Laila2026

I went in as a Kim Young-kwang fan, hyped for his rom-com return. I didn't need a masterpiece. I needed one reason to hit "next episode." I got zero.

The premise is a punchline. A man with a dying phone battery for a heart meets a woman who's essentially a human taser — and that's the whole show. Ten episodes of two people standing near each other so his heart keeps charging. That's the romance. Proximity.

The writing is the real villain here — not the actors. The director's actual instruction was: don't freshen it up, lean into the clichés. Kim Young-kwang wanted to put a different spin on things when he first read the script. They told him no. He admitted the sappy lines embarrassed him — "sometimes when I see myself doing them, I just want to close my eyes" — and got through it by believing 100% in the world of the show. Watching it back, he said his face got hot: "Did I really act like that?" On set, after the scene where he plays a bodyguard in Bo-bae's imagination, he was so embarrassed the second the director called "cut" that he playfully tossed Chae Soo-bin over his shoulder just to shake it off. That's not an actor failing a scene. That's an actor's instincts telling him the truth about the scene, in real time. When the actors are working harder than the script, the script is the problem.

I'd actually read the web novel before the show aired. It was so bland I couldn't even finish it — thin characters, thinner plot. But adaptations can elevate source material, so I held out hope the writers would do something with it. They didn't. If anything, they filmed the blandness and added matching headbands.

And then, instead of exploring the one fun idea they had — the friction of that 3-month charging contract — the writers panic and throw in everything else. A kidnapping. Corporate inheritance murder attempts. Blackmail. A forced arranged marriage. By the halfway mark the premise is buried under a kitchen sink of generic K-drama tropes, a Frankenstein's monster of a script stitched together from other, better shows. By trying to be a sci-fi fantasy, a corporate thriller, and a slapstick comedy all at once, it succeeds at absolutely nothing.

And the show's idea of how a romance writer learns is insulting to writers. Bo-bae doesn't need imagination, apparently; she needs field trips. She charges his heart, and in exchange he takes her through a dating bucket list — river walk, amusement park, haunted house — as if romance were a set of activities to be collected. But some of the greatest romances ever written came from women who were not out dating: Austen and the Brontës both wrote from narrow, homebound lives and still understood longing better than this show understands a coffee date. Romance is not field research. A contracted man can walk beside you by the river; he cannot manufacture the second your heart lurches because he might reach for your hand. A bucket list teaches what couples do. It cannot teach what lovers feel.

What's left is a teenager's romance wearing two grown adults like a costume. The dates read like a school field trip. The amusement park. The haunted house — the oldest trick in the book, a dark room whose only job is to give her an excuse to cling to him. A show that trusted its writing would give these two a conversation. This one gives them rides and jump-scares. Exaggerated giggling — from Kim Young-kwang, a man nearing 40, playing a CEO. Again and again.

Nothing wrong with adults being goofy. Goofy is a flavor, not the whole meal. Here the juvenile behavior is the romance, and it bored me out of my mind.

This is the show's fatal flaw, and it's a casting-and-writing flaw, not an acting one: a towering, mature adult man written to behave like an immature, spoiled teenager in love. Ho-rang has the wit and emotional intelligence of a toddler in a boardroom — tantrums, giggles, sleepover energy. Cast a boyish actor in his early 20s in that part and the audience could almost forgive it — a 21-year-old is still growing up; tantrums and amusement park dates are age-appropriate mistakes. Watch a mature man nearing 40 do it and it doesn't read as endearing growth. It reads as stunted. It breaks the romance at its root, too: Bo-bae is written as smart and hardworking, so why would she fall for a man-child who looks old enough to know better? The show never answers that. It just assumes the height will do it.

You can see the mismatch on screen. He looked like a fish out of water — a 190 cm (6'3") fish, splashing around in a kiddie pool, doing his best. Because of his age and the way the character was written, it literally looked like he was uncomfortable with it, and it showed.

And here's the part that makes it worse, not better: lightness is what he signed up for — this script is what they handed him. He'd spent years playing villains and dark, heavy roles — Somebody, Trigger — and said those years had left him quieter, closing off emotionally. He took this show because he needed brightness in his life; he wanted to laugh again, and he said afterwards that he felt recharged by it. I believe him — and it's exactly why the writing matters. A man came to a rom-com to recharge, his word, and light and airy was right there. This isn't light, it's infantile. The production chased a famous name and a big height gap without once asking whether a mature man could pull off a toddler-brained script. He warmed to it by the end — that's what a pro does — but warming to a role isn't the same as the role suiting him. He spent ten episodes fighting his own casting. As it is, the contrast didn't give chemistry. It gave embarrassment — his, and mine for him.

