SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Radio Romance
(라디오 로맨스 / Radio Romaenseu)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hello again! Time for another review. I just finished watching Radio Romance, but I took my time watching it. I didn’t go through it as fast as with the last drama I watched, and I will explain why.
First of all, this drama was on my list because of the two main actors. I’m a fan of Kim So Hyun, and I liked Yoon Doo Joon in Splash Splash Love, so that immediately sparked my interest.
I will start with a summary of the series, then I will elaborate on the characters and cast and then point out my criticisms on the series.

The story of Radio Romance is about a young radio script writer assistant named Song Geu Rim (played by Kim So Hyun). Her dream is to be a real script writer for the radio, but there’s a problem: she’s not a very good writer. Her scripts never make it to the broadcast and that’s why she’s been stuck as an assistant. She has it all when it comes to motivation and drive, and she has a real passion and love for the radio.
This passion started when her mother became blind after getting eye surgery and she had to describe everything she saw to her mother in great detail. The two of them would listen to the radio and her mother loved it so much because it made her able to see all these stories and sceneries that were described. It became Geu Rim’s dream to be able to get her own written script spoken on the radio, especially one sentence that her mother really loves: ‘It’s time for the sky to turn from blue to red’ (or something along those lines, to indicate the setting sun).
However, when the DJ for the radio show Geu Rim is a part of decides to quit all of a sudden and they can’t find anyone new, their show is about to get cancelled. At that moment, the eccentric radio producer Lee Gang (played by Yoon Park) returns from his trip to India and recruits Geu Rim for his new team. He says he will make her his main writer, on the condition that she gets top star Ji Soo Ho (played by Yoon Doo Joon) as their guest. Geu Rim is hesitant at first because she doesn’t really like Soo Ho – she’s not impressed by the whole top star image and just finds him a bit fake. However, the urgency is real and she doesn’t have another choice so she persistently starts persuading Soo Ho in order to get him on their show.
Soo Ho, who grew up in a seemingly perfect family (his parents both celebrities as well, the ultimate fabulous family and all that), is actually not happy at all. Everything in his life is decided by his mother (who isn’t even his real mother), who is also the CEO of his agency, and his father is away all the time having secret affairs with young actresses. His whole life he has lived from a script, he has never done anything for himself – he isn’t allowed to. When he gets offered the radio show, he initially has no interest at all. It doesn’t pay much, his mother is against it, it won’t have any real value to his career, so why would he? However, after seeing how far Geu Rim is willing to go to persuade him, he finally agrees to do it.
Geu Rim is determined to show him the beauty and importance of radio, and eventually of course he starts genuinely liking it too – and her, as well.

As it turns out, Soo Ho knows Geu Rim from when he was younger. There was a time when they were both in the hospital – Soo Ho for his depression and Geu Rim to support her mother. They met there. and Soo Ho fell in love with her. So actually he’s been in love with her all this time. The first time they meet as adults, he recognizes her immediately but acts like a jerk because that’s who he has become. However, when they start working together, he quickly accepts that he can’t deny his feelings and also confronts her with those feelings.
Geu Rim slowly but surely learns more about Soo Ho’s truth; his fake perfect life, the sadness and loneliness he’s been carrying with him for so long, and she starts sympathizing with him – and this sympathy turns into love as well.

I will start by stating what I liked about the series before elaborating on my critical points.
Recently I really enjoy watching dramas that put a spotlight on a business or society matter that otherwise doesn’t get much attention. Unpopular opinions or underdogs in certain industries suddenly get represented more and more and I really like seeing that. That’s why I really liked how this drama depicted the radio industry. Radio is considered to be kind of an underdog in contemporary media forms, with all the new social media platforms and apps and everything. I’ve never actually thought about what goes on behind radio shows, that those are scripted too and include a lot of technical expertise.
Although I have to say the radio show depicted in this drama – I don’t know if all Korean radio shows are like this – but they are really different from radio shows in my country. Most of the radio where I’m from is just the same music over and over and some hip radio DJ’s blabbing and making stupid jokes. They only call people when they’ve won something (like tickets for a concert they’re giving away or something). I haven’t heard a radio show where there’s an actual sincerely scripted monologue followed by a fitting song. Maybe once or twice, but those are not the mainstream popular radio channels. So it was definitely interesting for me to see this image of how radio was supposed to reach people.
Song Geu Rim has a really idealistic image of radio, something with the radio channels being stars in the sky and the importance of showing the listeners those stars (?). I’ve never thought of radio like that, but I suppose it’s a bit underrated. It’s also mentioned in the series when Soo Ho initially refuses to go on the show; ‘I’m already doing all these movies and dramas, I’m famous from TV, why should I bother with radio’. Ironically, in the end this very medium is what brings the two main characters together for good.
In any case, thank you writers for giving this insight into the world of radio.

