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

High Society
(상류사회 / Sangryu Sahui)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hi there! It hasn’t been more than 10 days since I posted my last review, but I went through this so fast, I can’t help it!
I really enjoy watching these ‘old-school’ type of K-Dramas that are just 16 episodes but immediately pull you in and don’t let you go until you’re finished with them. I heard about this years ago, and I’ve always kept it in the back of my head as one of the ‘classics’ that I still had to check out, so here we are! Let’s get started!

So, first of all, a summary. High Society is a drama that embodies the famous K-Drama trope of placing people of different social classes together. The four people on the poster are the main characters, two of them are from rich families, two of them aren’t.
Jang Yoon Ha (played by Uee/Kim Yoo Jin) is the youngest daughter of the president of Tae Jin Group, a very wealthy group that consists of multiple different branches and businesses. Her parents are elderly and she has three older siblings, 1 brother and 2 sisters. Despite the fact that she has always been covered by her family’s reputation, at home she is treated as the unwanted and troublemaking youngest child. The only person that treats her well is her older brother. From the moment she was born, for some reason her mother decided to use her as a scapegoat for everything that went wrong and she has been growing up unhappily from all the mental abuse. To get away from her parents and start preparing for a life on her own without them, she starts a part-time job at a big supermarket.
She works there together with her closest friend Lee Ji Yi (played by Im Ji Yeon). Ji Yi is not from a rich family and she doesn’t know that Yoon Ha is. Ji Yi has always been very aware of how important money is after her parents got divorced, and she wants to live a simple but happy life. Ji Yi is very pure and honest, and ambitious to get higher up in her career, although she starts out at the supermarket. Ji Yi initially has a crush on the Deputy Manager of the supermarket, Choi Joon Gi (played by Sung Joon).
Joon Gi is also not from a wealthy family, but he has worked his way up as a manager in the Yoo Min Supermarket chain. He has always been envious of people from rich families and he is very ambitious to become a part of their class, even though his parents are from a lower class – his father is handicapped and his mother works as a cleaning lady at the house of Yoon Ha’s father’s mistress – fun coincidental fact.
And then there is Yoo Chang Soo (played by Park Hyung Shik), the youngest son of the Yoo Min chain family (his older brother is the director). He is kind of a playboy/bad boy who hasn’t actually been that aware of his own elitism.
All with their own intentions and goals in mind, they become more and more involved with each other, but in the end the differences in their social classes seem to continually keep them from being together.
Romance starts blooming between Yoon Ha and Joon Gi, romance starts blooming between Ji Yi and Chang Soo. Two couples, both consisting of one poor and one rich person. Will the rich kids be able to overcome the social standards that their families have raised for them?

First, I would like to say once again that I really enjoy watching these ‘older’ K-Dramas now. Now, if I watch a drama from 2015 or before that, I can already see so many things that have changed since then, and there’s always these classical tropes that really make a classic K-Drama. The theme of rich versus poor, of course, isn’t original at all, and at some point it took a very Hana Yori Dango-kind of turn, but I really enjoyed it. And although it’s a slightly older drama, there was enough things that I found really refreshing, most of all the relationship between the main characters in itself.

The relationship between Yoon Ha and Joon Gi developed quite fast, already within the first three episodes. And what kept it interesting for me was that from the start, I wasn’t quite sure about Joon Gi’s intentions. It felt strange that he went along with her crush on him (which also came kind of out of nowhere) so quickly and easily. He immediately agreed to start dating, their first kiss followed not long after that.. and still I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all good and well. I know now that it was the whole point that he was first intentionally approaching her (or rather, using the fact that she approached him), to get closer to that High Society class that he yearned for so badly. However, as is to be expected, from a certain point on he starts to develop real feelings for her. But until then, I found it hard to see his true intentions, because he did a really good job performing that. Of course, it wasn’t right at all, and he also chose the completely wrong person to do it, because all Yoon Ha wanted was to get away from that High Society that he was chasing after. As he said it at some point, and as was repeated later by Yoon Ha: ‘His dream is her reality. Her reality is his dream.’
Eventually, of course, Yoon Ha finds out about the reason he approached her. She finds evidence in his house that he already knew she was rich before she told him. Unfortunately, just as she finds this out, Joon Gi was just starting to genuinely love her – as a matter of fact, he had already bought a ring to propose to her at that stage.
In the last couple of episodes, he is desperate to start over and get her back ‘the right way’.

As for Ji Yi and Chang Soo, they also meet at the supermarket. They first meet when Ji Yi still has a crush on Joon Gi and Chang Soo makes fun of her. However, he starts to get more interested in her as he sees how unique her personality is. When Ji Yi lets her crush on Joon Gi go for Yoon Ha, he starts approaching her again and despite his arrogant attitude, Ji Yi starts to like him more and more. All seems to go well between them until Chang Soo’s mother suddenly starts to interfere in his marriage prospects. She personally goes out of her way to meet with Ji Yi and tells her that she’ll never pass as Chang Soo’s wife, and if all they want to do is date, they should just break up before it gets too serious. Because she can see that for Chang Soo, it’s already getting serious.
So then their relationship becomes quite heavy and painful, because they start to care for each other so much and they keep postponing the moment that they really have to separate. Until Chang Soo’s mother goes (as I said before) full Hana Yori Dango-mode on her and starts indirectly threatening Ji Yi to the point where she’s almost kicked out of her house if she doesn’t stop seeing Chang Soo. Then, the two involuntarily decide to break up. However, they’re still both aching inside and this doesn’t stop until FINALLY Chang Soo’s mom decides to allow it, purely because she sees her son is genuinely suffering from not being able to live with Ji Yi in his life.

