Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Short
(쇼트 / Syoteu)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

I’m on a roll watching series, did you notice? But the ones I’ve watched in a row now all were relatively short ones so that’s why the reviews are so regular these past weeks.
This one too, ironically it’s already called ‘Short’ and it also only has 4 episodes. I saw it pass by somewhere one time and thought it would be interesting to watch a sports drama since I usually don’t watch sport-focussed series.

Short is about two short-track skaters, Park Eun Ho (played by Yeo Hoi Hyun) and Kang Ho Young (played by Kang Tae Oh), two complete opposites who are forced to commence training together to become national athletes and eventually participate in the Pyeongchang Olympics.
Park Eun Ho is the only son of the director of Kangbaek, the skating agency he’s a part of. His father (played by Yoo Ha Bok) has always been very strict with him and Eun Ho has lost his love for skating because of the pressure and the disappointment his father treats him with whenever he doesn’t win first place. Even when he does win, it’s never good enough for his father.
On the other hand, Kang Ho Young is a cheerful guy from the countryside with a genuine love for skating who blows everyone way with his speed in an amateur race. He lives with his grandfather and his late father also used to skate. Ho Young is spotted by coach Son Seung Tae (played by Yoo Ha Joon) and recruited to the training program at Kangbaek.
Eun Ho and Ho Young meet for the first time in the locker room and immediately get off on the wrong foot. When it turns out they’ll be training at Kangbaek together, they both initially loathe the idea. Especially when their coach tells them they need each other to find their balance. Eun Ho has the techniques but lacks vigor, Ho Young has the speed but lacks the technique.
They both move in at the house of a fellow skater, Ho Young’s friend Maeng Man Bok (played by Noh Jong Hyun) where he lives with his mother, sister and cousin.
Man Bok’s mother (played by Park Joon Myun) is a warm woman with excellent cooking skills who takes the boys under her roof and at the same time runs a restaurant by herself.
Man Bok’s sister Man Hee (played by Park So Eun) has a crush on Ho Young.
Man Bok’s cousin Yoo Ji Na (played by Kim Do Yeon) ran away from America to take an audition in Korea to become an idol. Both Ho Young and Eun Ho fall in love with her.
All in all, the story is about the rivalry between Eun Ho and Ho Young in both sports and romance, but also about how they eventually become friends.

In the beginning I thought this drama would be different from regular K-Dramas in that it would really be about sports, but with the introduction of Ji Na as the love interest, it turned into a more typical drama after all. For me, the whole fighting over a girl part didn’t really need to be a part of it, I was more interested in the sports part since that’s why I wanted to watch this series.
And of course, when I found out there were only 4 episodes I was wondering how they would fit a whole story within such a short series.
In the end, I think they did very well. However, I would have liked a little more build-up in the bond between the two guys. We see them mostly together at the house, eating and sleeping under the same roof and their rivalry in wooing Ji Na is clear, but I actually felt like I needed to see more of them together at the skating rink. There was constant talking about them training together but I don’t think I saw much actual training between them, just them racing each other in matches.
Also, I couldn’t really get a good idea of how ‘fast’ they were going because more than half of their races were shown in slow motion. I suppose the people shown racing from a distance were actual skaters and the slow motion was meant to show the actor’s faces, but still. It only made it even more obvious that they weren’t the ones actually skating.

I saw Kang Tae Oh in My First First Love just before this so I knew his funny side but I also really liked his character in Short. He was a genuinely nice guy and a loyal friend, who wanted to skate because he loved it and not because he wanted to be the best at it. The scenes with his grandfather were my favorite, I think. I think Eun Ho fuelled the feelings of rivalry in him because he himself was so focussed on winning rather than enjoying the sports, that Ho Young wanted to show him how wrong he was about that.
I knew Eun Ho’s character by face, but I can’t remember what I’ve seen him in. In the beginning his character seemed really angsty to me, the tension was clearly visible and you could see how little joy he took from what he was doing. It reminded me a little of Page Turner, where the main character was pushed by her parent to keep playing the piano, but eventually lost all pleasure in playing because it became all about winning.
I could empathize with Eun Ho in that he became sick of skating and tried to quit but wasn’t allowed to. In the end, being surrounded by Man Bok’s family and Ho Young, he gets that feeling back and ultimately even patches things up with his dad.