I have to admit one thing very honestly: the story and the situations depicted in this drama were very old-school to me. I feel like these days K-Dramas manage to really step up their game and not dwell on the hopelessly romantic tropes. They’ve really come a long way – this is why when I watch an older drama I can see the difference so clearly. The tropes with making a big deal of holding someone’s hand or pulling someone aside because a motorcycle rushes by at high speed – they’re nice gestures, but they don’t need to be dramatized in my opinion. In this drama this was exactly what was being done and I realized I found it kind of tiring. I honestly thought ‘come on guys, I thought we were past this’ at several times. Each kiss, each hand being held, each pull closer was in slow motion (+ repeated 4 times from different angles) and guided by cheesy romantic BGM. I had hoped for a little more maturity in the relationship. The chemistry wasn’t the best either in my opinion. They were cute together, but their romance lacked passion.
Of course, Soo Ho’s awkwardness justifies it from his side because it’s scary as hell for him to open himself up like that for the first time ever.
But for Geu Rim… honestly it seemed to me as if Kim So Hyun wasn’t used to having her own kissing scenes yet because her kisses were more like pecks and when a REAL kiss occurred it was initiated by Soo Ho/ Yoon Doo Joon and you could see her just kind of going along with it, making it a bit awkward while it should have been a genuine ‘I love you so much’ kiss.

I do have to give it to Yoon Doo Joon though, because while I thought Soo Ho’s eyes looked dead most of the time, his face would completely light up when he’d look at Geu Rim (especially when she made him smile). I think it’s great when actors can act with their face like that.
Soo Ho’s character is complicated. He has closed off his real feelings for so long that he’s become this other person who doesn’t have the freedom to live his own desired life anymore. Because of a traumatic happening in his past he can’t sleep well at night anymore, and he just follows the schedule that people make for him.
When he meets Geu Rim after so long, he finally starts seeing the light at the end of the tunnel again and slowly but surely (and very awkwardly) tries to open up more, even though he finds it hard to sometimes contain his greediness in the process. At some points he became a bit too Kim Tan (*the guy from The Heirs, I will use his name to indicate a certain kind of toxic masculine behavior from male characters in K-Dramas from now on) for me, but there were also moments where his loneliness and inner sadness got the better of him and these moments justified his actions because you could see that he did it purely because he didn’t know any other way to convey his feelings to Geu Rim. So I won’t be too hard on him.

As I mentioned before, I really like Kim So Hyun. I’ve seen so many dramas of her it feels like I grew up with her and I saw her turn from a child actress into the young woman she is now. It’s really nice to see someone evolve like that and to see her acting progress as well. As a child actress she got a lot of dark and gloomy roles – she started out as the young version of either the first or second female lead – and the first happy role I saw of her was in Let’s Fight Ghost. I felt like that was the first time I saw her as a genuinely cheerful character. That was her transition from child role to high school student role. I remember seeing her in I Hear Your Voice, which is a phenomenal series in my opinion. She was really good there as the female lead’s young version. And then there was Who Are You 2015 where she played the double role of twins – again a display of her versatile acting.
Overall, I think I have to say that her roles in Ruler: Master of the Mask and Radio Romance are my least favorite ones. I’m not saying I hated it; it’s just that I know how well she can act and her character just fell flat to me, even though she started out really cool. I felt like she could have shown more spunk and independent behavior as Geu Rim. On the other hand, I did like the moments where she resisted Soo Ho’s demands. When he would keep calling her and she’d think ‘damn, why does he keep calling’ and she would just not pick up her phone. Also, when they were together but she needed to focus on script writing and she would just tell him she needed some space. Soo Ho is a real attention seeker, so I get that from her character’s perspective it might not be easy to push him away for even a moment. But still, she could’ve been a little more empowering as a female character.

I have to elaborate that I really liked Geu Rim’s character in the beginning of the show. I liked how she dressed, the frizzy hair, she was this hip young cheeky kid with a passion that she couldn’t realize. When given the chance to be an actual writer, she could cry with joy. That’s all she cared about at that point. Throughout the development of the series, when her relationship with Soo Ho progresses, for some reason her look became more plain and she lost a bit of the spunk she had in the beginning. She suddenly became really mellow in my opinion, her energy level went down.
This was also kind of caused by the increase in dominance in Soo Ho’s behavior. He starts acting like the jealous boyfriend even when they’re not officially together yet. Everything had to go according to how he wanted it, he would just barge in and grab Geu Rim by the hand and take her with him as if she was a will-less damsel. He would forbid her to see other men, even hang out with Lee Gang even though they had a real close friendship. Of course as it turns out that Lee Gang is also interested in Geu Rim he was right to be aware for rivalry there, but it was obvious Geu Rim wasn’t romantically interested in Lee Gang.
As soon as Geu Rim started acting mellow and just started following Soo Ho, I couldn’t help but remember Kim So Hyun’s character in Ruler: Master of the Mask where she literally had no own will at all. I found it a pity that her character became so soft, because I really liked her spunk and I know she can act so much better than that.