Can I just say that I absolutely LOVED the Ji Yi and Chang Soo couple. They were so unbelievably precious. I really liked Ji Yi’s character, she was so incredibly pure and honest and precious. And Chang Soo got a lot of character development because of her, he became a totally different person (this is also props to Park Hyung Shik of course, but I’ll go on to fangirl about him later). But honestly, I was hyping so much over their romance. Especially in the scene when they were in the hotel and Chang Soo told the story about the frog and the scorpion and she said that she didn’t mind being stung… MAN. That was so beautiful. I could feel the love they had for each other so clearly there. And I really liked that story as well, it was a good analogy. And I liked that it kept coming back between the two of them after that as well, they kept using the ‘frog and scorpion’ as an example only they understood. Yes, they were definitely my favorite couple.

I will talk a bit about Yoon Ha’s family, since they are also quite important in the story. As I said before, Yoon Ha didn’t grow up very happy. It’s almost as if her parents were from another dynasty, that’s how conservative and old-fashioned they were.
Her mother, Min Hye Soo (played by Go Doo Shim), has been neglected by her husband for years – especially after Yoon Ha was born. When he got himself a mistress, she started blaming everything that went wrong between them and their family on Yoon Ha, telling her that she was the cause of all the misfortune. The only child she really seems to care about is her son. She doesn’t involve herself with her three daughters until her oldest daughter starts becoming more independent and ambitious about taking over the company.
Her father, Jang Won Shik (played by Yoon Joo Sang), doesn’t seem to care about anything else than his company, not even about his wife and children. He is distant, unfriendly, and uninterested in what any of them did at all. When he was fed up with his family, he would visit his mistress’s house to ‘get some rest’.
Her oldest sister, Jang Ye Won (played by Yoon Ji Hye), was always envious of the fact that only their brother was raised as an heir to take over the company one day. She was used by her father to test her brother in his ambition and leadership, and in this process she herself also became more ambitious. It is revealed that she has been dealing with a very unpleasant marriage and she also shows her cold side when she tells her mother that she’s planning the divorce and lets her husband take custody over their children because ‘he loves them a lot’. So I guess she doesn’t love her own children enough to even care about being apart from them? I say cold.
Her brother, Jang Gyung Joon (played by Lee Sang Woo) is, as mentioned before, the only person in her family who treats Yoon Ha with affection. He is the only person she can turn to, who seems to care about her. He has been tested by his father for a very long time to become the heir of Tae Jin Group, but it seems like he doesn’t really enjoy it and he keeps getting into conflicts with Ye Won.
Her second older sister, Jang So Hyun, is the middle child and she receives probably the least pressure of all. She’s the daughter who only cares about appearances and social media. She fights with Yoon Ha a lot, Yoon Ha calls her ‘Seven Year Old’.
Apart from that there are some regular staff members that appear, most important being Butler Hong, the loyal butler companion of her mother. It is mentioned that he came with her when she was married into Jang Won Shik’s family to support her with a familiar face around her. He is the person Yoon Ha’s mother is closest with in the series.

By the way, Jang Won Shik’s mistress also plays a side role. I will refer to her as Han Nam Dong*. Joon Gi’s mother coincidentally works as a housekeeper at her place.
*Throughout the entire series, they always referred to her as Han Nam Dong so I just assumed that that was her name. However, after checking DramaWiki/AsianWiki for the actress’s name, I found out that the character’s name is actually Kim Seo Ra. So maybe they use Han Nam Dong/Hannamdong to refer to the neighborhood she lives in or something? It would make sense, to be honest, for his wife to say, ‘he went to Hannamdong/I met with Hannamdong’, just to avoid having to call her husband’s mistress by her actual name.
Anyway, I don’t recall anyone ever calling her Kim Seo Ra throughout the series, so I’ll just stick with Han Nam Dong. It feels strange to suddenly start calling her by a different name than what I’m used to.

Okay, so one of the main plots of the story is the one about Yoon Ha’s brother. In the first couple of episodes, we see how close they are, although it was revealed that it wasn’t always like that. In any case, we see that he means a lot to Yoon Ha, he is literally the only person who makes it bearable to stay in her parents’ house.
At some point, Gyung Joon is going on a vacation and Yoon Ha is supposed to go with him, but when they get on the private jet, Gyung Joon tells her to just take the days off and stay in Seoul to spend time with her boyfriend (she and Joon Gi have just gotten together at that point). He sees how happy she is when she talks about him and decides for her to stay.
The next day, Yoon Ha’s world is turned upside down when news reaches them that her brother was involved in a ship accident on his holiday and his body hasn’t been found. Filled with guilt (fuelled by her mother who, again, blamed everything, even his death, on her), Yoon Ha becomes consumed by the thought that everyone that she loves, leaves her. She doesn’t deem herself worthy of Joon Gi and tries to break up with him. But he gets her to talk and comforts her – leading to their first kiss (even though at this point, Joon Gi doesn’t genuinely love her yet). It’s all part of his calculated plan.

