Sinasina

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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A truly well executed time travel kdrama, way way above Twinkling Watermelon.

This is the best kdrama I've seen since a very long time. (probably since It's Okay to Not Be Okay)
The only serious problem I have with it is the villain's lack of personality/backstory and how they just dealt with him under 3 minutes in the finale. I could nitpick If I really wanted to, but I fail to see the point.
I always say that explaining the inner workings of time travel always ruins immersion in time travel shows, luckily in this one they have not even tried. (it's better to keep the unexplainable unexplained)

Everything else is pretty good, the cast is great, the chemistries are great. The romance is up there with the best, there are countless very fluffy and or very touching moments. Love triangle haters are safe to enjoy this as well, because the secondary love interest is weak like a straw. The ending is a banger too.

Anyway 9/10 seems fair to me. It's not perfect or anything, for example Someday or One Day is better in this genre, but I'm very happy that Korea can still deliver something of this caliber, since it's been so long..

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enjoyable, but not that great

The Good
⌲ It's decently well researched.
⌲ While this is no Hospital Playlist, in the world of Doctor Romantics, this is still very far above average in the medical kdrama genre.
⌲ The lead actors did great.
⌲ The cool episodic patient related plots
⌲ The supporting actors were also up there.

The Average
⌲ The drama feels quite boring at times.
⌲ The romance (it's alright, but not nearly as interesting as the prospective couples we've had in HP, let alone what's the norm in a decent romance drama)
⌲ The semi-villains of the show
⌲ While I enjoyed the HP cameos, most of the appearances felt rather forced.

The Bad
⌲ The lottery thing is egregious.
⌲ FL survived med school & everything to finally become a resident & all she talks and thinks about is quitting.
⌲ To add to the previous point, the whole plot about the debt is a bit insane too..
⌲ The rubber mannequin surgeries were quite immersion breaking.

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It's a quality show without major nuisances.

This drama is 50% business, 50% romance & honestly even the business part is quite alright, certainly it's far and I mean FAR above the typial cdrama fare. The leads had absolutely amazing chemistry & visual compatibility. The basic romantic plot is very well thought out, how FL is recovering from heartbreak in the first half of the show is quite well done. The slow burn makes sense, it's not just endless time wasting like it so often is. While I normally strongly dislike love triangles, FL's former love interest worked out wonderfully as a storytelling tool, never becoming too annoying, while his presence still added a little flare to the otherwise somewhat bland setting.

While obviously this is pretty great, there were moments when the delivery on various propaganda agendas made me roll my eyes, but I've seen far worse. At the very least China has every reason to be proud of their PV industry..

This show is often compared to dramas such as `Amidst a Snowstorm of Love`and `Love Me, Love My Voice`. In my opinion those are mostly vibe dramas with a fairly limited plot. However this drama is not doing so well on the vibe side, the feels aren't quite there, opposed to that though there is way more plot & the FL has many super satisfying aura farming / face slappy moments. It's worth watching.

The drama OST is not too amazing or anything, but the intro song really grew on me..

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I enjoyed this a lot, but there are plenty of issues.

I watched this after Would You Marry Me and Dynamite Kiss. So maybe it's recency bias after having gone through those 2 horrible shows, but I really liked this despite some glaring problems. Maybe part of it is that 2025 had been a rather weak year for dramas..

I have always liked noona romances & Sniper Butterfly's leads are much more amazing than what's the norm in this genre. Despite the actors having a 20? year age gap, they had wonderful chemistry & were most probably very fond of each other. Also Michelle was amazing in every way possible. She is so chic, lively & charismatic that is super rare for Chinese TV & also I really love how fit & healthy she is, my heart breaks when I look at actresses like Lushi -and many others- being pushed into malnourishment.. ML's great too, he is super tall & young providing the perfect contrast with the FL.
Anyway this drama is the prime example why in romance if the casting is strong, then many flaws can be forgiven.

E23 is a really odd episode, feels like 50% of the entire dramas plot happens in it. On one hand it's good that they get the past timeline breakup & the present timeline reconciliation into the same episode minimizing frustration, however there were a great many boring episodes early on, there would have been time to make the plot a bit more even, I don't even know.

I strongly dislike love triangles & this drama has one. However this secondary love interest only gets like 30 minutes of screen time total, so it's bearable. Though there are some rather bad moments involving that guy..

As for what I did not like:
❌ The nastiest noble breakup in my cdrama history, the FL really went out of her way to make it as bad as possible.
❌ The past timeline plot about ML's catchup repeat exam prep school is super boring & oftentimes weird.
❌ About one third of the drama is very boring, especially from ep9 to ep 17 or so.
❌ ML's makeup in the present timeline is crazy thick, though I understand why they did that.
❌ The super boring corporate plots
❌ I loved the younger secondary couple, but hated how little screen time they've gotten and most of their romance happened during the time skip. It's a shame, in the 30 episodes format they have done them dirty.
❌ There were several very forceful kisses & one of them was so bad that perhaps there are fellow MDL readers that dropped the drama shortly after. Yes stealing kisses & being assertive is what the Chinese audience loves to watch, but this was too much for me, even though normally I'm okay with this.
❌ While there is plenty of fun fluff in the final 6-7 epis, I'm somewhat unhappy with the ending, mostly it was just a very mediocre boring way to bring this to a close. Happy endings should pack more of a punch, even if we don't get a wedding or kids, at least walk off into the sunset or something, anything..

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The main romance in this drama is pretty good, so is the chill moody atmosphere, but everything is else is very strange.
Review over, thanks for reading!

