Park Min

huh.....

This is the type of revenge story were the villain commit double digits crimes yet they don't get a worthy punishment after 100 episodes pain. The drama was okay for the first half but unfortunately the second half was doomed to fail because everything became inside a corporate setting. I yearn for the day drama writers realize that 2 parties fighting each other inside a company is boring as fuck! About 40-50 episodes were wasted on these random fights. The drama initially included the kids heavily but shortly after they were completely dropped to never be seen again on screen until the last scene. Anyway, only the 1st half was watchable.

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Hmmm...

The drama is definitely unique. The director went all out with his own style. Not necessarily objectively good nor bad just different. I personally enjoyed what it tried to do. The quirky direction is the drama's biggest highlight. There were no eavesdrop where characters happen to stumble upon a secret, instead there are very long extended cut open dialogue scenes with no interruption which makes all the difference to see the characters actually talk. Some episodes may consist of only two scenes for this exact reason. The drama doesn't shy away from throwing experimental scenes that are completely unrelated to the story for fun. Although some scenes are just too bizarre like that one scene where an old lady reminiscing a young guy's body after the funeral. These scenes will probably make most of the characters seem insensitive. Then there's ep79 coming out of nowhere completely unexpected! The characters sometime step outside the boundaries of their character and do something unlike their character. This also resulted in inconsistency and showed the characters in a bad light. At least the drama doesn't attempt to "fix" the character, sometimes it's okay to remain broken. I ended up enjoying the drama for all the wrong reasons and that's cool. I liked Ha Na as the antihero, she did great and it might be her best work so far.

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Ew....

Well, the poster is completely misleading this is a full fledged makjang from the first frame to the last. Mo Ah & Nam Goo are one of the worst pairings in daily makjang. It's strange when the support cast get better pairings. You got also the usual idiotic forgiveness accompanied by a lackluster ending so don't expect anything at all. Anyway, the verdict is... it's bad. It's a certified stinker.

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Okay but lacks a lot....

Well, the drama is a little bit different but ends up following the same footsteps of its melodrama predecessors, mainly after the 1st half. The drama is definitely one of the tamer ones, the writer just doesn't let things get too far even when things have all the right to be fully escalated. This is why the envelop of forgiveness was aggressively pushed beyond its limits. This is also why the drama had a very very long 12 episodes epilogue just to stress on that one single point. This is also why you may see the influx of positive comments. This is also why feelings in general became disingenuous at the end.

Both main leads had a weak performance and even a weaker written character especially the female lead. The actress is just too stiff, the only scenes she showed some expressions was the ones with the baby while the remainder mostly poker face. Her poorly written character suffered greatly due to its saint-like personality. You know how these kind of personalities go in dramas. Anyway, the 1st half was promising but it didn't live up to my expectations.

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It's a miss...

I'm a huge fan of older drama but this one missed the mark for me. It was unnecessarily over-complicated for every relationship in the show. For every character and relationship the writing was good enough just to fall flat and flop around episode 11 without being able to recover at all. You may think the reunion plot-line of the sisters is the main focus but unfortunately it was given the bare minimum of attention, even the climax of their reunion was underwhelming. If and only if the ending was slightly tiny bit better. It just felt like this type of ending that they went for was unwarranted. At the end, it was too big of a let down, not a single thing went as I hoped for. At least let the bad guys win just to spike some interest in the drama.

I asked my friend, who is an anthropologist, and he confirmed to me that Lee Seon Woo is a newly undiscovered human species; they may resemble conventional modern humans but they differ with one particular characteristic that is their empty cranial cavity. Truly a spectacular discovery, how could they function? A mystery that would never be solved.

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Bad...

This is the worst long-running drama I've seen from SBS usually they are serviceable, no wonder they canceled the time slot. It's really unfortunate that Choi Jung Yoon came back from 7 years hiatus for this awful project. This is one of the most brainsmooth stories in kdrama I've seen, absolutely mind numbing. This is the writer's first drama and it's showing big time. Amateur writing, cheap production, bad stylists and horrendous cast performance. There are kids shows better written than this, it's hard to believe a human wrote this. A production value from 20 years ago, awful lighting and sound design. These stylists need to be fired, look at the characters' faces, a thick mask of whatever make up they have is about to fall off. Finally the cast, which consists of 85% of unknowns who can't act and are always awkward. For the same reason, the few side stories we had were uninteresting and lacked and characterization. I think what contributed to the death of this drama the most is the lack of familiar faces, the size of the cast and the side stories.