Anyway, a lot changes in Yoon Ha’s family after her brother disappears. Ye Won’s ambitions get the better of her and she starts pining for their father’s company, her mother loses her mind over the presumed death of her favorite child and starts drinking and giving in to the mindset that she has nothing left to care for. Yoon Ha is confronted by the fact that apparently, her brother left her all sorts of things before he left, he even bought stocks in her name, he leaves her a key and a USB to secret information about the company: in summary: it’s as if he planned to disappear.
Mainly through these things I didn’t believe for a second that he was dead. It was way too coincidental and convenient for him to die. Also, it would’ve been way too cruel to Yoon Ha. I just kept waiting for the moment that he’d suddenly reappear like ‘hey guys, this was all a test! AND YOU FAILED’, or something like that. In the end, I was right, he didn’t die, he voluntarily disappeared to get away from his family (can’t blame him for that). And he tried to give Yoon Ha a bigger presence within the family and the company. Thanks to his disappearance, Yoon Ha was forced to start working at her father’s company opposite Ye Won, who has far more work experience.

It’s interesting, because if you read my last drama review on The Great Seducer, you might remember I was critical about how many (unnecessary) characters there were. Family members that didn’t have anything to do or contribute to the story. But in the case of High Society, the families were very important. They stayed in the background, which was good, but their influence on mainly Yoon Ha’s and Chang Soo’s lives and personalities was essential to the story.
Also, there were no unnecessary characters. Some people were only mentioned by name (such as Chang Soo’s father & Ye Won’s and Gyung Joon’s families), because that was all that was needed. It saved the screentime for the important things and people and I really liked that. The only person I wasn’t very sure about in this regard was Yoon Ha’s second sister, So Hyeon, because in my opinion she didn’t really contribute as much as a character, she was just there as yet another thorn in Yoon Ha’s side.

So basically, the foundation of the story was the love story between Yoon Ha and Joon Gi while showing their respective family backgrounds. Yoon Ha’s background is explored a little more thoroughly because it is important for us to know her position within her family and the fact that she has no desire to remain a part of the High Society per se. For Joon Gi, the most important thing to know is that he has always envied the High Society and wants to be a part of it. This is why he takes Yoon Ha as an opportunity to marry himself into it, without being aware of her personal family situation. The whole plot of her brother’s disappearance and how this changes her family members is also meant as a tool to give her pressure and background behind her (fake) love story with Joon Gi.
Then there’s the love story between Ji Yi and Chang Soo, in which Chang Soo goes through a similar experience. Shortly put, Yoon Ha and Chang Soo both experience the limitations of their prestigious High lives when it comes to (marrying for) love.
I think it was an interesting take on the classical rich versus poor trope, because it put things in perspective. It’s all about the ‘who is really the rich one?’ question. ‘The one with the largest amounts of money, or the one who can live the most freely?’ I think in the end all four of them agreed that it was the last one.

I would like to comment on the cast now.

One thing I liked in all the actors to be honest: THEY CRIED. They actually cried like normal people would cry. Apart from a few cases where they would just remain motionless and one dramatic tear would fall down (ahem Chang Soo), they all had a moment where they would break out in tears and SOBBED GROSSLY. Which I always appreciate. People shouldn’t worry about looking pretty when they cry.
Also, the KISSES. I can always appreciate a good kiss in comparison to the majority of the ‘press-yo-lips-together-look-we’re-kissing’ cases in Asian dramas. These people were not afraid to actually kiss. Bonus points.

First of all, even though I’d heard of Uee, up until now the only other drama I’ve seen with her is Manhole (which is from a couple of years after this one). I also found out she’s in You’re Beautiful, but it’s been ages ago since I watched that and I didn’t realize who she was in that. Anyways, I’ve also heard she has been receiving incredible amounts of hate comments because she lost weight or something. Anyways, I really liked her character in High Society. She was fierce despite her sucky family, she kept herself going with the few things she did have that made her happy, and she didn’t let no man walk over her. I really liked how fierce her eyes could be, she would have this ‘don’t screw with me’ kind of look on her face.
I think she did really well, she was able to portray a variety of emotions and she had a really cool style!

I really liked watching another drama with Sung Joon. I’ve watched several dramas with him and I really like him but lately he hasn’t really been appearing that much anymore. Anyways, I find that he tends to be typecasted a little into the distant, mysterious, calculating type (maybe he just has the face for it), but it was nice to see him again. I think I liked Joon Gi the best when the whole act with Yoon Ha was over and he started pursuing her genuinely, even honestly admitting to all the wrong he’d did her. This gave a whole new, slightly playful edge to his character that wasn’t there before.

Lee Ji Yi was by far my favorite character in this series. Although I didn’t know the actress, Im Ji Yeon (or Lim Ji Yeon?), I really was impressed by her. She was so refreshing! So pure and honest and straightforward! She didn’t hold back and she wasn’t afraid to keep being her bubbly self all the way. I really liked that, even though you’d think she’d be the typical naive young girl, she was smarter than you expected and she had a very good consciousness of what was going on. When Chang Soo’s mom started to bother her, she took it upon herself to keep her distance from him and even when it was allowed, she didn’t automatically go back to him. She really wanted to prove (to herself, I think) that she could make it on her own.
I also saw that this was actually her very first drama!

