselessly, also following the always annoying separation followed by a 1 minute happy ending formula. It's better than people dying I suppose, but not by much. I don't know if this was live filming or not, but it sure feels like it. Then again, it's quite normal for kdrama writers to not give a fork about well thought out endings, so that could be it. (This is pretty much the industry standard now, if anything.) On a positive note a well thought out, reasonable ending would've been exorbitantly difficult with the setting we've had, so perhaps embracing the silly is not the worst thing in the world. I would hugely prefer though if writers made scripts that can be wrapped up in a way that makes sense, instead of making convoluted messes & then just yolo-ing the ending.

As for what I liked.. There is a lot of reasonably well written dialog existing outside of the plot-driving conversations. I liked the moody presentation & the pink filter was part of that too I suppose. I liked the visuals on my color calibrated displays, but I can see why someone would hate this, if watching the show on an LG oled TV or a Galaxy phone..
The OST is pretty good too!

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Great, but the Manhwa is greater.

I'm not gonna waste the time talking about how amazing this is, it's fully deserving of the 9/10 rating, but in this review I'll focus on the things that I did not like so much.

In the early episodes Ahn Hyo Seop tried to copy Park Seo Joon's character from Secretary Kim. I'm not entirely sure why the production team wanted this, I don't think this worked for the actor. As much as I'm not a fan of his, I gotta admit that once he stopped doing that, he was perhaps the best version of himself so far. He had reasonable chemistry with Kim Se Jeong and his acting ability & on screen maturity has seemingly taken a step forward.

Obviously I've read the webtoon and I'm unhappy about a few things. For starters they have removed my favorite part of the webtoon, namely Hari's hilarious attempts at trying to turn fake into real.
In the final two episodes we have deviated quite far from the source material & I disliked pretty much all the changes.
Young Seo's conclusion was perhaps a little cliche in the comics, but it was nice. Instead of that we've gotten this rushed thing with YS cutting his father off. I liked the original plot more, but this was okay too I suppose and they might have made Korean television history with this. I've seen countless kdramas with asshole parents & this is the first time when the parent gets cut off in way that does not conform with the values of Confucianism. I certainly approve of this message!
The scandal about "Hari stalking her crush for 7 years, then dating her CEO right after" is the scriptwriter's invention. Did anyone actually like this? Not me anyway..
The forced 1 year temporary separation was complete bull, I'm sorry. There was 0 need to do this. This is one of the worst kdrama cliches that the Manhwa does not have. Compared to other dramas this is once again not the worst, at least they did not break up, or anything. it's just sad that they wasted what little time they had with the 12 episode limit on something like this. The webtoon has a very long & fluffy happy ending, also it's not boring at all. I understand that there was no time to get all of that in, but the deviations were less than appreciated and that's putting it bluntly.
Also the webtoon has a really funny secondary love interest for Kang Tae Moo, if they wanted to increase tensions in e11-12, they should have gone with her mini ark instead. (not a real love interest, but everyone though so & it was really amusing how Hari needed to defend her territory)


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(There is a love triangle, but I think triangle haters can safely watch this, the secondary love interest had relatively little screen time & has been rejected very strongly in a timely fashion)

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Outstanding, but infuriatingly unfinished

It's a brilliant, incredible yada yada show. The perfect casting meets with with the best creative talents the kdrama genre has to offer. There are plenty of 10/10 reviews very accurately depicting the awesomeness of the show, so I'll keep it short.

The reason why it's not 10/10 for me is because I have gotten into kdramas specifically due to the fact that kdramas tell a somewhat coherent story in 16-20 episodes & usually they are light on the filler and the good ones give the audience closure. This show has been written with a second season in mind & it ends with a cliffhanger. The cliffhanger itself is not that offensive, but two of the three most important storylines are hanging in the air, unfinished. So yeah, the last episode was quite the maddening experience.
I really wish Netflix stopped trying to influence how kdramas are made..

