Reviews

WE HAVE BEEN ROBBED

This had SO. MUCH. POTENTIAL that it physically hurts. 😭

I kept sighing throughout the whole drama thinking about what this could’ve been if the FL wasn’t Liu Haocun. 💀 I mean i respect her decision but why do romance then. U know what, I blame the casting director

Because honestly? The chemistry was THERE. I loved the chemistry so much, but somehow the drama still felt… incomplete. Like we were one ingredient away from a five-star meal. 😭

And my man Wang Anyu?? CARRIED.
Those lovestruck eyes were doing overtime. Somebody give that man an award because he was WORKING. 🫠

Meanwhile, the FL was serving us one gorgeous poker face after another. 😭 She looked beautiful, yes, but I just couldn’t feel her character. I genuinely tried. I really, really did.

The dialogue was kinda weird at times too, but honestly, I could overlook it because the chemistry kept pulling me back in.

Casting: 8/10 — and I’m giving half of that score to Wang Anyu and his lovestruck eyes. 😂

Such a frustrating watch because you can SEE the potential. It could’ve been SO GOOD. 😭

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Just… weird

I felt so uncomfortable throughout the whole thing… I have two dogs and I kept looking at them and thinking: “These are my babies… It’s like they’re my own children”, which means that even if they showed up one day looking like Seo Kang Joon or Jung Hae In, I would still feel a MOTHERLY love towards them. So excuse me for finding the whole “dating your pet” concept extremely weird.

Milk and Uncle’s relationship was easier to digest because 1) Uncle didn’t know Milk was a cat in a human’s body; 2) he himself did not raise the damn cat. But Jung Woo and Choco? Nah, bro… That’s just not it.

The plot had potential if it’d gone in a different direction, like leaning more towards them helping Jung Woo find romantic love with someone else, as in playing cupid.

Acting was lacking too, Milk was probably the best out of the four, but still cringey.

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What's Wrong With the Nobi?

Watched December 5, 2024. I gave it a two that night and never moved off it. Only one drama I've ever seen has gone lower. I left it alone for a long time after that because enough time had passed, enough dramas had come and gone, and I wanted to know if I still hated this thing or if I'd simply been in a particularly foul mood that night. I've learned more since then, too. I notice the places where Neo-Confucian ideas creep into a story, get dressed up in modern clothes, and quietly start telling everyone where they belong. So I thought maybe I'd see something different this time. Maybe I'd been too harsh. I watched all sixteen episodes again.

The two stays. Consider it a rounding error in this drama's favor.

What's Wrong With Secretary Kim is one of those dramas where the premise becomes more offensive the longer I sit with it because the woman at the center of it is making one of the most reasonable decisions anybody could possibly make. She wants to quit her job. She wants a life that isn't built around somebody else's schedule, somebody else's family, somebody else's needs. That's it. That's the thing this drama spends sixteen episodes trying to defeat. The title asks what's wrong with Secretary Kim, when the more interesting question would have been what's wrong with everybody who refuses to let her leave.

Lee Young-joon makes me furious because the show keeps stripping away the context that makes his behavior so ugly and replacing it with expensive suits, pretty lighting and that smug little expression that apparently means I'm supposed to find him irresistible. He is her employer. He signs her paycheck, controls her working hours, controls her reference, controls the environment she has spent nine years surviving in, and then acts personally betrayed when she resigns. She tells him she wants to leave and he simply refuses to accept the answer. She tries to find another job and he interferes with the replacement process. She says no and he keeps pursuing her. There is no complicated mystery here. A woman is trying to leave her boss and her boss decides that her decision is something he gets to negotiate. The fact that he's rich and beautiful doesn't make that less disturbing. It just means the drama has the budget to make it look romantic.

And I hate the physicality of it. I hate the wrist grabbing, the blocking her path, the way he backs her into walls and desks and corners and uses his body to occupy the space she needs to move through. The camera keeps treating those moments like sexual tension, with soft music and close-ups and that breathless little pause dramas love when they're telling me two people are about to kiss. I'm sitting there thinking, why is he still standing there? Move. She is trying to get past you. This is not chemistry to me. It's a man taking advantage of the fact that he is physically bigger and socially more powerful than the woman who is trying to tell him no, while the production desperately begs me to find it sexy.