Park Hyung Shik. What can I say. I love him.
The last thing I’ve seen of him is Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, and before that I think I’ve only seen him as side characters. Anyways, he was only 23(!) when he filmed this drama and I can’t really say anything negative about him. His chemistry with Im Ji Yeon was tangible and in the scene where she broke down in tears in front of his mom I cried with him.
This boy shouldn’t be crying. Just saying. It’s bad for all our hearts.
I really liked that I was able to watch this older drama from him, it’s always a pleasure.

I was shook when I found out Yoon Ha’s mother, Go Doo Shim, is also the granny fairy from Gyeryong Fairytale! There she is such a precious little grandma and here… well let’s say that she was a mother only in title. How she treated Yoon Ha, that was not parenting. And then in the second-to-last or last episode, she finally started acting like a mother because she suddenly ‘became aware of how she had treated Yoon Ha’. Well, I’m sorry, but I didn’t buy it. Anyways, she performed really well. I especially liked the scenes she had with her husband where she got drunk and started throwing things at him – she was definitely allowed to show the versatility of her acting!
In all the other scenes I was constantly thinking how fitting it would’ve been if she’d played Domyouji’s mother in the Korean version of Hana Yori Dango. She’d pull it off 100%.

I’ve seen multiple dramas with Yoon Joo Sang, Yoon Ha’s father, and he always plays this grumpy type of guy! Maybe it’s his face and barking voice haha. Anyways, his character was quite despicable, there was one time when you see him reflect and show emotion, but in any other way he was the head of the family who felt like he was entitled to do what he wanted because he was a rich man. But not to show any empathy to his family like that, it made it hard to really sympathize with him. I couldn’t help but encourage Yoon Ha to get out of that house ASAP. I think he is a good actor, but I would like to see him play more friendly characters, haha. That would be a nice surprise.

I realized I knew the guy who played Yoon Ha’s brother, Lee Sang Woo, from 20th Century Boy and Girl, he played Anthony! I remarked then that I found him quite stiff and with not a lot of emotion on his face. I still thought that here, although it didn’t bother me as much as then. But I also liked this drama better, haha.

One more shoutout that I would like to give is to the woman who played Joon Gi’s mom, Yang Hee Kyung. I loved her so much. I just wanted to hug her. She was such a warm and lovely mother who would just regularly pass by her son’s house unasked to clean and bring him food, going her own way, doing her own thing. And his father, played by Nam Myung Ryul, was also super sweet. He was suffering from some physical handicap and in the beginning I believe Joon Gi was embarrassed of him because he was never able to stand up for himself as a poor man, but I’m glad they made up in the end. His parents were the most precious people and they deserved all the hugs!

All in all, I enjoyed watching this drama. Although the theme of rich versus poor is anything but original, I still like the spin they put on it, proving the images people have of rich people wrong. We have to remember that everyone, rich or poor, has a story. Having a lot of money doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re happy, not having a lot of money doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re unhappy. People have to find their own happiness despite their backgrounds. And though I have to slightly disagree with Yoon Ha on her comment that ‘she is not her background’, because you can never fully separate from how you were brought up, I still think the most important thing is where you go from there.

The one that’s next on my list is even older, from 2013. Sometimes it’s really nice to go back and see some series that used to be a hype almost 10 years ago. And then watch one from one year ago and see how much has changed in tropes and mannerisms and acting/setting styles. Loving this! It will be a while until I can start on some recent dramas unless I decided to change the order of my list, but for now I’m just going to stick to it. There are some more exciting ones coming up that I’ve been anxiously looking forward to as well!!

Until my next review! ^^

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

The Great Seducer / Tempted
(위대한 유혹자 / Widaehan Yuhokja)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hello hello all! It’s been quite some time since my last review. Within the last couple of months, I’ve moved and a lot happened with work and life and I also started watching some more non Asian series on Netflix and Amazon Prime which kind of distracted me from K-Dramas for a while, even though I had already started this series. So my apologies for the belated review! After meeting with my fellow K-Drama loving bestie I completely got back on track so I will continue my to-watch list again starting now 🙂 I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long, haha. The only disadvantage for me to take so much time finishing this drama and writing this review is that not all details are as clear in my memory as others. So I apologize if this is not the most interesting review, I hope I can make it worth your while.

This drama had been on my list for a while as well. Even though I swore to never watch a drama with Joy again after seeing The Liar and His Lover, it was Kim Min Jae that persuaded me to still give it a try. And I’m glad I did watch it. I wasn’t disappointed.