I have seen Yoon Park in several other dramas but this was the first time I’ve seen him in such an eccentric role, so I really liked that. Although he didn’t even come close to being a love rival, he was the mature guy who accepted his defeat with a smile and backed off to let the two be happy. But I really liked his trolling nature. Although I liked his eccentricity, they could’ve made him a little less stereotypical. The constant ‘Namaste, Namaste’ was enough after a while.
I feel like Lee Gang and Jin Tae Ri were cast purely to create a second male and female lead, but their characters didn’t feel like second lead characters to me, more like slightly important side characters. Lee Gang, in any case.

Please forgive me as I will now elaborate on my most critical point of this entire series: Jin Tae Ri.
Jin Tae Ri (played by Yoo Ra) is an unpopular actress who used to star in a drama with Soo Ho when they were young and she’s desperate to make a comeback. That is literally her story. The only thing she does in the entire drama in butt into people’s business to focus the attention on herself, bitch at people to make herself feel better, and repeat the same record over and over again: ‘I was in a drama with Soo Ho as a child. I was in a drama with Soo Ho as a child.’ She would barge into places, make desperate accusations and irrelevantly blackmail people. When she wasn’t bitching at people, she was crying because ‘deep down she’s actually really vulnerable and she just wants people to notice her’. Well, that’s exactly how she was portrayed – as someone who just wanted to be noticed but in trying to achieve that only created pointless air with her words.
I don’t like to be this critical, but Jin Tae Ri is possibly one of the most pointless characters in a drama series I’ve seen so far. I honestly didn’t understand the point or purpose of her character.
She didn’t contribute anything to the story, not even as a rival or anything. If she was supposed to be in love with Soo Ho, that didn’t come through. She only threatened him with the fact that she would reveal information about his family in order to get on a show with him to better her reputation.
It really felt like she was just there in order to have a bitchy second female lead character. In the end she gets together with Soo Ho’s manager because he’s the only one who can stand her. No one in the drama cares about what she has to say, everyone just lets her rant and when she leaves the room everyone just goes on with their lives. Even when her background story was explained it didn’t do anything for me.
This was one of the main things in this series that really bothered me, I hope people can respect my opinion. I don’t want to blame anything on the actress because she still performed everything devotedly, but this was just a very badly written character. She could’ve not been there and it wouldn’t have made any difference. In the end she literally didn’t achieve anything except a boyfriend, good for her.
I had this hope that when she first started her ‘I’ve known Soo Ho from when we were kids’ story, she would turn out to be an actual childhood friend who knew what happened and who’d maybe been there in the period where Soo Ho’s friend Woo Ji Woo died and the impact it’d had on Soo Ho. If that was the case, it may have given her some purpose as a character; as someone who knew a side of Soo Ho that no one knew and who’d help him open up or something. But nope, none of that.

About this friend Woo Ji Woo, he was the stepping stone to link Soo Ho and Geu Rim to each other. When Soo Ho was in the hospital, he became friends with Woo Ji Woo (played by Choi Min Young). Ji Woo is an energetic boy who loves music but who is terminally ill and knows he won’t live longer than age 20. He has a crush on Geu Rim, who frequents the hospital because of her mother, and he strives to win a singing contest and confess his feelings to her while he still can. Soo Ho is inspired by his will to live the last of his years freely and without regrets, but he ends up falling for Geu Rim as well.
In the end Soo Ho feels so bad about betraying Ji Woo that he distances himself from him. When Ji Woo runs after him one time he is hit by a truck and dies. The guilt of his death has followed Soo Ho to this day, it’s why he still can’t sleep and open up fully to Geu Rim. Whenever he’s with Geu Rim, a part of him always remembers Ji Woo.
In the end it turns out that Ji Woo was fully aware that Soo Ho liked Geu Rim as well and he even gave them his blessing disguised in letters addressed to Geu Rim but actually written for Soo Ho.

Why the two main characters in K-Dramas always have to be somehow linked to each other in their respective pasts is another trope that I’m getting a bit fed up with. It’s not a regular thing in real life where all ideal couples actually already knew each other as children and just magically happen to meet again under really complicated circumstances, I think the stories where two people just meet without having any connection to each other are the most realistic nowadays.
I liked the Ji Woo story, but there were things that felt weird to me. It kind of seemed to me like the two boys were following Geu Rim as kids, they were always watching her from a distance, even riding the same bus, always just watching her and smiling at her (which I sometimes thought was a bit creepy in a way). Also, Geu Rim’s lack of emotional reaction when Soo Ho told her the whole Ji Woo story was really weird. You’d have to feel something if your boyfriend tells you he had a friend who liked you and he pretended to be him because he liked her too and how they watched her so many times together? Geu Rim was just like ‘daww you must have felt so sad seeing me because I reminded you of your friend *hug*’ That’s certainly not how I would’ve reacted.