Since there is a minimum word count on MDL for reviews, let me elaborate a little bit what I mean by strange. For starters this show has an incredible amount of social engineering / agendas in it. These only become really jarring around e13, but they can be felt from early on. There is also the sister character, she has an incredibly hard to tolerate trashy personality (don't mean to criticize her for being promiscuous or anything like that) in the first half of the show, but then she becomes a much better person out of nowhere & gets together with a young guy, well *inserts shrug emoji* alright. Then there are a bunch of incredibly crappy people at work that also transform, getting "very well deserved" redemption arks.

The writing is also super weird in the sense that the show has several -perhaps even many- brilliantly written and really cool scenes, but these are not integrated very organically into the show, the flow of the story is just really odd. For all I know it could be that actually brilliant writers failed to properly navigate the maze of written and unwritten Chinese censorship rules & my feeling of strong dissonance is a direct result of that, I don't know. I just think that trying to justify -even malicious- authority- with all those redemption arks I mentioned earlier could also be explained by trying to please the censorship body.

Despite these issues, `Fake It Till You Make It` is still quite entertaining & most Chinese dramas with the business tag are usually far far worse than this one, because at least I never felt very annoyed in this one. Had some minor frustrations with Da Wang early on, but even that is nothing compared to what usually happens in this genre.

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I enjoyed the first 6 episodes, sure it's been a bit lukewarm & nothing unique or out of the norm, but at the very least the drama is relatively free of annoyances up to that point & it`s still somewhat funny with acceptable chemistry between the leads & decent-ish acting. The second FL is also really funny, though I always liked Dasom before..

Unfortunately the final 2 episodes are similar to what we usually get in 16ep dramas. Meaning it`s complications leading to an arbitrary separation culminating in a 3 minute long happy ending, if this is even that.. I always hated that formula, here though it's even worse, since having 2 trash episodes out of 8 has twice the impact.

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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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Not exactly flawless, but the drama transcends the term "masterpiece" in mutiple ways.

I just finished watching this & I'm still in shock. I kinda sorta hate how the plot got wrapped up, but the last episode was not only objectively perfect & extremely touching, but I even lost the war against the onion ninja nation, I never had a chance.

If I really wanted to, it wouldn't be very hard to pick the story apart. (Chicken and Egg Paradox & other potentially not so minor plotholes come to mind) However ultimately this show is beyond cleverly written. In fact I'm yet to see an Asian drama with writing this good. There are some dramas that I consider as good as Someday or One Day, but in terms of writing none of them can compare. What I find especially shocking how the drama barely features any repetition. Whenever you expect something to happen, such as travel back in time to attempt to change something, to relive a scene, the end result is completely different than our expectations, with unique unexpected perspectives & no repetition. I cannot emphasize enough how brilliant the storytelling is. Mind blown!
Also it's worth mentioning that despite the relative complexity of the plot, it's still easy to understand what's going on & yet the "explanations" never feel forced, masterful..
(I barely remember the plot of Steins;Gate, but I think this one is easily superior)

So okay, we have established that the story is brilliant, but what about the romance? Well, it's one of the best, most touching romantic stories I have ever encountered and the OTP romance could not have resonated with me any more. (and naturally the romantic plots are also super cleverly written, paced & sequenced) There is some fluff, but this is hard romance for the sentimental soul.
As for love triangles? I'm not going to spoil that, but triangle haters can safely watch this.

The three lead actors did a phenomenal job. They had good chemistry with each other & they were pretty much perfectly cast for their roles.

The cinematography is low key perfection. It's not as exaggeratedly beautiful as modern kdramas, cdramas usually are, however it's the perfect fit for this show.

And finally we arrived at the OST. Objectively speaking the OST is just as repetitive as in Something in the Rain, but I guess Wu Bai's Last Dance is ehm a WEE BIT better than "Stand by Your Man". I think I've heard it like 40-50 times before the end credits rolled, but I still felt goosebumps even in the final episode. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AqfOhesl5U piano cover on Youtube, if someone is interested, though it's not as good when FL plays it on the Piano in the show) Devoted by X-Ray Dog is also a very impressive piece, though I think I've heard it before, still it worked great in this drama.
Of course the other songs are supremely good as well, though Goblin is certainly a bit better overall in this regard. (Goblin has like 10 top tier songs and the OST Album is a very coherent listening experience, versus the 3 in Some day or One Day)


Taiwanese dramas are typically horrible. I tried to watch quite a few actually, but I just couldn't get past the first 2-3 episodes trying to pick the ones recommended by community here on MDL. Some Day or One Day is the second one I managed to finish. (the other one is Last Romance & I'll probably try Rainless Love in a Godless Land soon) I'm strongly suspecting that this drama is by far the best one the Taiwanese entertainment industry has ever produced. Comparing it to Goblin, which I think is the best kdrama ever made, it holds up extremely well. It's incredible how the people that typically make 2005 kdrama era garbage could make something like this. It's like going from using aqueducts to colonizing Mars.

Just to say some negatives too. Some of the supporting actors are a hit or miss, Xie Zhi Qi?! Also there is only one thing in the drama that could've used some CG, namely the dream prison. It felt a bit immersion breaking to see the big pixels projected onto FL's face and the whole construction reminded me of a cheap hobo shack. It would have taken very little effort to fix this & admittedly in the final episodes they've improved on this a little. (by little effort, I mean that I could have personally fixed this at the cost of $2 while being physically present on set, or alternatively I could have edited the footage myself in an afternoon, applying some selective blur here and there)

15/10. Will I just keep rewatching this until the end of my days? How do I move on from this?

Watch https://mydramalist.com/61297-someday-or-one-day-extra-scene for that little extra closure. I wanted way more than this, but it's still more than nothing.


edit:
The rewatch value is FAR lower than expected.

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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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