To start with a short summary: Kwon Si Hyun, Lee Se Joo and Choi Soo Ji are friends for life. The three of them, all from rich families, have since high school been a unit of three (I will keep using the term ‘Unit of Three’ to describe them in this review since I quite like it). No-one comes between them and although they act lavishly and arrogant, when it’s just the three of them it’s clear that their friendship runs deep and has many layers. When one is in trouble, the other two come rushing in matter-of-factly.
Kwon Si Hyun (played by Woo Do Hwan), the only son of a large conglomerate’s director, is ‘the great seducer’. He excels in seducing women and letting his friends clean up after him when he’s done with them. His mother has recently passed away and he has a bad relationship with his father.
Lee Se Joo (played by Kim Min Jae) is the youngest son of another rich family and he is constantly beaten up by his relatives. His mother is in a coma in the hospital for unexplained reasons, and he only has 1 other person at home who treats him normally. To escape his home situation, he relishes in the night club life and is almost as big a playboy as Si Hyun, the only difference being that he gets into fights more often.
Choi Soo Ji (played by Moon Ga Young) is the only girl of the group and lives like a princess. Her mother is the director of a big hospital group, Jungmyung.
The three friends have never had to worry about people judging them or bothering them, they have always been together and they don’t really care about other people. Until the time approaches that they’re going to have to face arranged marriages and Soo Ji is publicly humiliated by her fiancé Lee Ki Young (Lee Jae Gyoon). She conjures up a plan to revenge him, asking Si Hyun’s and Se Joo’s help. Her plan: to take revenge on Lee Ki Young by taking away from him both his first love and the girl who replaced her as his new fiancée.
This first love is Eun Tae Hee (Joy (Red Velvet)/Park Soo Young). Tae Hee has been going through a rough time after her parents got divorced. Her father is a barista in Germany and her mother a renowned pottery artist with whom she has a bad relationship since the divorce. Tae Hee comes back to Seoul to live by herself and pursue her dream of becoming an architect, bringing her to the same college as the Unit of Three. She knows Lee Ki Young because her father used to be his mentor. Anyways, she has no feelings for him whatsoever and isn’t really thinking about romance anyway.
The girl who replaced Soo Ji as Lee Ki Young’s fiancée is Park Hye Jeong, a very naive and princess-like girl who is also the daughter of a large food company’s owner.
Soo Ji’s plan is as follows: Si Hyun has to seduce Tae Hee and she will become ‘friends’ with Hye Jeong to eventually rid Lee Ki Young of all the people he cares about.

This is the set-up of the story in episode 1. I have to say that it took me a couple of episodes to get on top of everything because from second 1 there’s already SO much happening and SO many characters being introduced. It felt like meeting all characters (main AND side) in one single episode and it was a very turbulent start for me. We are pushed right into the dramatic lives this Unit of Three lives without a warning or gentle introduction.
I was also surprised by the sensual innuendos that were shown from the start, because that’s quite rare for a Korean drama. They really showed the playfulness with which the Three interacted with each other, especially Si Hyun and Soo Ji, who would sometimes even pretend that they were a couple or that they had no boundaries when it came to physical contact.
At first glance, it seems like there is some lowkey romantic tension between Si Hyun and Soo Ji, more than between Se Joo and Soo Ji. Se Joo is, in that respect, initially kind of a third wheel. When the revenge plan starts bringing tension between Si Hyun and Soo Ji, Se Joo is kept in the dark about a lot of things.

Let me briefly jot down all the different storylines and then I will pass by them one by one.
1. The Unit of Three (the friendship between Si Hyun, Se Joo, and Soo Ji)
2. The love story between Si Hyun and Tae Hee
3. Tae Hee’s story and family background
4. The relationship between Si Hyun’s father and Soo Ji’s mother
5. The relationship between Si Hyun’s father and Tae Hee’s mother
6. Hye Jeong’s and her family situation
7. Kyung Joo and her mother
(I initially wrote down two more, but I will probably cover them in the above 7 and I don’t want this review to become too long. There is already so much content to cover!)

Yes, it’s a lot. And it’s crammed into 16 full episodes (32 back-to-back). Of course, with so many storylines and characters in a series, some tend to be more interesting than others, some get more attention than others, etc.
For example, for me, the most important thing was of course the romance between Si Hyun and Tae Hee. And a storyline that didn’t really concern me that much was what was happening with Soo Ji’s mother and the scandal she got into. Some minor characters were introduced in the beginning and were, in my opinion not very important as the series progressed (for example, Kyung Joo’s mother). I think most things that happened in the beginning were purely written to emphasize the lavish and scandalous lifestyles of the Three. Anyways, here we go.

1. The Unit of Three (the friendship between Si Hyun, Se Joo, and Soo Ji)
The friendship between the Unit of Three forms the basic layer of the entire series. Even though you might say that Si Hyun and Tae Hee become the main characters as their romance progresses and Soo Ji and Se Joo disappear to the background as more supportive characters, without the bond between the Unit of Three there is no basis. It’s an unspoken bond that no-one can break. They even have their own secret hideout in a penthouse somewhere that Se Joo’s mother left him, which they use as a place to gather, hang and make their plans. No-one else is allowed in there.
Both Si Hyun and Se Joo have made advances on Soo Ji in the past, but she always brushed them off. As Si Hyun gets more and more involved with Tae Hee, Soo Ji starts to become more and more confused about her real feelings for Si Hyun. As Si Hyun’s feelings for Tae Hee lead him to start drifting away from his friends and eventually make him decide to leave their little group, Soo Ji has a hard time holding herself together. Se Joo, desperate to keep supporting Soo Ji, keeps taking her side and even ends up telling Tae Hee the truth about why Si Hyun initially approached her, driving them apart again.
In the end, they all kind of make peace with the fact they grew apart and split up. After the 5 year time jump in the last episode, Si Hyun anonymously sends Soo Ji flowers on one of her cello recitals with a note containing Se Joo’s current address in Japan and she visits him there. With that, we can assume Soo Ji and Se Joo do end up together after all while Si Hyun makes his way back to Tae Hee.

