Reviews

Bland and Emotionless

It’s fine to stan an actor and still admit their drama is trash. This one is boring AF, NaNa’s face is killing me every damn time, the sound design is a menace, Seo YeJin stays timeless beauty, and the rest of the cast are just existing. Zero chemistry across the board, intimacy scenes bland, and I’m just gagging at the intimacy scenes 😩. The only thing that’ll send me over the edge is if JCW’s scenes were done by a double 😩😂… and after that NaNa x JCW moment, I know they used one. By episode 5 I was on 2X speed and skipping, no way I’m wasting 8 hours on this piece of shit. Omo, I’m drained! #TheScandal bye bye!!!

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Crash Course in Romance

Crash Course in Romance — 7.5/10

Crash Course in Romance is a warm, charming and surprisingly heartfelt romantic comedy that combines romance, family relationships, friendship and a touch of mystery. It is not a perfect drama, but it has enough genuine emotion and lovable characters to make it an enjoyable watch.

The biggest strength of the drama is its central couple. Jeon Do-yeon and Jung Kyung-ho have a lovely chemistry, and their relationship feels mature, affectionate and refreshingly natural. Their romance is not based only on the usual misunderstandings and dramatic twists. There is a sense of warmth and companionship between them that makes many of their scenes genuinely enjoyable.

I also liked the family aspect of the story. Nam Haeng-seon is a particularly appealing character: strong, caring, energetic and deeply devoted to the people around her. Her relationship with Hae-e adds another emotional layer to the drama, and some of the quieter family moments were actually more touching than the romantic ones.

The drama also does a good job of portraying the intense world of private education and the enormous pressure placed on students and parents. The contrast between Haeng-seon's relatively simple and warm life and the competitive academic environment gives the story an interesting social dimension.

However, the drama is not equally strong throughout. The mystery/thriller subplot sometimes feels disconnected from the warm romantic tone of the main story, and some of the conflicts become more dramatic than necessary. A few characters and situations also feel somewhat exaggerated, especially compared with the natural chemistry of the main couple.

The pacing is another mixed point. The early episodes are particularly charming and engaging, while the middle portion occasionally loses some of that lightness. Nevertheless, the emotional core remains strong enough to keep the story moving.

What ultimately makes Crash Course in Romance work is its warmth. It is a drama about finding love later in life, but also about family, second chances, friendship and the importance of having people who genuinely care about you. It is sweet without being completely superficial and emotional without becoming relentlessly heavy.

Overall, It is not one of the greatest Korean dramas, and it has some noticeable weaknesses, but the wonderful main couple, the lovable supporting characters and its warm atmosphere make it a very pleasant and worthwhile watch.

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Drama, Action, Romance. Everything I need!

I really enjoyed this show. Ofc, the storyline is nothing new or original but that did not make the show boring or anything. Two men with a shared moment in the past reuniting while one of them is undercover. The two male leads had great chemistry and I enjoyed the dynamics between the characters.
I understand why people criticize the show for the use of AI in the Flashbacks. I also would have liked real Flashbacks but at the same time I can understand why they decided not to. In the end, it was only used for one or two scenes, and the majority of time there where real actors, who put a lot of effort in portraying the characters well. So I can accept the usage of AI in two scenes.
The Ending… I get why shows like to use the “oh, the male lead is dead, but in the last scenes he appears again, without any explanation,…happy ending!” plot but in general, I am not a huge fan. I always end up with questions like “how did he not die? What was he doing in the year he was presumed dead?? Why did he not try to contact Nie Chuan before?” Yeahhhh, not a fan of having unanswered questions after a show.
Overall, this show was very enjoyable. It had action, romance and drama, and while it was not long and not the most high quality production, the finished show is definitely worth the watch in my opinion.

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you should watch police in love ????❤️‍?

Police in Love is the best series that has aired this year. YinWar came to save us! Their acting is simply unmatched they’re the best in the Thai BL industry. 🫠❤️❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥
I enjoyed the first episode so much. I’ve watched it several times on WeTV, and I was smiling throughout the entire episode with butterflies in my stomach. 😍🫠🦋🦋🦋💕💕
Thank you YinWar for your incredible talent and outstanding acting skills. As for Inspector Thier… I’m absolutely crazy in love with him. I want to marry him too 😭💘❤️ How lucky you are, sweet Mangkorn 🫠💕

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All the Scandal, None of the Chemistry

Scandal somehow managed to make Dangerous Liaisons feel completely lifeless, and I genuinely don't know how they pulled that off. I felt almost no chemistry between the three leads. The direction and sound weren't bad, but they never created enough tension or emotional weight to make me actually feel the story. Even the acting felt too influenced by previous adaptations, especially in the way the characters behaved and reacted, rather than giving them a distinct personality of their own.