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Top tier tomance, but the rest is increasingly not great nearing the finale.

The romance in this one is about as good as it can get within the constraints of Chinese TV. The leads not only have great chemistry with each other, but the romantic plot flows very nicely and realistically throughout the entire show. There are no love triangles or needless complications either & yet they have so many touching and emotional scenes, it's just insane!

The drama is not just romance though, there is plenty of billiards related content. In the early episodes I was amazed by the camerawork & by all the effort taking & recording these shots must've taken. Though the games themselves were really really strange to my non-expert eyes. (but I have seen snooker played at the highest level & Ronnie O'Sullivan would be jealous of what's happening on screen in this show)

The first thing I disliked in this drama is fake Finland. Even if we ignore the strategically inserted homeless guys the whole environment is incredibly weird. To me it feels like the the studio shipped all the blonde white actors -based in China- to Finland (assuming they filmed there, I think so~) to act in this show. To add insult to injury the dubbed English is weird too, not because it's bad like in Kdramas, but rather educated Chinese dubbing actors just cannot sell this, every time a white guy opens their mouth on this show it sounds incredibly fake. (Though maybe I'm overreacting. It's just a Finland like imaginary country, not Finland after all.)

The bigger problem I had with this is that the final 7 or so episodes are incredibly boring. The romance in them is still fun, but the focus shifts to various educational topics involving sports, patriotism & self improvement. The sports drama parts, games played were all extremely skippable in this period as well. Having only this much in a 30 episode cdrama would be quite normal in the current era, but pushing most of it into the final episodes made it very difficult for me to finish the drama.
Despite how much I enjoyed at least 2/3rds of this, it's difficult for me to rate this very highly, since it was really and I mean REALLY difficult to reach the finale.

If you are reading this review before watching the show, my suggestion for you would be that after ep20 as soon as you start feeling bored, just straight up jump to the final episode.



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Now that I think about it, I also find it odd that the Cousin had a distinct second couple plot, but the creators forgot to wrap that up.

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Skip!

I just cannot believe that this drama has received 10/10 reviews praising the writer for the plot, incredulous. Having a silly, unrealistic setting in romantic comedies is perfectly normal, but to at least some extent the writer should respect the audience. Here not only are there at least 2 completely intolerable plot points, but also in the second half the plot is very jittery with no respect for logic.
In my review of 'Love is Sweet' I wrote that the OTP romance is good and everything else is trash. In 'The Love You Give Me' that statement not only holds up, but also even the romance is not nearly as good, but the annoying things are perhaps even more annoying. The two side couple's stories are also not great..

To say something good about the show, at least the acting is on a high level across the board & the leads were very cute together, with very good chemistry. (and there were many times when I found that both leads had red ears during some of their scenes, I found that to be very cute) However this is not enough to save this drama. There are many fluffy scenes that I have enjoyed, with a decent amount of comedy, however this is not enough to save the drama, not even close. There is just too much push-pulling here, with the progress always stalling due to very arbitrary reasons. Even the final episodes hold some "fantastic" surprises to sour the cake for us.

Ah almost forgot, the child actor playing their kid was amazing..

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The low ratings are probably largely due to kdrama lovers watching something that is Alien to them!

This show reminds me of The Matrix quite a bit. As an ancient fossil I still remember my elementary school classmates talking about the meaning of the film & sharing with me their own interpretations, one sillier than the other. Fast-forward to 2022 & reading Glitch's comment section I had a similar feeling even before I decided to actually dive into the drama and it is exactly like the Matrix's non action related content in the sense that it's messy with all this at times seemingly random symbolism that is completely up to interpretation and no two people will think about it same way. (and there are other similarities too, except this show has very few action scenes)

I will of course share my take, but before then let me just say that this is absolutely worth watching and reading my review from this point onward will not be all that useful in deciding whether you give this a shot or not.

