Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.
This week I still didn’t post any recaps, but I’m getting ready to start posting again next week with Oh No! Here Comes Trouble, which I have already talked about a little in these weekly recaps.
This week I finished a long-term watch:
The Heirs/The Inheritors – 상속자들 – 2013
An older Korean melodrama with 20 episodes.
Lee Min Ho is a poor little rich boy and Park Shin Hye is a legit poor girl. They meet, melodrama ensues.
This is my favorite of the Lee Min Ho shows I’ve watched, with Legend of the Blue Sea close after, The King Eternal Monarch far behind and I didn’t finish Boys Over Flowers. I wonder what my preferences in Lee Min Ho shows says about me as a person? I’m a LMH-TH.
Anyway, after we left California the story felt very familiar to me as someone who read High School manga in the 90s, with rich kids and poor kids and all the horror of being a teenager. The show does a great job of endowing the lives of the ‘teenagers’ with great drama so that the location they eat lunch in the cafeteria becomes a pivotal issue. There’s a lot of wrist grabbing.
Our female lead wasn’t my favorite character. As the poor girl, she was beaten down and struggling not to cry A Lot. She seemed to accept the system and just wanted to do her best within it. She’s not unrealistic, but I found it hard to watch her at times and wanted to see a spark or two of defiance show up in her.
Our male lead makes up for her by being one of the more subversive male heroes I’ve seen in this type of drama. Dramaland is riddled with male CEOs happily working within the system or even magnanimously deciding to be nicer to the hired help. Kim Tan has had it with all of it and wants no part of it. He’s aching to tear free of the rigid system and doesn’t care about what his peers and the adults around him want. He’s refreshing.
The rest of the cast is delightful. The mothers of our leads are a shippable odd couple. Kim Woo Bin nearly steals the show even when he’s being a vile sociopath with a crush he doesn’t understand. The other high school students each felt like they had their own lives and struggles, existing to do more than just support the leads. The fathers are awful as usual.
I’m talking about the characters because they’re the reason to watch. Except for the unique start in California, the plot is pretty standard. Rich kids, poor kids, business takeovers, punching, rain, umbrellas, etc. etc. This is a show you watch to see dynamic characters suffer and struggle, and it’s a good one.
Because apparently I need more firefighters in my life, I started:
A Date With The Future – 照亮你 – 2023 Pictured
A recently aired Chinese rescue-romance drama, I’ve watched 14 of 36 episodes.
A High School girl is rescued by a young man after an earthquake and promises to meet him again 10 years later. It’s 10 years later, and he doesn’t remember her.
Since I’m watching Fireworks of My Heart too it’s impossible not to compare them, but I’ll save that for when I’ve finished both. For now, I’ll just talk about this drama on its own.
This show starts with the old-fashioned-romance staple, a female lead in love who won’t take no for an answer. While her antics forced me to hit mute and look away a fair amount of the time, she’s also pretty awesome. She’s smart and talented and good at pretty much anything she does and knows it. Even her single-minded pursuit of him showed admirable confidence. When he pushed her away she would regroup and think things through rather than get angry at not getting her way. And I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a character so blatantly enjoy skinship.
He’s a grump grappling with serious past trauma by hoping that if he ignores it, it’ll go away. Lucky for him, he has an adorable bulldozer that’s in love with him. Since under the grump he’s both a great firefighter and a good guy we can get behind them as a couple. As he starts to fall in love with her, he’s also pretty dorky, necessitating more mute button times.
The story is a pretty standard cdrama romance, with a potential second and third couple and all the tropes. And I mean ALL the tropes. It’s a little exhausting how many they cram in. The writing, in general, is sloppy and rough. The second male lead is creepy and unappealing in a way that I don’t think he’s meant to be. There’s an evil co-worker who exists just to be evil. All the firefighters are unhealthily interested in their boss’s love life. The dialogue maybe sounds more natural in Mandarin, but in the English subs it’s unnatural and corny. The production is also sloppy in places, with scenes that feel slapped together and characters appearing from the side of the frame magically.
On the other hand, the rescue scenes are pretty enjoyable and better shot. It’s easy to follow what’s happening and what the firefighters are doing, how it’s going wrong, and what the danger is, so they’re engaging and interesting. The female lead gets a little too involved, though the show tries to justify it, but otherwise, I really like them.
So far this show is a pretty mixed bag. I’m enjoying it but not ready to widely recommend it.