2. The love story between Si Hyun and Tae Hee
While the friendship of the UoT is the basis of the story, the main storyline of the series has to be the romance between Kwon Si Hyun and Eun Tae Hee. When Si Hyun is instructed by Soo Ji to seduce Tae Hee, who initially has no direct interest in romance, we see that it’s a challenging game for him. He approaches her quite aggressively, starts chasing after her and turns up at places she regularly visits (including her volunteer job at a care facility for elderly women). In the beginning, Tae Hee is annoyed by him but he ends up breaking down her walls and she lets him in. She lets herself be seduced by ‘the great seducer’.
However, the plan doesn’t really go as they expected because Si Hyun (of course) starts developing real feelings for Tae Hee. And then he starts to struggle between two worlds: his friends, the UoT, their unspoken pact and the plan; and the new world of redemption he found thanks to Tae Hee, in which he is free again to focus on the simple beauties in life and his almost forgotten passion for drawing. This imbalance causes him to waver a couple of times – he ends up hurting Tae Hee in front of his friends twice.

I have to add here that I really appreciated how straight-forward Tae Hee was with him. When he turned her down in front of his friends (before crawling back to her afterwards) she held her head high and straight-out asked him what the hell his deal was. Yes, as soon as she left she bawled her eyes out but she had the guts to not let his friends see that. And then she would just keep confronting him until he told her what was really going on. In the second of these cases, when Si Hyun was pulling the classic ‘I found out something that involves our pasts and could hurt you so I’m protecting you by being an ass and pushing you away very harshly’ trope, she actually cornered him, got him to emotionally break down and had him tell her what was going on. And they always made up so quickly after that!
It’s always nice to see a couple talk with each other in their relationship and not just accept it when one of them suddenly seems not to be interested anymore.

In the end they still break up. The way in which their pasts are connected is still an issue (even though the reason they initially broke up was actually a misunderstanding). But they find each other again when Tae Hee becomes a professional architect and Si Hyun becomes her secret client. So it’s still a happy ending for this beautiful couple!
Seriously though, I thought they were an adorable couple. Their chemistry was really good and I really enjoyed watching all the scenes where it was just the two of them together.

3. Tae Hee’s story and family background
Okay, so, one of the complicated storylines here is Tae Hee’s (family’s) story and how it ties her to Si Hyun (and indirectly to Soo Ji). Because things get very intricate.
Basically, Tae Hee’s parents divorced when she was a teenager because her mother loved another man. Tae Hee was more on her father’s side and stayed with him in Germany for a while. After coming back to Seoul, her relationship with her mother got worse, and one day after a fight Tae Hee ran out and got involved in a car accident, leaving her physically, but mostly mentally traumatized and it took her a long time to recover from it.
The details of the car accident were: she ran out after the fight and discovered a car in the middle of the road with a seemingly sick woman behind the wheel. Tae Hee promises her that she’ll find help, runs away again and then gets hit by another car coming around the corner (the driver was on the phone, but it was night so they didn’t expect anyone to pop up on the road unexpectedly like Tae Hee did). The person driving the car got out, made sure Tae Hee was alright, promised to come back for her, but drove away and never actually came back. This person later turns out to be Soo Ji’s mother, who was looking for the sick woman in the car, who happened to be Si Hyun’s mother.
Si Hyun’s mother later passed away because of this action – she had been too sick to drive by herself in the first place. The reason she was driving: she was on her way to see Tae Hee’s mom, because she discovered that her husband (Si Hyun’s father) was having an affair with her (Tae Hee’s mother).
SO BASICALLY. Tae Hee eventually finds out her mother cheated on her father with her boyfriend’s father. One legit reason to break up with said boyfriend? You tell me.
Anyway, Tae Hee has had a hard time because of her parents’ divorce and she has always blamed her mother for making her and her father suffer. When she finds out about her mom’s past relationship with Si Hyun’s father, she blames her even more for even making Si Hyun’s family suffer as well.

Okay, so the major thing that made this drama so ‘full’, to me, was because the stories of everyone’s parents were crammed into the narrative almost as prominently as those of the main characters. Of course, it’s not like the parents became main characters, but their connected pasts linked almost all of their children together and at some point their stories started to almost overtake their childrens’.

Let me make the narrative of the parents clear because here it becomes complicated to write a review:
Si Hyun’s father, Kwon Seok Woo (played by Shin Sung Woo)
Si Hyun’s mother (played by Choi Ji Na)
Soo Ji’s mother, Myung Mi Ri (played by Kim Seo Hyung)
Tae Hee’s father, Eun Myung Ryul (played by Kwon Hyuk)
Tae Hee’s mother, Seol Young Won (played by Jeon Mi Sun)

First of all, as I’ve already given away earlier, Si Hyun’s father and Tae Hee’s mother are in love with each other/had an affair while they were both married. When they meet again, their feelings are rekindled, even though Si Hyun’s father is just getting engaged to Soo Ji’s mother for business purposes. Let’s start there.