Then there is his dependence on her, which might be the part I despise most because the show turns his inability to function without Mi-so into evidence of how deeply he loves her. He can't sleep properly, he can't organize himself, he can't manage his own life, and apparently this is supposed to be adorable because it proves how important she is to him. No. It proves that he spent nine years making another human being responsible for his existence. He has built his entire life around her labor and then acts devastated when she finally decides she wants some of that life back for herself. It's emotional blackmail dressed up as vulnerability. Stay because I can't function without you. Stay because I'll fall apart if you leave. Stay because you'll feel guilty watching me suffer. And the drama looks at this enormous adult man making his employee responsible for his emotional stability and goes, isn't love beautiful?

It gets even worse when I think about what those nine years actually mean for Mi-so. She wasn't starting from some position of freedom when she took that job. She was already carrying her father's debts and the needs of her family, already accustomed to putting herself second, already living a life where being useful to other people was treated as her responsibility. She has spent her entire adulthood being needed. Her father needs something. Her sisters need something. Her boss needs everything. And then the romance comes along and tells her that the solution to spending her life orbiting other people is to find a man worth orbiting. Father, boss, husband. It's a relay race and she's the baton. Everybody celebrates when the final handoff happens because apparently she has finally found the correct person to belong to.

And none of that structure is an accident, which is the part that actually makes me want to scream. Confucian doctrine gave women three obediences. Her father before marriage, her husband during it, her son in widowhood. Cradle to grave she belonged to somebody, and her autonomy was never hers to hold, it was passed between men like property changing hands. Now look at Mi-so's life and tell me what's different. Father, employer, husband. The badge is corporate and the tower is in Gangnam and the script is four hundred years old. This drama isn't inventing a romance. It's larping Joseon in tailored suits with a good colorist and hoping nobody clocks the shape of it. I clocked it. It's the same arrangement, just better lit.

A Joseon father handed his daughter a silver knife and called it protection, and everybody understood what it actually meant, which was die before you're dishonored. Young-joon hands Mi-so a bag. I'm aware one of those objects kills you and the other doesn't. The message underneath them is the same message. Your worth is fragile, your worth is conditional, your worth is somebody else's to assess, and here is the beautiful object that proves you've accepted the terms. The knife made the arrangement obvious. The bag makes it feel like being loved.

That's the whole trick, and it works on millions of people. The drama makes the cage look like the way out. Mi-so is exhausted, she's carrying debts that were never hers, she has no time and no life and no room to move, and the story offers her exactly one exit from all of it, which is a bigger and better decorated version of the same room. She's allowed to be competent. She's allowed to be the most capable person in the building. She just has to be capable at him, permanently, and hand the whole thing over to a man's emotional needs before the credits roll. That's not liberation with a romance attached. That's the oldest confinement there is, restaged with money, and the show has the nerve to film her walking into it in a white dress like she chose it freely. So I guess servitude is fine as long as LV made the uniform and Hermès made the collar and leash.

That's why the gifts bother me too. The show keeps presenting all the expensive things Young-joon gives her as evidence that he appreciates her, as though bags and clothes and access to his luxurious world somehow compensate for nine years of labor. He doesn't give her freedom. He doesn't give her time back. He doesn't give her the years she spent organizing his life. He gives her things. That's not the same thing. Those gifts feel less like generosity the longer I look at them and more like a leash with a very expensive clasp. The cage gets prettier. The bars get more expensive. The cage is still there.

And then the kidnapping storyline comes along and somehow manages to make an already infuriating drama even more unbearable because Mi-so's own trauma becomes another thing other people control for her. She was the child in that room. It happened to her body and her mind, and yet her memory becomes something the adults around her can suppress, debate, carry, write about and eventually reveal when they decide the timing is right. One brother turns the experience into a book. The other carries the memory for years. The family buries the truth. Young-joon stands beside her with information about her own past that she doesn't have. Everyone has a piece of her history except the person whose history it actually is. Then the drama hands the truth back to her like a romantic revelation and expects me to be grateful for the emotional timing. I'm not. I'm furious. Even her trauma gets processed through other people's decisions before it is allowed to belong to her.