He isn't too old for rom-com. This rom-com was too young for him.

And the toddler-core doesn't stop at the writing. It is the show's idea of romance. The headband infestation: scene after scene of ridiculous headbands — plastic baubles, flower crowns, party hats. The airport reunion, where two grown adults meet and dance and pat hands like toddlers playing pat-a-cake. Matching headbands — written for a 40-year-old CEO. I have never seen that in any drama, and I have seen a lot of dramas. And the fan posts calling the story "great" and the chemistry "amazing" keep sharing those exact photos as the proof. If your evidence of grown-up romance is two adults dressed for a kindergarten birthday party, you've made my point for me.

And they didn't just miss the rom — they missed the com too. Ten episodes, and I counted two chuckles and one real laugh. The laugh came from the family scenes, not the couple. For a romantic comedy, that's a structural failure.

Look at how the show gets its laughs when it tries. The plane toilet scene: two grown adults shoved into a cramped airplane bathroom because the writers couldn't figure out a cleverer way to force physical contact, so they locked them in a lavatory. It humiliates the tycoon — a 190 cm (6'3") corporate executive fumbling in a toilet stall — and calls that comedy. Or the finale, where they're reunited, she feels a tiny shock, and plays it off with "it's just static electricity" — a line the writers clearly thought was a zinger. It isn't earned, it isn't witty, it's an escape hatch, and it only lands at all because Kim Young-kwang's cute smile does the writing's job for it. The show doesn't know how to write a joke. It only knows how to write a posture.

The chemistry? About as exciting as a wilted celery stick. Not one volt of tension — ironic, given the premise. Not one moment of waiting for them to get closer.

What the show sells instead is the illusion of chemistry. Instead of building tension through witty banter, shared values, or earned emotional growth, it leans on one visual gimmick: look how big he is next to her. That's not chemistry. That's size.

Then Chae Soo-bin called the height gap "size chemistry" in an interview and rated their chemistry 100 out of 10. That sums up the whole disconnect: the thing they think is the selling point is the thing that's sinking it. A good 90 of those points are just the height gap. And if contrast in size is what matters, why stop here? Pair him with a dwarf and her with a 196 cm (6'5") basketball player turned actor — by that logic, the chemistry should be off the charts. He's 190 cm (6'3") of broad-shouldered grown man; she's styled so tiny and youthful beside him that the romantic framing starts working against itself. In the kissing scenes it looks like he's making out with a preteen. Chae Soo-bin is obviously a grown woman — I'm talking about what the production puts on screen. Her profiles list her at 167 cm (5'6"), but that number doesn't survive contact with the screen — next to him she reads all tiny frame, which only widens the gap. And it isn't only the tape measure. She has a tiny face and a narrow, delicate frame; he is a former runway model, broad-shouldered and big-jawed. Put them in a tight two-shot and his face and shoulders swamp hers, so the eye reads her as far smaller than the listed number. The production doesn't correct for that — it keeps shooting down at her from his eyeline and dresses her soft and oversized against his tailored suits. Instead of selling me on two adults who desire each other, the visual language keeps emphasizing how disproportionately large he looks beside her. She could use his shoulder as an armrest. And the camera has to strain for it — awkward angles, strained necks, just to make basic eye contact look romantic. It doesn't. It looks uncomfortable.

And it's not just my pickiness — the research backs this up. Partners in real life tend to match each other in height, and extreme height gaps show up less often than random chance would predict. The average real-world couple's gap is about 13–15 cm (5–6 inches); gaps of 30 cm or more (12+ inches) are genuinely rare — around 5% of couples. We're wired to read a huge size mismatch as unusual, not romantic. So when a drama sells the gap itself as the chemistry, it's fighting against what audiences instinctively buy as a believable couple.

And the styling department deserves its own scolding. When they gave her a makeover, they could have dressed her like a grown woman — mature dresses, clean lines, something that says adult. Instead they stuck a big bow in her hair and dressed her like a little girl. The wardrobe didn't just fail to fix the visual mismatch; it styled the childishness right into her.

