July 26, 2018 July 26, 2018 Categories K-Drama ReactionsAbout Her, First Impressions, Let's Eat 3, Mr. Sunshine, Your House Helper3 Comments on First Impressions: Your House Helper, Mr. Sunshine, About Her, Let’s Eat 3	
The June dramas have proven to be really great ones not only with their respective pilot episode but almost throughout their run that it kinda set the bar a little higher for those following them. So I’m really happy that these new dramas which premiered this first half of July are also nothing short of promising. I wonder how Korean drama writers are able to come up with new interesting concepts every now and then.
Our first drama for this edition is the adaptation of a much-loved webtoon titled Your House Helper. It’s about a male house helper Kim Ji-woon (Ha Suk-jin) who helps arrange peoples’ homes, lives and relationships. The pilot episode didn’t reveal yet why he’s doing it so but we know that there’s something strange with him and that he’s not doing it for the money. He offers his services but only to people who give values to their places and only to those who’s willing to let him in. I will welcome Ha Suk-jin anytime to my home, to be honest. But aside from Ji-woon, most of the characters are as interesting as well, particularly our female lead Lim Da-young (Bona), an impoverished hardworking advertising intern and Lim Sang-ah (Go Won-hee), a jewelry designer who appears to have been waiting for a special someone who wouldn’t reply to her messages. But what I enjoyed the most about the first episode is its ‘cleaning’ element because personally I find organizing things inside a home therapeutic. There’s this sense of satisfaction I get from seeing a disheveled abode turn into a peaceful home.
Verdict: This drama is tipped to be a healing one so it kind of intrigues me how it will play out in the rest of the episodes. I’m also excited to see the dynamics between the characters as they find themselves sharing a single house. This drama is moody and quiet but not boring. It’s a well-made, clean cut episode, I guess.
Am I watching a movie? I know a lot of you were probably thinking of the same thing as you were watching the pilot episode of this big-budgeted drama that is Mr. Sunshine.
There was a lot of buzz about this because of the following reasons: First, it’s the creation of hitmaker-writer Kim Eun-sook who also penned successful dramas Goblin and Descendants of the Sun; second, it’s the tv comeback of Korean Hollywood star Lee Byung-hun; third, it’s crticially acclaimed film actress Kim Tae-ri’s first-ever drama project, and lastly, it’s grandeur production which was set in an era where Korea is transitioning to the modern-day country that it is now. And to tell you frankly, it has lived up to the hype.
The first episode masterfully painted the period the drama is in and clearly explained the background of our soon-to-be main characters by showing us their childhood past and how are these set to shape their motitvations as they grow up. Some of these characters are Lee Byung-hun’s Choi Yoo-jin who fled to the US as a child after his slave father was beaten to death by his landlord and his mother took away her own life, and Yoo Yeon-seok’s Go Dong-mae who’s a son to war fighter who then later chose to become a rebel after seeing how the country abandoned them when they got by the US soldiers. The story is very solid and the characters are apparently well-written but I think it’s the cinematography and the musical scoring that are the most noteworthy. There were a lot of scenes, especially the one set against the mountains that look like beautiful paintings. The war scene between the US and Korean fighters was adrenaline-pumping and gripping and the score used in it was just perfect to accentuate the thrill even more.
Verdict: The pilot episode of Mr. Sunshine is just so excellent but if you’re looking for the main ensemble on the screen, well, there’s only a few minutes of them because the first episode focused greatly on setting the stories of their origin. I believe it’s a drama you shouldn’t dare miss.
Drama About Her has in its cast some of the most popular names of the first wave of the Hallyu fever: Nam Sang-mi, Kim Jae-won, Jo Hyun-jae, and Han Eun-jung, unfortunately, it also has one of the most common tropes used in a drama: amnesia, plastic surgery to get a new identity, and a gang of men running after our protagonist. But, is that a bad thing? Well, it depends on your taste.
But to give you an idea what this drama is about, well, let me explain. It’s about the story of Ji Eun-han (Nam Sang-mi) who loses her memory after undergoing plastic surgery to assume another identity, and searches for memories to find out who she was. She wanted to have her face changed because of a band of men that’s hunting her. For what reason? That is we don’t know but getting hints from her own statements, it’s because of her own greed so she must not be a very kind person after all. The one who did her surgery is Han Kang-woo (Kim Jae-woo), who’s a plastic surgeon Eun-han was able to save from dying. So to return the favor, he reluctantly gave her a new face. Problem is, she lost her memories. The story is intriguing but it looks like it’s being groomed to becoming a makjang, which I seldom find fun to watch.
Verdict: If you watch Han Ye-seul’s Birth of Beauty, well the pilot episode seemed like it’s a rip-off of that drama only exagerrated and sporting a different genre. I want a great drama for Jo Hyun-jae to be honest.
Rounding up the new premieres is the third installation of tvN’s Let’s Eat series. Yoon Do-joon reprises his role Goo Dae-young while Baek Jin-hee, An Woo-yeon, Lee Joo-woo, and more new names join him in this new season.
Actually I haven’t seen the first two seasons, so I wasn’t expecting anything aside from the fact that food played a significant role in it so I was pleasantly surprised that it was actually so enjoyable and fun. There were a lot of scenes where the drama spent a couple of minutes showing us how our characters are enjoying their food that I found myself salivating over those sumptous dishes I wished I was munching on as well. But apart from that, I think the glimpse of our characters’ college lives set in the 1990s was what made me grinning from ear to ear. I love how Dae-young met his male friends and how they spent their days just bonding together over the silliest of things. It made me think of how simpler and happy life was during your school days that I wish I just got stuck there and never faced the grim realities of adulthood.
Thanks for the write-up, loved it! Although, I think that Goo Doing Mae’s character became aligned with the Japanese because of how he was being treated as a butcher’s son by his fellow citizens – it’s another character who loses his father during the battle of Ganghwa and is then betrayed by his country (or rather, the villanous Lee Wants Ik).