Park Min-young is the one reason I can still see Mi-so underneath all of this. I am biased and I don't care. She is doing an enormous amount of work to make this woman feel like she exists beyond whatever the plot currently needs her to do. There are moments where Mi-so is supposed to be happy and I can still see the calculation in her face, the exhaustion, the little flashes of someone who has spent years being competent because everybody around her expects her to be. Park Min-young gives her an interior life that the script keeps trying to confiscate. That's what makes watching the drama so frustrating. I can see the woman. The writing keeps seeing the assistant. Then it sees the girlfriend. Then the fiancée. Then the wife. Every time Mi-so starts becoming her own person, the story finds another relationship for her to disappear into.

And then we get the ending, which is where the whole thing finally becomes insane. She quits because she wants a life of her own, and she ends up marrying the man whose life she has spent nine years managing. She still organizes his day. She still takes care of him. She still fixes his tie. She still revolves around his needs. The difference is that now she doesn't have a salary, a job title or an end of shift. The employment contract was at least a contract. What replaces it works more like a nobi munseo, the paper that used to certify a person as somebody's property, except this version gets signed in front of flowers while everybody cries about how beautiful it is. Marriage is where the show quietly deletes the paycheck and calls it happily ever after. I am supposed to look at this woman who spent the entire drama saying she wanted to experience life outside of service and feel moved because she has voluntarily made her service permanent. She didn't escape the job. She married the boss.

That's why I hate this drama as much as I do. It's not simply that I dislike Young-joon or that I think the romance is badly handled. I hate the fundamental argument the story keeps making about Mi-so. She says she wants to leave and the narrative treats that desire as something that needs to be corrected. She wants independence, so the plot gives her romance. She wants her own identity, so the plot gives her a husband. She wants to stop spending her life taking care of somebody else, so the plot gives her somebody else to take care of forever. The show keeps calling the thing she wants a misunderstanding while presenting the thing she is trying to escape as her destiny. And yes, it's a romcom. I'm aware. That's the packaging, not an alibi. A story doesn't stop arguing what it's arguing because the lighting is warm and everybody in it is beautiful. Sixteen hours is a long time to spend saying something, and this one said it very clearly.

Nothing is wrong with Secretary Kim. That's the fucking joke. She was the only person in this entire production who knew exactly what she wanted. She wanted to go home. The drama just couldn't stand the idea that home might be somewhere Lee Young-joon wasn't. So it spent sixteen episodes dragging her back toward him, dressing the cage up in romance, throwing confetti over it and calling the result freedom. Park Min-young fought like hell to make Mi-so feel like a person inside that story. I could see her fighting. I could see the person underneath it. And I could see the script winning anyway.

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WHEN LOVE BECOMES A PUNISHMENT

OVERALL IMPRESSION🌟
A devastating tragedy about love, revenge, guilt, and grief, where every attempt to punish another person causes even greater emotional destruction. This is not a comforting romance; it is a painful story about irreversible choices and consequences that cannot be erased by regret or apologies.

WHAT I LIKED💖
• The drama presents both leads’ suffering so powerfully that I could feel their pain, even when I strongly disagreed with their choices.
• The ML’s emotional conflict is compelling: loving the FL feels like betraying his dead family, yet taking revenge on her also destroys the woman he loves and gradually ruins him.
• The FL shows remarkable courage and determination despite being punished for actions beyond her control.
• Even at her lowest, she continues searching for a way to survive rather than allowing hatred to consume everything within her.
• I appreciated that the story shows how people respond differently to grief—some become destructive, while others retreat inward and slowly lose themselves.
• The eventual payback against those who mistreated the FL provided a small amount of satisfaction within an otherwise heartbreaking story.