There was one character that I did like, although he didn’t get any credit for his actions in the end: Jason (played by Kwak Dong Yeon). He is introduced as a friend of Soo Ho and also as a psychologist who is instructed by Soo Ho’s mother to keep an eye on him. In the meantime, he likes to assess Soo Ho’s emotional transgression and when Geu Rim enters his life, he is fascinated to see how Soo Ho changes. In the beginning it was just funny to see how cheerful he’d get when Soo Ho would show an emotion. At a certain point I started doubting if he was to be trusted, because he has this poker face expression sometimes that had a glint of darkness in his eye – but in the end it turns out that he didn’t have any hard feelings against Soo Ho. Yes, he might have gotten a little too ambitious in his curiosity as to how Soo Ho would respond to certain situations, but all he tried to do was help him open up and face his fears in his own way. And as a result he just gets a ‘no you researched me for fun, you made me a case study and reported to my mom, get out of my house’ from Soo Ho. Anyways, I liked his character.
I like characters that aren’t one-dimensional and that keep you guessing as to what they’re really up to and what their motives are.

I liked the character of Soo Ho’s manager as well, although he didn’t get a lot of back story. He was a nice supporting character. I do feel like they made him like Tae Ri just so she had someone to turn to in the end that could love her, but otherwise I didn’t feel them as a couple.
However, their kissing scene was better than all of Soo Ho and Geu Rim’s kissing scenes combined. Honestly when that happened I couldn’t help but think, ‘now THIS is what I call a kiss’. On the other hand, the proposal felt kind of out of the blue. Mostly because I just missed the whole build-up in their relationship. But anyway, I already ranted enough about Jin Tae Ri, so I’ll just say I liked the manager guy.

There were these two radio producers who became ‘rivals’ to Lee Gang’s team, one of them being Geu Rim’s former boss. This woman, Ra Ra Hee (played by Kim Hye Eun) is the one who kept Geu Rim as an assistant for so long, and when Geu Rim gets the chance to be the main writer for Lee Gang, she becomes salty and tries to convince Geu Rim that she’s not good enough. However, even though she teams up with Soo Ho’s mother and tries to thwart Lee Gang’s team, in the end she does seem to care for Geu Rim as her junior. Apart from that her role wasn’t really deepened any further, except for her relationship with her partner producer.

I realize I haven’t said anything about Soo Ho’s mother in detail yet. Nam Joo Ha (played by Oh Hyun Kyung), is this sophisticated career woman who has spend her whole married life pushing her son in the right direction (her right direction). Almost the entire series she seems to be the cold-hearted stepmother who doesn’t care about her son’s free will and emotions and can’t care less that he has feelings for some girl; keeping up appearances is the most important thing.
But when their family’s facade is exposed by one of her husband’s ex-affair actresses, she is on the brink of falling apart. She is secretly suffering from her husband’s behavior and covers this by drinking wine and being extra strict for Soo Ho. I liked that in the end Soo Ho and his mother managed to come to terms when he covered for her in a press conference and she also opened her mind more.

As a last comment before my conclusion, this drama showed me again how insane the fan culture in Korea can be. Top stars and idols are treated as gods by their fans, but as soon as they fall in love in real life, the fans can immediately turn against them. I just don’t understand how some people can have so little respect for other people’s privacy. It’s none of your business! I think one of the most terrible things about being an idol is that you don’t get to live a normal life. You are limited in so many things, things that seem so mundane to normal people: seeing the people you like, going places you want to go, even falling in love and dating. It’s crazy and I will never get used to it.

I’m sorry if this review became a little more critical than uplifting. But I find it important to write down my thoughts on the series, whether they are good or less good. I find it important to be critical and I’m trying to be more critical in life as a whole because I usually don’t have a strong opinion about a lot of things. This is one of the things where I feel free to share my thoughts and I hope this can be respected.
In any case, I’m glad I saw this drama but it wasn’t one of the best I’ve seen. There were a lot of tropes I’d like to see less of in the modern (post-2017) K-Drama. The balance between the important and less important characters was a bit shaky, with some characters we got a lot of information while I could’ve done with less, and with some characters I would’ve liked some more depth in order to sympathize with them more.
I am still going to watch new dramas with Kim So Hyun because she can do so much better than this and I still admire her as the young and talented actress that she is.
It’s definitely a cute love story, but I would’ve liked it to be a little more than that. Using the radio medium as a way to connect people was really nice, but with the development of the romance this too seemed to fade into the background a bit.

Anyways, I will keep writing my reviews and I will keep you posted! Thanks for reading! ^^