As a fan of Nana and Ji Chang-wook, I had high expectations, but I found all three protagonists rather dull. And I'm not against the changes they made to the original. Those alterations could have made the adaptation more interesting, but they simply weren't used to create anything emotionally compelling.

What bothered me most was the lack of emotional progression. In the original, Valmont never explicitly says he falls for Madame de Tourvel, yet you can feel it through his actions and changing emotions. Here, I felt absolutely nothing. I was mostly bored, with only a little anxiety about the ending. Just so-so.

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Couldve been perfect if it werent for bad pacing and story missteps

I adored the beginning of this drama, but the pacing is godawful. Things are always done either too slow or too fast, with the ending being the worst offender. What in the world even happened there? It definitely felt like a 16 episode show cut to 12 in the middle of editing or something. The leftover bluescreen and the ai usage on the fake usb during the final episode also took away alot of the quality very suddenly. Im very curious about what happened behind the scenes that caused all this.

Plot wise it started interestingly, but it felt like a pidgeons nest the way nothing really came together. The final mission especially made zero sense, was handled way too quickly and way too sloppily. After all that big talk all that happened was a big confusing fight between everyone, how did this end with everyone in jail? How were the north koreans so easily subdued if they were supposed to be these big scary guys? How is Bulgae safe, wont NK keep coming after him? So much weird stuff.

Despite the strangeness I did enjoy the drama apart from episode 12. Its cute, especially the gang members romance moments. I did get stuck on this show and binged all 12 episodes within a very short timeframe..

Side note, Bulgae was my favourite character but the way his memories returning was handeled made me sad. It was like his previously shown personality was completely overwritten despite the earlier conversations he had about his past pointing towards a cleaner merge..

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Good Enough

'The Apartment Job' is a comedy about a fake family who are trying to fraud an apartment building managment.

The drama has some laugh out loud comical moments, though others are not as successful. But the strongest part of the drama is the fake family that become found family. The side characters were delightful and probably those who carried the drama through when the main plot got boring.

The politics of the apartment building management were, in addition, interesting, though unoriginal and the villain was even too comic book like at times.

Finally, the performances were all enjoyable.

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The Potential Was There… Somewhere.

Shows like this always make me wonder who the target audience is, because it doesn’t seem aimed at people who are familiar with gaming, given how little effort was put into making the gaming setting feel authentic. But at the same time, so much of the story still revolves around gaming that I can’t imagine viewers who aren’t interested in games finding those parts particularly engaging either. I think this reflects my main issue with the writing as a whole: the lack of authenticity. The show seems to expect viewers to simply accept whatever it throws at them, whether it makes sense or not, and unfortunately, that extends to the characters and their relationships as well.

I think stories like this live and die by their characters and relationships, especially the team dynamics and rivalries with other teams. So I could have overlooked the lack of realism in the gaming setting if the script had made up for it elsewhere, but unfortunately, it didn’t.

The story lacked meaningful relationship development beyond the main romance, and most of the side characters remained too surface-level for me to become invested in them. If you’re not going to deliver a particularly strong story, you should at least put more effort into building a cast of characters that feel real and make you want to root for them. The main romance was cute at first, and I was genuinely entertained by Three’s somewhat eccentric personality, but it simply wasn’t enough to carry 10 episodes. I found myself caring less with each episode, and what should have been a fun and easy watch slowly turned into a chore.

In the end, this didn’t work for me, not only as someone who loves video games but also as someone who values nuanced characterizations and authentic storytelling.

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If I were a bramble and you were a rose

“Cruel Love” (or “Bad Love”) is a typical example of a genre product that falls victim to the very nature of Korean dramas, which are capable of changing direction midway through: a powerful premise, built upon a chain of tragic events and tangible consequences, which at a certain point is gradually replaced by a more conventional and convoluted melodrama, full of artificial obstacles capable of inducing a state of utter frustration. No one is claiming to want a happy ending at all costs, but rather demanding – for the sake of dramatic and intellectual integrity – that the story’s development remains consistent with what it initially promised.

The first part of the drama works extremely well because, through melodramatic coincidence, in every episode each tragedy brings about a consequence and every event perfectly alters the course of the story, through a whole series of external and irreversible obstacles (scandal, a ruined career, abortion, the breakdown of a family, bereavements, the rekindling of love, etc.) which create a rupture with the characters’ previous lives.

The romantic drama arises naturally from the situation that has been created. The psychological consequences depicted in the first part of the story are an extremely powerful driving force for the narrative’s progression: characters who suffer the consequences of their own decisions, or are forced to confront events that have now irrevocably altered their lives.

It is exactly this aspect that makes the first half particularly successful: however exaggerated the events may be, the pain does not seem gratuitous, because it leaves its mark and forces the protagonists to rebuild their identities from the ruins. In-jung, in particular, is not simply subjected to a series of misfortunes: she is transformed by them, and her newfound love for Yong-gi takes on meaning simply because it comes after a life that is completely different from the one she had imagined.