WHAT I DISLIKED⚠️
• The ML’s treatment of the FL is cruel, abusive, and extremely difficult to watch.
• Although his grief explains his broken state of mind, it does not excuse his actions or entitle him to forgiveness.
• The FL suffers for her parents’ choices even though she cannot undo the past or restore the lives that were lost.
• The SFL is soulless and repeatedly manipulates the ML’s grief to intensify the hatred between the leads.
• So many terrible decisions are made that the emotional damage eventually feels impossible to repair.
• The drama contains prolonged emotional torment, revenge, family deaths, suicide-related themes, and abuse, making it unsuitable for viewers seeking a gentle romance.

PRODUCTION AND PERFORMANCES🎭
• This must have been one of the most emotionally difficult dramas for the actors to perform.
• Fang Zheng Nan and Cheng Lin Miao portray their tortured characters with extraordinary conviction and emotional intensity.
• Their performances made me feel anger, sorrow, compassion, and frustration, often simultaneously.
• The writing is powerful because it allows viewers to understand the characters’ pain without demanding that we forgive their harmful choices.

FINAL THOUGHTS💭
I am such a softy because I could feel both leads’ suffering, even while knowing that love cannot erase the consequences of their actions. This drama left me in tears and stayed with me long after it ended.
I recommend it, but be warned: it is emotionally overwhelming, heartbreaking, and almost impossible to watch without feeling something.

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A beautiful and meaningful watch. Highly recommended!

This drama is such a beautiful mix of emotions—heartbreaking, funny, heartwarming, and ultimately hopeful. I really loved the story of Kang-ho and his mother because it shows that even when love gets complicated and mistakes are made, there is always a chance for healing and forgiveness.

Lee Do-hyun and Ra Mi-ran were absolutely amazing. Their mother-son relationship felt so real, and their performances made the emotional moments hit even harder. I also loved the village characters because they brought so much warmth and humor to the story.

What I loved most is the message about second chances, family, forgiveness, and finding happiness after painful experiences.
Definitely one of those K-dramas that makes you laugh, cry, and appreciate the people you love.

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A confusing mix of genres executed poorly . . . a real disappointment given an interesting premise

First, some positives. Our prosecutor Eun Sae is bold, upbeat and successful city woman, someone with a Plan A, B and C. Her personality preserved post amnesia was really fun. She had a lot of initial skepticism on the village/countryside fantasy life Tae Ha is selling. This was all refreshing and a nice change in a female lead. Tae Ha playing a fiercely protective gangster trying to leave the lifestyle, I'll always take a guy sacrificing for a girl in a plot.

And then it all crashed and burned, Eun Sae loses all of her fire, and becomes wide eyed and guileless with no sense of self preservation. Tae Ha's ridiculous plan to save her gets more and more ridiculous. And Google not existing but social media existing was a hard pill to swallow about the realities of this world. It was hard to continue to buy in.

I was still watching for some reason, I think because how it would all resolve with the amnesia, and the corruption, is an intriguing mystery. But, then they had to devote more and more plot to San Gil, the psychotic man with 9 lives,. I really don't need some 30-50% of screen time to be devoted to torture scenes, and wild maniacal laughter, and yet, that's where this drama decides to go.

Also, and this is a bit petty, but absolutely true, they tried to shoot the action scenes cinematically with interesting music choices, angles, lighting, but it didn't really gel for me, and definitely fell short of the action scenes in say Agent Kim Reactivated.

I'm dropping, and I recommend skipping. It absolutely was not paying off to stick with it.

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This was almost perfect!

As a woman who would be called a dolsingnye (divorced woman), a unnie/noona (older sister), and soon an Ajumeoni this was ALMOST the perfect romanctic drama.

I loved the role reversal of CEO and Secretary. The supporting cast was awesome as were the child actors - Byeol CARRIED this show. I binged the first 9 episodes, I JUST couldn’t stop watching.

But I think a lot of the oxygen was sucked out the show when the corporate drama started to take center stage. I know it was a plot device to move the lead’s relationship forward and serve as a catalyst for the side characters’s journey but it wasn’t enjoyable. The main female villain was annoying and I usually fast forwarded through her screen time. I would have preferred more time with the office cast and having the corporate warfare happen more in the background.

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Boring!!! And bad acting...