4. The relationship between Si Hyun’s father and Soo Ji’s mother
Si Hyun’s father and Soo Ji’s mother Myung Mi Ri are planning to merge their two respective companies, JK Group and Jungmyung Hospital, by getting married. This would result in Si Hyun and Soo Ji becoming siblings. Of course, initially the kids rebel against this – possibly also because of still-budding feelings that exist between them in that period.
However, the engagement of their parents seems to be unyielding. Even though Myung Mi Ri is struggling to keep a hold of her hospital after a scandal and is tormented by her future mother-in-law (Si Hyun’s grandma). It’s a purely business-related marriage, but despite that she does try to start acting like a wife to her fiancé. Kwon Seok Woo, however can spare little of his attention to her after he is reunited with Tae Hee’s mother.
Honestly I don’t think he treated Mi Ri well at all. In the end, I’m glad they didn’t get married and Mi Ri chose to build her own independent clinic that wasn’t desperate for sponsors she couldn’t find.
I have to be completely honest when I say that Mi Ri’s storyline was one of the least interesting ones to me. I didn’t really pay attention to what she was going through because I was too invested in the romance part of the story (can you blame me?). But that’s also why I definitely felt like they were trying to put too much content into the drama.
And also, coming back to Si Hyun’s father, the whole thing in the beginning where he told Si Hyun he wasn’t his biological father, leaving Si Hyun completely alone in the world except for his two friends – and then in the end this turned out to be a lie that Si Hyun’s mom told him to punish him for the cheating? What was that about? She hated her husband so much for cheating that she actually forged a DNA test to take his son away from him? No matter how much I stand for female independence (and I’m not saying Kwon Seok Woo did a good job at parenting), I still think that went a bit too far for just a vengeful prank. Si Hyun completely lost his sense of belonging because of this, while his relationship with his father was already bad.
If Tae Hee hadn’t saved him and brought him home where he truly belonged (which wasn’t even with his friends as he first thought), he would’ve maybe ended up in even worse circles.

Anyways, as mentioned before, Soo Ji’s mother Myung Mi Ri turns out to be the one who accidentally hit Tae Hee with her car so many years ago and she left her there in her search for Si Hyun’s mother who’d driven off in search of Tae Hee’s mother (caught up yet?). She kept the accident a secret and even covered it up, lying to Si Hyun about it when he comes asking questions.
When Si Hyun finds out the two cases of his mother’s and Tae Hee’s car accident are connected, Myung Mi Ri goes so far as to tell him that his mother may well have been the one who hit Tae Hee, causing Si Hyun to push Tae Hee away because he feels so guilty about this. I would like to thank the K-Drama Lord again for making Si Hyun and Tae Hee clear up their misunderstandings.

But honestly, “car accident”. They were making such a big fuss over it, and from the fragmented flashbacks and the way Tae Hee talked about it I was really expecting a terrible accident with blood and trauma and all. But when they eventually showed the entire flashback, I was kind of underwhelmed. I thought that Mi Ri had actually been responsible for the car accident of Si Hyun’s mother, but it turns out that Si Hyun’s mother drove off on her own while being sick. Mi Ri was only coming after her because she was aware that she might’ve been responsible for Si Hyun’s mom to drive off, since she tipped her off about her husband’s affair.
And Tae Hee really just happened to be there. And from how it looked, she wasn’t directly hit by Mi Ri’s car, she grazed the side of the car and fell.
Yes, it was really inappropriate of Mi Ri to leave a hurt and traumatized teenager at the side of the road while she could’ve easily taken her with her in her car and brought both her and Si Hyun’s mom to the hospital. But Mi Ri was really distracted at the moment and she could only think of finding Si Hyun’s mom. I’m not trying to dismiss Tae Hee’s traumatized view of the incident, but I could kind of understand Mi Ri’s position and thinking as well. In any case, the accident seemed less bad than I had thought after the foreshadowed glimpses we got from it. And the flashbacks Tae Hee had when she was almost hit by a car at some point and went all shock and tears. So I guess, in hindsight, I have to admit I did find the accident that tied everyone together a bit anticlimactic. I thought Mi Ri had actually hit both Si Hyun’s mother AND Tae Hee and had been hiding the fact she killed Si Hyun’s mother or something. So that made me go kinda ‘eh’.

5. The relationship between Si Hyun’s father and Tae Hee’s mother
Now that I’m writing this it occurs to me how much (past) drama was centered around Si Hyun’s father while he wasn’t even a major character in the show. Sure, create some past story around the kids’ parents for background-filling purposes, but to keep the parents’ drama alive so far in the future that it even starts to impact their kids’ lives…
Again, I will confess, it still has to do with the fact that I was so invested in Si Hyun and Tae Hee’s love story that I cared for little else haha.
Anyways, Kwon Seok Woo and Seol Young Won (Tae Hee’s mom) met each other a long time, when they were both married. Seok Woo’s wife, Si Hyun’s mother, was sick and being treated at Myung Mi Ri’s hospital. Young Won was a famous pottery artist.
After Si Hyun’s mother passed away, the two were separated and didn’t hear from each other for two years. Then, Young Won had an exhibition in the same hall where Seok Woo and Mi Ri’s new cooperation and engagement were announced. Seok Woo saw a poster for Young Won’s exhibition and found her. Young Won, no clue that he’s engaged, went along with rekindling their mutual feelings for each other, even after all this time.

I have to say I couldn’t really blame Young Won. She honestly didn’t know he was getting married – he didn’t find it important to mention, apparently. She lived in constant regret of screwing up the relationship with her daughter, and said daughter kept blaming her for every single bad thing that happened. She genuinely loved Seok Woo – but still she immediately stepped back when she found out about his engagement to Mi Ri. She literally went back to her gallery in the countryside to take her distance.
As I’ve written in length in my review of Valid Love, I have come to a new perspective when it comes to people having affairs. When is something an affair? I keep calling Seok Woo and Young Won’s thing an affair, but it’s never mentioned they actually cheated on their spouses. It’s just mentioned that they were in love with each other despite being married to other people. And the way Young Won immediately left when finding out about Seok Woo and Mi Ri made me think she really didn’t have any interest in their love becoming ‘an affair’. I don’t know, I understand Tae Hee needed a scapegoat and someone to hate after her parents’ divorce, but I honestly didn’t dislike Young Won.