In my opinion this show and its characters are incredibly juvenile, but for me that is part of its charm. The early episodes reminded me of Aussie and German children's adventure shows from the nineties & I've got to relive the sense of wonder I felt when I was watching some of them as a kid. (maybe there is a hint of inspiration from Stranger Things as well..) Of course the Glitch remains quite juvenile up until the last episode, but some of the plot gets heavier & more mature as we reach the end.
By juvenile characters what I mean is that many of them are exactly like children with 8th grader syndrome going on an adventure as a group of 2-6 doing batshit crazy things that mature people would never do, but doing all that in a somewhat protected environment, where the adults never interfere too much. (law enforcement) For me this was of course very entertaining & the last episode was absolutely fantastic! Good, well thought out endings do matter & this show has one of the best endings I've seen from a television show. (I raised my final score by an entire point because of the ending) Also the sturgeon conversation at the end is such a simple, but brilliant idea. I can almost see the writer talking about sturgeons with some producer & then deciding to somehow make that the main theme of a new show called Glitch, or not, maybe it's only in my head. (and no, sturgeons are not really a spoiler, since it's impossible to interpret this without context)

TLDR: This is a Korean High Concept show that is not really a Kdrama. If you like high concept shows, give this one a chance. (of course the visuals and visual effects are quite nice & the acting is 10/10 as well)

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It's alright, but there are annoyances.

The Good
⌲ There are some extremely touching emotional moments.
⌲ The main characters were excellent. (ML, FL + 3 ghosts)
⌲ Jin Ki Joo is really awesome in this, what's up with all the hate???
⌲ Park Hae Jin was quite alright too, he has improved A LOT since My Lover From the Star.
⌲ The romance is pretty good, albeit way too slow.
⌲ The ghost related side stories, crime solving (not quite as good as in Goblin, but far above average)
⌲ The comedy
⌲ The second couple was quite fun, though they had very little screen time, or plot significance.

The Average
⌲ The love triangle (considering all the sageuk vibes, this was quite tolerable)
⌲ The show has many extremely silly moments. (some of them were quite out of place)
⌲ The plot
⌲ The ending (the five minute long happy ending does not completely justify the entire final episode and it's just too fantastical, even for a kdrama)
⌲ The "general"

The Bad
⌲ The directing is strange in many ways. (Mystic Pop Up Bar is from the same writer & has a similar plot, but the contrast is quite large in this regard)
⌲ The drama is too sageuk-like for contemporary fantasy. (and I'm not talking about the S. flashbacks)
⌲ The 90 minute long sageuk flashback
⌲ The Saesang fandom in the three kingdom era
⌲ The mandatory noble idiocy breakup x2 (once in the long flashback, once in the final episode that lasted for 5 minutes)
⌲ The 2d villains are less than whelming & super stereotypical

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The Good:
⌲ The documentary concept
⌲ The sequencing of the major plot points (first half is more melo, the second half more romcom)
⌲ The docu flashback scenes are the best.
⌲ The romance, mostly (It's way more magical in Hogu's Love)
⌲ The chemistry between the two leads
⌲ The brilliant acting (If ML did variety, he could dethrone YJS in a few weeks & the FL is also incredible)
⌲ FL's cute chubby face
⌲ The bickering
⌲ The weak love triangles
⌲ The last 5 minutes of the drama (Had they spent 1-2 episodes on that 3rd documentary, I would have given the drama a 10/10 rating for sure, flaws be damned.)
⌲ The mild melancholia
⌲ The visuals
⌲ Despite all the stupid foreshadowing the leads stay together after they start dating again.
⌲ The rewatch value should be excellent with some FW buttoning.
⌲ The low key good OST

The Neutral:
⌲ NJ (I'm suspecting the actress was portraying Sulli & that made me quite sad)
⌲ Let's be friends! (Horrible plot device, but the ensuing romcom moments were good)
⌲ There were some well acted, but underutilized supporting characters.