This was really bad!! First of all it was extremely boring. The story was boring and the way the actors delivered it was also boring. There were some sound problems. The visuals were good.
The OST song was good and the music used during the drama was ok.
The way of advertising products was bad, just random showing a still city view with an advertising sign..
The production failed so much in this drama.

Most actors didn't do very well, they all could use a lot more acting lessons..
Folk and Best were the two best actors, but they also could use some more acting lessons.
The mains had no chemistry, the little chemistry that was seen was created by Folk.
At least they had good kisses.

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Unassuming at first but heartfelt at its core.

First off, personally I wouldn't have minded longer episodes to flesh out the law cases more. The more that was uncovered, the more intrigued I got however, it was quick to be resolved. That said, I wasn't fully put off per say.

There was a case - the lesbian couple where one them ended up marrying a man - that wasn't resolved, or rather hadn't ended in the optimistic way. It's quite telling of the Japanese legal climate and societal expectations for queer people in the country (that I'm sure also resonates universally too). This is only one example but through the trivials of the cases explored, the series leaves some key pointers on relationships and family.
With it's closeness to reality, I do sincerely hope these points are taken away and make a difference on opinions and legislation of the matter.

But back to the plot, the last arc was the one that touched me the most. Probably due to the sheer vulnerability that was displayed (even if it wasn't for long). Hajime had the hardships of his grief but got back to his feet with his sisters wish and Anna's safety/wellbeing on the line. Anna's father wasn't painted as a black-and-white antagonist but a human who conceded to the fact that he'd overlooked the impact his faults and actions had on Anna. Oh and little Anna, what a star she was. Little comments of wit throughout and a heartbreaking performance that had me tearing up near the end. Props to her and everyone in the cast.

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Quiet, unhurried cinema, which at first seems like a simple story about childhood. But it's a deceptive impression. On the surface - loneliness, class differences, fragility of friendship: all this is visible at once, and this is important. But the real meaning of the film is revealed only in the finale - and is voiced by its youngest character.

His words are simple and therefore striking: in childhood there is no time for protracted grievances and endless conflicts. We quarreled, fought - and keep playing. Don't hide malice, don't complicate life for yourself or someone else. Childhood is one, and to waste it on enmity means to miss what you can't get back.

The line of father and son works here not as a parallel plot branch, but as a warning. It shows what the habit of not letting go, saving, keeping silent leads to - and how this habit cripples relationships through generations. It's not about childhood or adulthood: inability to live conflicts destroys equally.

That's why the message of the film cannot be called childish. It's universal. The director does not read moral teachings, does not give answers - she simply shows two ways: one, along which a small child walks, and the other, along which adults follow. And the difference between them is not in age, but in the ability to let go.

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The drama got off to a fantastic and highly exciting start

The episodes from 9 to 10 are thoroughly enjoyable.

However, by the tenth episode, all interest in the drama vanishes—because of the incredibly annoying female lead. Never in my life have I been as disappointed by a drama as I was with this one—specifically, the episodes following the ninth. The male lead’s performance was extraordinary—truly beyond words—but the female lead’s acting felt annoying and over-the-top in places. I managed to overlook these issues and enjoy the show, but from the ninth episode onward, it became so toxic that I just wanted it to end; I certainly never expected such a terrible conclusion—this could have been a masterpiece. There is one thing I simply couldn't grasp: the girl went to such great lengths—learning the language and sign language—to express her love for Mainland, yet she ended up sleeping with her own friend over a trivial misunderstanding—a situation where the fault was entirely her own.She realized his mistake the next morning when his friend mentioned that Sakaki had stopped by and said there had been a misunderstanding between them; she understood it easily then, even though she hadn't grasped it the night before—despite Sakaki’s repeated attempts to explain it to her.

I didn't expect her to be quite that immature. Honestly, the ending completely ruined the mood for me. However, regarding the casting—it was good overall; I enjoyed the songs, and the male lead was outstanding.


I really loved everything about the 1995 setting—the fashion, the romance, and the ways people communicated back then. Amidst the modernity of today, this series brings a refreshing touch of nostalgia to the conventional drama genre.

I feel it is worth watching at least once, though I didn't find it rewatchable—and the reason for that is simply the drama's ending.

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