Man Bok’s family gets its own plot in the series. His mother has a huge debt going because of some mysterious woman who ran away and left all her unpaid money on her (? – I didn’t really follow what that was about). Anyways, some woman owed a bunch of loan sharks a lot of money but since she ran off Man Bok’s mom, as co-owner, was forced to pay off all her debts. When she wasn’t fast enough, the loan sharks even came to raid her restaurant.
In the beginning, Eun Ho’s father is very strict about Eun Ho staying anywhere else besides home, so he asks his manager to find out where his son’s staying. When he discovers Man Bok’s family, gradually he warms up to the idea after finding out about Man Bok’s mother’s incredible cooking and he agrees to him staying there. During their visits, the manager notices that the mother is in financial trouble (he overhears some phone conversations etc.) and he starts blackmailing Man Bok that he will pay off all his mother’s debts if Man Bok lets Eun Ho win the next race.
In this, Man Bok becomes so desperate he lets himself get injured on purpose during trials, resulting in Ho Young staying back to help him and Eun Ho winning. When everyone finds out this was done to make Eun Ho win, everyone initially gets mad at Eun Ho and his father even though they had nothing to do with this and also did not agree with the manager’s tactics.
In the end, Eun Ho’s father offers Man Bok’s mother a job as cook for the athletes during the deciding matches, paying her enough to cover all debts at once and she happily takes it. Eun Ho and Ho Young both make it to the national team. Man Bok fully recovers from his injury, all is well.

Let me know elaborate on the whole Ji Na love triangle.
First of all, for Kim Do Yeon (former IOI, now Weki Meki member) this was probably her first time acting in a drama. She is an idol in real life, (I remembered her from Produce 101, which is also where I knew Chae Yeon from My First First Love from) so I guess the most convenient role to give her was an aspiring idol, so she could show off her singing and dancing skills in the drama. Her acting was natural enough, but it didn’t make a big impression on me. Her only goal was to pass an audition and in the meantime she would occasionally appear during the guys’ match, cheering them on with Man Hee. You only ever see her with Man Hee, the whole family, or the guys. We don’t see her as an individual person hanging out with friends. I hate to say this, but to me it really felt like her only purpose in the drama was to be ‘the pretty girl’ to create a love triangle.
As a character she fell really flat. We only see her from the perspective the guys see her, almost a bit objectifying. I didn’t get any personality from her, she was simply the love interest. Also, the way the guys felt about her was only made clear through outward signs. There was never a true moment of connection between any of the three, they just both thought she was pretty and with that they started pursuing her.
In the end, Ho Young comes closest, because he has several ‘moments’ with her (aka the slow motion ‘she loses her balance and he catches her so she doesn’t fall and they stare into each other’s eyes’ trope) and he is the one who asks her out, on the condition of him making the national team. She doesn’t even answer his question, but easily states she has to go back to America because she didn’t pass the audition. In that scene, Ho Young was looking at her like, ‘wait but don’t you remember my confession?’, I found it kinda weird she ignored it like that.
But the series ends with Ji Na still returning because last minute she got called by an agency who wants to take her in as a trainee so she can stay in South-Korea. There is no further closure to their romantic relationship.
Man Hee eventually notices Ho Young is only interested in Ji Na and switches over to Eun Ho, because she finds out he’s having a harder time than Ho Young. The way these two end up seems more like a couple than the other two.

Overall, it was a nice change in genre from the dramas I usually watch and it definitely gave some insights in the world of ice skating as an olympic sport. I didn’t, however, learn that much about ice skating techniques or anything like that. There wasn’t much explanation about the sport itself, I felt like you already had to know something about it to watch it. When the two main characters were racing together it felt as if I was watching a match on TV, I felt quite distanced from it. As opposed to feeling like I knew more because I now had more knowledge about the world backstage the matches. I would have liked more scenes on the training process and bonding between Ho Young and Eun Ho rather than their awkward attempts to impress Ji Na. She felt a tiny bit like a distraction from the sports part and I thought that was a bummer.
Besides from that I think all actors portrayed their characters well and the series definitely had potential. I may also have liked it too be a bit longer after all, even though the ending didn’t feel rushed (despite the 4 episodes).

I think the main story of the series was the bond between the two guys and I get that they wanted to show multiple situations in which their rivalry would become clear. But for me, the first episode, their first meeting was enough to establish their relationship. In my opinion the series didn’t need a girl to show how two completely different guys could end up as friends and teammates who depended on one another. It could’ve done with a little more build-up in the relationship, but apart from that I didn’t think it was too bad.

I will know return to my sappy regular dramas focussed purely on romantic human relationships (kidding, still love them), but I will definitely be open to another sports drama if I discover one again.
Catch you later!