The Bad:
⌲ The writing is not coherent, this is especially obvious if binge watching. (yay live filming)
⌲ The reasons for the initial breakup (I would have accepted "pride", but they just had to put a noble reason spin on it)
⌲ The second ML's character feels misplaced & pointless. (Could have FW buttoned all his scenes for more enjoyment)
⌲ The last 3-4 episodes were sullied by the entire "French Architect School" plot. (Woong of all people is such a genius that he has become an architect/engineer in 2-3 years and then he went back to Korea to continue drawing for galleries and whatnot)
⌲ The story drags in the middle. (The writer pulled the breaks on romantic progress in jarring ways, because 16 episodes..)
⌲ The final episode is weak, sans the last 5 minutes. (It's not ruining anything, it's just whelming)
⌲ The audio quality is trash, don't bother with those planar headphones! (were all microphones bought at the 1$ store, then again even some of the songs sound horrifyingly low-fi, while some others are excellent)



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I strongly recommend watching https://youtu.be/yxGomiIUN8s AFTER you are done with the drama. (it's only 2 minutes long)

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I enjoyed the comedy and some of the fluffier scenes and the leads formed a reasonably good pairing, but I found the drama quite frustrating. Usually if the romance is on point & I get enough sugar I can be quite forgiving when it comes to bad writing, however the annoyances should be at least below a certain level! Tiger and Rose is unfortunately full of majorly annoying plotlines, situations and events and the writing is just extremely juvenile. None of the major characters have a consistent personality, there were way too many arbitrary happenings & actions without an acceptable motive. Perhaps binge watching made it worse, because I'm sure I would have largely forgotten about much of the conflicting dialog, had I only watched 1-2 episodes a week, but still I felt quite a few things were just intelligence insulting.

Even if I begrudgingly accept, that due to the "drama within a drama" setting, the regular cast were just sillier than normal, at least the FL should have been somewhat sane, right? Chen Qian Qian however is perhaps the dumbest, most unreasonable FL character that I have seen in a cdrama thus far.

I cannot help but compare this show to Mr. Queen. That show also had quite a few annoyances if I want to be entirely honest, but it was not nearly as infuriating as this one and also Mr. Queen is just HUGELY funnier and everything is just massively better, from the production quality to acting performances, the OST etc.. Oh wait, never mind, the ending is perhaps even worse in Mr. Queen, I forgot about that for a second!

I sense that censorship made a significant impact in this drama. That's probably the main cause behind the horrid ending, which follows the same template as in The Day of Becoming You.

Lusi seems like a very talented actress, she's totally romcom queen material. This drama and Dating in the Kitchen were just a waste of her talent in my opinion.

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I had a pretty good time up until around episode 12. I mean sure the writing is pretty sloppy throughout, but the variety show concept and the fluff were nice. The leads had reasonable chemistry and quite a few cute scenes.
The second lead stories were annoying, but luckily I found them easily skippable.

Chan Sung as a cartoon villain did not work, then again can I really blame him under performing, when it was such a badly written character?

Ultimately why I decided to rate this show at 6/10 is due to the last two episodes. This is supposed to be a preproduced show, but the writing resembled live writing during the last 2 hours, you know when the writers keep stumbling trying to save the bad ratings or at least make a token effort.. People in the comment section here praised the drama for not breaking up the main couple, well I'm not sure if I can agree with them. Episode 15's script at times made me feel like they were separated for like 2 years, then after a short reunion they went into another 3 months of pseudo separation in the final episode. Perhaps it's just kdrama fatigue, but the separation(s) made unusually little sense to me, even if I compare this drama to something like This is My First Life. So yeah, the 10 minutes of happy ending before the rolling credits did not alleviate the bad taste in my mouth.

I cannot stress enough how good the variety show with the antifan idea is, unfortunately they did not expand on that enough. It could have been something really great, oh well..

