Gern

This appears to have disappeared from Netflix. Any idea where it can be found now?

My general impression of Miss Truth is that it’s a pretty good overall story hampered by a problematic love story. The crimes, despite often verging on the “modern side” and seeming a little too bizarre and overly complex for the era, were fun, outlandish, and satisfying. They kept the show compelling and entertaining despite it suffering from self-inflicted wounds in the romance department.

The problem with the romantic story was the desire to paint the protagonist as a woman who truly falls in love with two different men. On its own, that isn’t necessarily fatal, but it tried to build the perception she might be in love with both guys at the same time and maintain that illusion almost to the end of the story. This caused two problems. The first was that it became increasingly difficult feel as of the woman’s affections for either man were real as she appeared to flip-flop between who she loved.

The second was that the writer and director could never allow a strong connection and love to form with either male lead. If they did, it would undermine the will she/won’t suspense. Even worse, it would cause the audience to lose sympathy for the woman, and, with it, interest in who she loved. After all, if there were true love and commitment to two men at the same time, she’d be seen as a cheater who betrayed the trust and love of both of men. Even as it is, anyone who has had a boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife cheat on them and knows how that really feels may find the romance in this story deeply unsettling.

So the show delivered a love story with no chemistry, no connection, and no real feeling almost to the final episodes. In short we got a romantic story with no real romance until the end, by which time I’d lost most of my interest in who she ends up with. If they’d have abandoned the idea of keeping the audience guessing as to what the woman was thinking and feeling and portrayed it as a mistake for her to invest her heart in the SML, it would have freed the actress to play each romance with much greater depth, emotion and drama. As it was, we got a pretty good mystery story where, until the final episodes, there was no real and compelling romance.

It’s true. It’s forgivable to women because it’s a woman hanging out with two brothers. It wouldn’t be if it were a man hanging out with two sisters. The kind of close relationship she has with both brothers would seem entirely different if it were a guy hanging out and having a blast with one sister while spending most of his time with the other. The problem comes when reversing the roles causes all that romance to evaporate. I’m perfectly fine with the two brothers pursuing her. What makes it not okay is how close she is with two men at the same time and how unaware she is of the signals she is sending them both. Boundaries are the key. If she maintains a certain distance from one of them then I’m all on board.

If there were a phrase I’d use to describe this show it would be “too far.” It didn’t really do anything we haven’t seen in other shows, but there comes a point when the unbelievability goes so far for the sake of drama that it becomes clear it is only doing it to create drama. When that happened I often found myself saying “come on, he/she isn’t making sense. They are only doing this to pile on the drama.”

This starts with the premise. There’s nothing inherently wrong with characters acting in self contradictory ways. A doctor whose out for revenge isn’t a bad concept. But our female lead became so bloodthirsty in her quest for revenge that it tortured the bounds of credibility.

Characters would suddenly change their personality, as if it was a switch for the director to turn on and off as the need for drama dictated. Sullen, broody and mean one minute, then chatty and playful the next. Or they’d turn on a dime as if murderous hate and desperate passion were possible for the same person at the same time. Lines like “you mean nothing to me now,” and “from now on you and I have nothing to do with each other,” are followed shortly after by lines like “I wouldn’t have been so cruel if I knew he was dying.”

Anger over things that didn’t make sense often occurred like “I’m never seeing you again because, during my kidnapping, you didn’t tell me your plan to defeat my kidnapper.” Or “I lied to you by posing as a man for months and making you crazy miserable in the process but how dare you fool me for a few hours and keep me in the dark.”

Again, it wasn’t anything new, but this show seemed determined to repeatedly push it beyond the point that allowed for suspension of disbelief. The actors did their best, but the show could have toned it down a bit in its attempts to conjure drama out of unbelievably inconsistent behavior.

Did you forget the game of truth or dare where the ML says his first kiss was 91 hours ago (with the FL who initiated it) then the FL refuses to answer the same question because it would reveal she leaned into a kissed from the SML since then. That might be just her changing her mind if not for the long and passionate kiss with the ML after she deliberately started dating the SML. All the ambivalence and intricate reasons don’t change the fact she was doing intimate things with two men at the same time while dating one of them. And it wasn’t an accident. It was deliberate. Not cool.

Yes definite cheating. She makes out with one guy while formally and quite deliberately dating another. Anyone who thinks that’s not cheating deserves to have a boyfriend or girlfriend do that to them.

I liked this pretty much all the way through, but it was sometimes as struggle. I felt like the contract between them wasn't spelled out very clearly. Then it seemed like it was made null and void, then magically came back. I didn't get that part, it was confusing. The dialog often seemed to be trying to hard to be clever, but came off cryptic and confusing, making it often hard to follow. My biggest niggle was the way the female lead acted at the very end. She seemed as if she wasn't all that committed to the relationship, like she wasn't sure she really wanted to be with him forever. Maybe they were trying to be different, but it just came off as her not caring whether she had a future with him or not.

I agree with you here. They went through such an ordeal to be together and in the end she didn't really seem all that committed to him. You marry someone because you can't imaging being without them. Her response to the idea of marriage made it seem like she could imagine life without him, like she wasn't willing to vow to stay with him through sickness and health, good times and bad times, until death do them part.

I had no sympathy for a guy who basically left his girlfriend hanging not even responding to a text for years. That is such a cruel way to break up. I get what you're saying, but the way he treated her broke some pretty serious rules of basic decency, he deserved to have those same rules broken for him. I don't think the other guy did anything wrong, given he did it to get her to give up on a guy who never came back into her life.