To be fair to Chae Soo-bin: she suited the character. Na Bo-bae needed sunny, quirky, a little clumsy — that's her lane, and she played it well. The problem was never her performance. It was the pairing — they just looked awful together — and a script with no magic in it. Even good actors can't spark with nothing to work with and no believable connection to play. And the pacing gives them nothing to build with anyway: at 10 episodes, the show sprints from transaction to deep, reality-altering devotion so fast it feels synthetic. A romance needs room to breathe. This one never gets any.

And we've seen the grown-up version done right. Because This Is My First Life: two adults who actually talk to each other — awkward, honest, funny, real. It takes this show's own contract-relationship trope and treats it with maturity. Call It Love: the same Kim Young-kwang, handed restrained, wounded, adult material — and he was superb in it. That's the proof. Hand him a grown man to play and he delivers. Hand him a man-child costume and he flounders in it, visibly. Even The Secret Life of My Secretary, fluffier by a mile, gave us two people with push and pull, teasing and tension.

I love light and airy — The Holiday is one of my favorite films. But light still needs substance, and for me that substance is dialogue. Give me two adults who actually enjoy talking to each other — teasing, witty, a little dangerous, that slow-dawning realization that conversation has become something else. Give me the verbal sparring of Something's Gotta Give or Two Weeks Notice: two sharp adults who can actually talk. This show's idea of flirting is matching headbands. This show gave us... proximity charging.

Yes, it was a hit anyway. It's climbed to number 2 on Netflix's global non-English chart, top 10 in 64 countries, 6.4 million views in its second week. And honestly? I'm glad. I'm especially glad for Kim Young-kwang — a highly underrated actor who deserves far more recognition for how completely he moulds himself into whatever character he's handed: villain, wounded romantic, or, yes, even this. His talent was never the question. If he takes one thing from this review, let it be this: I disliked the show, and I'm happy for him. I want what's best for him — that's what you wish for any actor who works this hard to entertain us: every success going, and better material to spend it on. If this hit buys him the clout to choose that material next time, it will almost have been worth it. His next rom-com, The Queen of Taming, he describes as a completely different flavor — a dangerous, unstable man who needs holding onto before he goes astray. That, at least, sounds like a grown man. The hard part, as a viewer, is that success also brings more of the same: the industry will read No. 2 in 64 countries as proof the formula works, and scripts just like this one will follow. I won't blame him for that — an actor works with what people want, not just what's offered, and people clearly want this. But I don't think I could stomach another one like it. Unfortunately, this one just isn't my cup of tea — and I'll be careful next time not to watch a similar show that leaves me more drained than the male lead's heart battery. But hit doesn't mean good — Boys Over Flowers and Emily in Paris proved that long ago. This is junk food media: designed for quick dopamine loops through superficial visual contrast and rapid-fire tropes, effortless to binge, built for clips — the headbands, the height gap, the airport reunion all translate perfectly into viral cute moments. Once a show gives people characters to obsess over, the writing gets a free pass.

And maybe that's the whole story: this show was never going to cater to viewers like me — and that's because of my expectations, not in spite of them. I come to a rom-com expecting adults who actually talk to each other: teasing, sparring, wit with teeth, romance built in dialogue, substance under the light. This show has nothing for that viewer, because that's not what it's built from. It's built from moments designed to survive being clipped, dubbed, and scrolled past: the headbands, the height gap, the airport reunion. Cute travels without subtitles. Banter doesn't. So it's built to travel, not to talk. If the talk is what you came for, you were never the customer. The algorithm was.

An influencer friend put it this way: K-dramas have been so weak lately that this felt like a breath of fresh air. Light, breezy, no substance required — everything wrapped up in a neat little parcel. And I understand the appeal. Some people accept that willingly. I can't. I expect substance from a writer — real meat on the bone. I've always been this way. Back when I watched Indian dramas, I was critical of the things I didn't agree with. I got a lot of backlash for it — but I also met people who were thankful someone had said it out loud, which surprised me. Until you speak up, you don't realize you're not alone — and it's been the same with Take Charge of My Heart. There are people out there who think the same. That's what this is: a demand for better.

People keep calling it cute. Fine — cute was the problem. I wanted two adults falling in love and got a sticker book. Do yourself a favor and leave this battery completely dead.

★★ — one for his face, one for showing up.