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Put Your Head on My Shoulder 2, the slightly inferior sequel!

I did not think that a Xing Fei + Tang Xiao Tian pairing could work, but this drama proves my preconceptions wrong. Daddi's (Chinese actors and their self chosen English? names, gawd) visuals have been significantly upgraded, perhaps he has gotten a bit more mature too in the past 2 years. Anyway the leads had great chemistry and their romance really delivered.
I always liked fluffy romcoms with weak love triangles and this one is right up my alley. I've been more than sufficiently entertained really.

Comparing this drama with Put Your Head on My Shoulder makes a lot of sense. Not only because of the lead actors' reunion, but also because the plot structure of the two dramas is strikingly similar, or at the very least the way the love triangle situation is handled is almost the same. (One weak triangle in the early episodes and another in the second half, both easily resolved) MLH has two big shortcomings in this comparison. Firstly the setting is much worse, the whole hospital and law firm environment leads to a few minor annoyances, annoyances the other drama did not have. Secondly MLH is 6 episodes longer & in my opinion it's just about 6 episodes too long. There is quite a bit of repetition & artificially stalled progress between episodes 16 & 26. Also the ending episodes were not nearly as good, they weren't bad or anything, but drama faded into boredom a little bit.

The second leads had decent chemistry too, but I found their story somewhat unnatural. Also their conclusion is lacking. So much effort has been spent to explain their backstory in the early episodes, how they wanted to stand on their own feet etc, but ultimately besides them ending up together their story feels somewhat unfinished. What did they end up doing with their lives? Sure they did the store renovation, but then fastforward a few scenes and they are traveling around the world spending the money of their parents!? *shrugs*

I think this drama is the second one I've seen just THIS MONTH, that featured volunteer doctors visiting the site of a major earthquake, the surgery during an aftershock scene is also something both dramas had in common...

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Overall this is still an above average cdrama in the fluffy romcom category. There are no breakups, no forced separation and all conflicts and the complications are easily resolved, the OTP romance is great too.. 8/10 seems fair, I might even do a rewatch someday.
With that said, if you have not yet seen Put Your Head on My Shoulder, you should start with that drama first.


edit: I did a rewatch. I still enjoyed the first half a lot, but the second half was even more of a letdown than I remembered. (Way too dragged out, annoying second couple relationship and quite a bit of boredom) Adjusting the score to 7,5.

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This drama is pretty difficult to grade. On one hand it's very unique, with a heartwarming story, there is no love triangle and there are quite a few brilliant moments in the drama. On the other hand the chain of misunderstandings is just too much, borderline makjang-ish. Decided to give it an 8, because it's just too awesome and memorable for anything less.

UEE was incredible as Do Hee, I don't understand what all the hate is about, I could not imagine anyone doing a better job in this role. Choi Woo Shik was surprisingly great as well, though I only knew him from Fight for My Way. They had great chemistry too. The rest of the cast were also decent, the casting director did a great job.

The OTP's romance is really on point, I just wish they would have foregone the mandatory breakup in ep14, at least the ending was great, a really satisfying happy ending. (I don't care much about the result of that trial)

As for the second leads I'm on the fence about their relationship. For starters I did not like the second ML's character and it took 16 episodes to resolve their principal misunderstanding. At least the confusion about his sexual identity was kind of amusing.

One thing I noticed is that in the early episodes Hogoo's shenanigans caused me a lot of secondary embarrassment, I felt like he is mentally challenged. However in the second half his character was adjusted to become much more capable and attractive. Natural character development cannot possibly be held accountable for this upgrade.

The semi animated opening credits were awesome.

edit:
I've increased the score to 9, because I keep thinking about the drama & feel a strong urge to start a rewatch session already only after a few days..

edit2 (1 year later):
Changed it again to 10, the reason being that the romance is just so incredible, that the flaws are easy to ignore. There are very few dramas out there that give me the same feels.

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