Misleading poster, the redhead was only there for the first 25 episodes then turned to brunette/dark.

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Kinda watchable...

Don't watch it for the romance, this is 90% politics/business/drama and 10% romance. Most of the couples don't get together until around the ending. Speaking of the ending, last 15 episodes was a one big event that got stretched for way too goddamn long. The ending itself was really lame, this weak-ass ending isn't fitting for a 64 eps drama. Many characters didn't get a follow up or update at the end, like Soo Hyuk's mother and her love interest.

The drama also lacked consistency, its pace is all over the place especially the writing quality, as if there are more than one writer going against each other. Episodes 30 to 50 felt like a dry batch. The excessive time skips were another weak part of the drama and a prime example for how not to do a time-skip. Every time there was a skip the drama created a jarring big disconnect with its content and flow. The action/fighting scenes look too staged and artificial. The dramatic thunder clap sound effect radiates extreme cringe energy.

It's weird for Jung Hye's father to feel this entitled for a daughter he didn't raise for 30+ years. He was introduced around the end and his sole purpose was to create some tension with the baddies, another reason why this drama should have been only 50 eps. Speaking of female leads, imagine if the writers gave both female leads more than 1 singular brain cell! That would make the drama a bit more tolerable.

Cha Soo Hyuk (Lee Pil Mo) is the worst part about this drama, this pathetic leech of sub-human with severe inferiority complex and victim complex. He deserves a worse ending, how he ended up wasn't enough.

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Great love story.

What's love? This is a mature story about people falling out of love, searching for love and are afraid of love. Great character writing and smooth exchange of dialogue. The subtle comedy was done wonderfully. The drama had a unique sense of direction at times where it expands beyond the conventional realm of drama, it even steps into film territory briefly with film-like shot compositions and witty dialogue. This is the type of drama where whether the couple came back together or not is irrelevant, their love story is what made it worth it. The drama isn't perfect by any means, but it succeed in delivering a well made package. Although I wish if they merged Mi Yeon and Yoo Kyung into one character/story instead of giving each a section in the drama.

Lee Ha Na, this is her first acting role in drama or film and she absolutely nailed her performance. She even outshone Son Ye Jin every now and then. I find her, as an actress, is better fit in casual roles like this one over action ones like in "Voice". It would be nice if Voice would just end with season 5 and Lee Ha Na would move to bigger and better projects.

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Passable, I guess?

The opening scene is a teaser from episode 17, I hate when a drama pull this kind of stuff. It's okay to tease a couple of episodes in advance but not a teaser from the ending. Speaking of the ending, the last two episodes were bad, they were leaning to heavily on old melodrama themes/cliches that doesn't work in the context of this drama. Most of the cast did a half-assed job, their performance came out as awkward and immature, especially from those who work in the campaign. The candidate's son Jang Sung Min was the worst character/actor in the dram, replace him with a stranger might be better.

Regarding the story and its events, there was no real big escalations that you might expect in a political focused drama, it was mostly the known generic jabs in a political context. They forced "In Yeong" and "Min Ki" plot line but then proceeded to brush it off aside without much regard. Their screen time appearance was very limited after that. The drama was passable at best.

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Poong, the Joseon Virgin

The earlier episodes of the first season were decent and promising but there was a clear and undeniable pattern slowly starting to emerge after a few episodes. The drama was heading in a downward spiral throughout its both seasons. There was no clear direction to its story, I wanted it to remain as a slice of life but even that was not attractive on its own. Each passing episode felt like a downgrade of the previous episode. By the end of 2nd season, my interest had plummeted and it lost any remaining appeal. The only plausible reason for this drama to get a season 3 is if the studio wanted to commit some kind of money laundering/tax fraud scheme. It's never a good sign to adapt something and have its serialization based on public perception. This will most likely result in incomplete stories and padded semi-soft endings unless its creators were to pull through and be the exception. In more than one way, the Anime sphere shifted mostly towards this scheme in the past 6-7 years and it turned into a survival of the fittest type of race. The Kdrama is slowly heading in the exact same direction.

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