Expectations can easily shape the audiences response to something. The cast raised expectations to unrealistic levels. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't bad.

You do realize she's 32 and he's 35, right?

Late. We see signs she might like the ML in episode 19, but then, on multiple occasions, she’s back to ruining her chances with the ML because of the 2ML, leaving you wondering if she still is in love with the 2ML. There’s certainly no attempt to distance herself from the 2ML or to avoid misunderstanding of their relationship until the last four or five episodes. Until the last several episodes, she never seemed committed enough to him to go out of her way to win the ML over.

Hard to say because it was gradual. It didn’t seem like one moment, so it was part persistence on the ML part. If I has to choose one moment, it seemed like she “realized” she loved him after she’d betrayed the ML, gotten him flogged, forced the emperor to decree their divorce, and generally shot their relationship to pieces all for the SML. Once it seemed like she no longer had a chance with the ML she changed her mind.

In a way, your question gets at the fundamental problem with a “true” love triangle. She never really leaves the SML and goes to the ML. She rejected the SML first when she finds out the SML (the covert assassin who had killed dozens of people in front of her) had initially approached her as a part of a mission. In one of the most unbelievable scenes ever, she never even asks if his feelings for her now are real. She just switches off her love and walks away while he’s being killed.

Of course, that’s not the end because they had to keep the “will she”/“won’t she” going. Later, out of what looks like sympathy to the SML (the man she can’t trust,) she reveals details of a secret mission (that her wedding to the ML is a fake,) a little later she appears to outright betray the ML for the sake of the SML, and after that she treats the SML’s wounds when he’s hurt, even as she grows feelings for the ML.

This all goes back to the problem I mentioned at the start. To make the back and forth between the two men work, the writer and director had to make sure the actress never developed any real real chemistry with either actor. They couldn’t cultivate the impression she was destined to be with either man. If she ever went head over heels for one of them and we sensed full-on commitment, the minute she switched back to the other, we’d lose trust in her heart and give up caring who she likes. So we got thirty episodes with no real romance, because true love and commitment would ruin the tension between choosing the SML or the ML.

Yes, and after she rejected one man and chose the other saying he was the only one she had feelings for, it became difficult to become emotionally invested in her feelings for any other man. A voice in the back of my head kept saying: yeah yeah, I’ve heard it before. You said you loved this other guy and he loved you, and now I’m supposed to trust that this time your love is real?

I don’t mind that she loves the 2ML. What I mind is any man or woman changing who they are in love with (unless their first love remains unrequited.) once two people are together, if one of them changes who they are committed to, it serves as obvious evidence that their heart can’t be trusted and could change again after the finals credits roll. Once a lead commits to one person and they to them they can’t just change their mind without making every relationship no longer feel real.

There a reason to not like it. It demonstrates the woman’s heart can never be trusted and whoever she winds up with in the end could just be temporary because she can change her heart again.

I’m only half way, but I would leave out the “little bit” part. She fell for SML to the point of marrying him out of love and crying out for him to save her from the ML. If she later falls for the ML then she will have proven her heart is fickle and can’t be trusted. She will prove she can fall for a new man at any time. Which makes it impossible to believe any relationship with her has consistency and will last. When the FL can so easily fall in and out of love there can be no happy ending for anyone, because no relationship with her feels real.

We don’t disagree. I just never got the sense she should have ever given him any hope that she’d like him. And in the end, I thought it was a mistake to get together with someone she really didn’t like. I think we were supposed to cheer that his persistence paid off,, but it just seemed sad to me to get together with someone so indifferent to him.

This was a pretty good show that did an admirable job of walking a line between complete silliness and strong drama. All the characters were different, fun, and played brilliantly. It must be hard to pull off the level of lunacy all the characters went through and still make the real feelings work. However it suffered from one self l-inflicted wound I found hard to get past.

Most of the angst in the show stemmed from the female leads promise to and memory of her childhood love. The worst episode came late in the story when the Young Lord entered the picture. At first, for no apparent reason, the female lead found the male lead’s insecurity and jealousy highly annoying to the point of being callous to him, treating him no different than the new stranger. Then she ghosted the male lead altogether, spending her days laughing and talking with the Young Lord, never letting the male lead see her, or even giving the distress she was causing him the slightest passing thought. It left a bad taste in my mouth and clarified a troubling aspect of the narrative. It wasn’t just that she didn’t love the male lead. It was as if he were less than a friend and his feelings utterly irrelevant to her.

This never got addressed, leaving me questioning her love for the male lead right up until the final credits rolled. Instead the whole episode got swept under the rug by a series of really well done revelations. At some point, I wanted the male lead to tell her “I don’t believe you really care about me, the person in front of you. You only love this idea of a childhood friend.” Or , I wanted the female lead to questioned herself. “How can I tell myself I love this man when I agreed to leave him for a different man without giving the pain it would cause him a second thought.”

Even in the fading minutes of the show the female lead seemed extremely emotional over the wounded Young Lord, while totally unconcerned about the stab wounds and arrow sticking out of the male lead’s chest. What these episode made apparent, throughout the course of the show, was that the person she remembered from her childhood no longer existed, if they ever did. So this whole issue of who does she really love, this mythical memory from the past or the present man in front of her never got resolved when it should have been a massive stumbling block for thier entire relationship. I wasn’t looking for some last grand moment of regret and drama. Just a coming to terms with who and what she really loved, and a recognition of the hurt and turmoil her indecision had caused. Absent that, I enjoyed the show, but left it certain he loved her with all his heart, but unsure if she really knew or even gave a rip about real person the male lead had become.