But then, as the action shifts from the provinces to Seoul, a melodrama of misunderstandings seems to unfold, a victim of its own need to carry on. Although the obstacles are gradually removed, the script seems compelled to create new ones, including through the introduction of utterly laughable and redundant characters, resulting in decidedly weaker situations that end up influencing the fate of the protagonists – who love one another and should therefore be together, but for some reason cannot…

The problem is that, at this stage, the complications no longer seem to arise naturally from the accumulated wounds, but become, in themselves, the fuel needed to prolong the story. What in the first part was a drama built on consequences gradually becomes a drama built on obstacles: when one obstacle is removed, another must be found immediately. And so the narrative ends up losing the very force that had made it interesting, because the viewer begins to see the mechanism at work rather than being drawn into the events.

The introduction of Park Shin Young, the lookalike of the protagonist’s first love, is a twist that ends up creating a narrative dynamic different from the premise, whilst also missing a great opportunity; whereas previously the focus was on the psychological consequences of what had happened, the story now attempts to play the classic melodrama card with ‘the past returning’ in an almost physical form.
This, in itself, could have been interesting, but instead it ends up shifting the narrative tone, being used explicitly to further complicate the relationship, when it could have carried greater psychological weight – perhaps to truly explore the relationship between memory, guilt, grief and desire, with all that this entails within the relationship between the two protagonists.

The very nature of this subsequent agreement (“let’s stay together until spring”) presupposes that the characters no longer act according to their own inclinations, but rather in the interests of the script. Two adults are in love, the main obstacles are gradually being overcome (by the way: is there a ranking of the most absurd terminal illnesses in the Dramaverse?) and neither of them has a concrete reason to give up on the other: the viewer’s question inevitably becomes: “But why!?” Even the suspension of disbelief breaks down; everything seems to boil down to justifying the 20-episode run.

These two different forms of melodrama ultimately distort the romantic dynamics of the story as well: the first part told the story of people who suffer the consequences of their own decisions; the second seems to focus on people who make decisions with the aim of bringing about new consequences. And this is a substantial difference, because in the first case the tragedy is part of the story, whilst in the second it becomes almost a plot device within it.

The paradox really comes to the fore in the final episode. After the inevitable time ellipsis, both have rebuilt their lives; almost all the obstacles that had prevented the two protagonists from living out their love for much of the story have simply vanished. And so the inevitable ‘Is that it!?’ arises, because the ending demonstrates, almost retrospectively, just how contrived much of the previous, tormented journey had been. The meeting, the glances, the embraces and the promise of eternal love… The end.

The bench built by Yong-gi, the return to Samcheok, the walk hand in hand: it’s all symbolically very beautiful and brings the story full circle with elegance, but it lacks what would have been most interesting to see – namely, a genuine confrontation between the two.

There is no real conversation capable of making sense of what has happened, no shared analysis of the wounds, the blame, the fears and the sacrifices that have kept them apart. The traumas of the past seem simply to have been absorbed and dissolved by the passage of time and the disappearance of external obstacles. With these removed, the two can finally love one another. But the most interesting drama would have been to understand how two people so deeply scarred by what they had been through could find one another again and consciously choose each other.

For this reason, the ending – whilst consistent with the series’ romantic tone and undoubtedly evocative both visually and emotionally – leaves one with a sense of incompleteness. The story has spent an enormous amount of time setting up the obstacles, but surprisingly little on actually showing how the protagonists overcame them.

There is, however, still much to be commended about the overall production of “Bad Love”: the excellent performances, the beautiful soundtrack, the atmosphere, the cinematography, the provincial landscapes, the melancholic charm of Samcheok and, above all, that initial ability to craft a mature, painful and compelling romantic story. It is a series that manages to be elegant, evocative and even poignant, and which, in its first half, achieves moments of remarkable intensity.

It’s a shame that, as the story unfolds, that very elegance ends up being little more than packaging – like a beautifully wrapped present: fine wrapping paper, a perfect bow, every detail meticulously attended to, all of which whets your curiosity about what might be inside. Only to open it and find the cheap little ring that comes with an Easter egg.

After a truly excellent first half – with convincing performances, a great atmosphere and a remarkably captivating audiovisual production – “Bad Love” culpably ends up gradually losing the narrative focus of its story (ironically, with the metaphor of the bench and swing clearly evident!), replacing the power of the consequences with a succession of increasingly contrived complications needed solely to drag the whole thing out.

The emotional turmoil and depth that had led one to expect the very best fade away in a conclusion that is far too hasty and complacent, culpably made up of haphazard narrative choices and missed opportunities. What remains is the memory of something that could have been far greater than what it ultimately managed to be.

6 ½

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