Not mindblowing, but not awful either. I like the procedural nature of the show in the first few episodes, but then we get to the Hanju arc and it completely shifts gears. Both in a positive sense and a negative sense. Characters I was lukewarm on at the beginning I really start to resent, there's the horrible forced heterosexual romance between the co-leads, and in general we get a lot less of Kim Hyesoo when she's the reason we're all here. The saving grace was a really good, unnerving, yet also sympathetic performance from Choo Jahyun, the other reason why people watch this drama. I can't say I wasn't disappointed when I started to realise her role was a lot more minor than I was initially led to believe.
But overall not great when all the men in this drama sort of float between "take or leave it" performances, really hammy villain performances that feel like tonal whiplash considering the often extremely dark ripped from the headlines plots, or Giho who I started out disliking and outright ended up hating. Han Do starts out slightly annoying, gets okay in the middle, but man his character reverts back to being annoying in the last few episodes. I'm sure Jung Sungil is a perfectly competent actor and I'm really not here to shade any of the cast but his character ends up being one of the most generic leads ever. None of the personality quirks he's shown to have end up mattering and he just dissolves into this Ken doll of a man who has a conscious apparently but never really does anything useful for anyone, and the lack of chemistry between him and KHS is apparent. I don't think either of these actors thought a romantic subplot was a good idea here.
Maybe this deserves a season 2, maybe more so if they elaborate on the final scene, but I'd honestly rather the talent here just did something else. Or, at the very least, we get something more focused in what it wants to be. More importantly, less men acting as the saviours of the plot despite not really doing anything and taking out all the oxygen in the room when any female characters try to take up space. We had a good thing going in that middle third and clearly that was too much to ask to continue.
But overall not great when all the men in this drama sort of float between "take or leave it" performances, really hammy villain performances that feel like tonal whiplash considering the often extremely dark ripped from the headlines plots, or Giho who I started out disliking and outright ended up hating. Han Do starts out slightly annoying, gets okay in the middle, but man his character reverts back to being annoying in the last few episodes. I'm sure Jung Sungil is a perfectly competent actor and I'm really not here to shade any of the cast but his character ends up being one of the most generic leads ever. None of the personality quirks he's shown to have end up mattering and he just dissolves into this Ken doll of a man who has a conscious apparently but never really does anything useful for anyone, and the lack of chemistry between him and KHS is apparent. I don't think either of these actors thought a romantic subplot was a good idea here.
Maybe this deserves a season 2, maybe more so if they elaborate on the final scene, but I'd honestly rather the talent here just did something else. Or, at the very least, we get something more focused in what it wants to be. More importantly, less men acting as the saviours of the plot despite not really doing anything and taking out all the oxygen in the room when any female characters try to take up space. We had a good thing going in that middle third and clearly that was too much to ask to continue.
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