I would like to take a moment here to say a special something about the actress who played Tae Hee’s mother, Jeon Mi Sun. I was shocked to hear she committed suicide last year, she was only 48 years old. She portrayed so many moms in K-Dramas, she was such a familiar face and a talented presence. In this drama too, she was such a calm presence, even through all the drama her character was going through with her secret affair and everything. Depression is absolutely atrocious and it takes away the best people. May you Rest In Peace, dear Jeon Mi Sun-sshi. Rest in well-earned peace.

6. Hye Jeong and her family’s situation
So, as I mentioned before in the main summary of this drama (we’ve already dived too deep into the many side stories and I’m in a hurry to finish this review, haha), Park Hye Jeong was one of the main targets of the original revenge plan Soo Ji made up. A naive little princess, she has always been home-schooled by her dominant mother. She doesn’t know anything of the outside world, is a big ditz and is bad at studying. She has a pet turtle she calls ‘Turtle’ (100 originality points). And through business arrangements (her mother owns a food company), she is newly betrothed to Lee Ki Young.
Soo Ji offers to be Hye Jeong’s friend and help her study. When she ultimately gets out more, Hye Jeong even meets a guy (the bartender at a pub they frequent) and falls in love with him. Slowly but surely she becomes more aware of her potential and right and wrong.
Even Soo Ji, who is initially just out for revenge, starts feeling a certain affection towards her, and ultimately she stops using Hye Jeong for the plan as well.
I actually really liked Hye Jeong’s character. Even though in the beginning her role wasn’t completely clear to me (so much happens in the 1st episode that it took me some time to figure out she was also someone they wanted to take revenge on). She was a nice and refreshing character.
It was the whole story with her mother around it that was too much for me. I mean, it could’ve been enough that her mother was an influential person and needed support from bigger companies, but in my opinion they gave her too much story. Just like with Kyung Joo’s mother, whom I will discuss after this, there were several characters that were enough as supporting plots for the side characters but that didn’t need to be further involved in the story. Hye Jeong’s mother was one of those people for me. And then they also introduced her brother and gave him a story as well and all the while I was just like ‘this is leading me so far away from the actual story! I don’t need all these extra unnecessary characters that don’t directly contribute to the plot!’ I’m sorry, nothing personal, but that’s how I felt.
The only thing that mattered to me was that, in the end, Lee Ki Young, she, and Tae Hee were officially brought together as the initial ‘victims’ of the original plan. At that point, I was really reminded that, right, this was what it all started with, these three.
Hye Jeong became her own person, told her mother that she didn’t want to marry Ki Young and follow her own path. And she and her boyfriend were so cute together!

7. Kyung Joo and her mother
I haven’t talked about Kyung Joo yet at all. Go Kyung Joo (played by Jung Ha Dam) is Tae Hee’s best friend. She has a major crush on Se Joo in the beginning and eagerly jumps to the chance to ‘befriend’ Soo Ji if that increases her chances with him. However, she remains a loyal friend to Tae Hee. She just doesn’t know she’s also being used in the plan because she’s too naive to notice and an easy target because she admires The Three so much. She also unknowingly gets dragged into the plan by Soo Ji pretending to be her friend, and somehow (again, I’m not sure anymore) she also ends up helping Hye Jeong study and ultimately introduces Tae Hee to her as a tutor as well.
Okay. A best friend for Tae Hee. Fair enough. But the thing with her mother still puzzles me, as I’ve also mentioned before. Kyung Joo’s mother (portrayed by Lee Young Jin) is introduced more prominently than Kyung Joo herself in the first episode, as someone who looks way younger than she is, who used to be a former model, and as someone that Si Hyun has made out with at a club one time. It’s also revealed that she’s not Kyung Joo’s biological mother, but nothing more (which makes me wonder why they would even reveal that when it has literally nothing to do with the story whatsoever: just to add extra drama to the story with already 384637438 things going on?)
Anyways, after that first introduction that suggests that Kyung Joo’s mother is going to get some special attention, she completely disappears from the drama. You see her maybe two times trying to comfort Kyung Joo when she comes home crying/upset. So, in short, Kyung Joo’s mom gets this puzzling special introduction, and thereafter she doesn’t contribute anything to the drama anymore. I ask why.

But, as I keep repeating, this was my main issue with this drama. There were too many minor characters that got more attention than necessary. For me, the main characters were The Three: Si Hyun, Soo Ji, Se Joo, and Tae Hee. Kyung Joo and Hye Jeong etcetera were side characters. Their parents/family situations should’ve been active in the background. I don’t even know who all those people in Se Joo’s household were, to be honest, except for the older brother that teamed up with Lee Ki Young at the end.
But in this case, the whole issue with the parents taking over the main story at some point bothered me a little bit.
I think they should’ve stuck to the revenge plan going wrong because Si Hyun developed real feelings for Tae Hee as the main story.
When I originally saw the trailer for this drama, I was under the impression that the whole drama was about this guy taking a bet to seduce a girl that had no interest in romance. In the drama itself this only turned out to be a small part of the plot.
Still! I didn’t dislike the drama because of this. Even despite the parents’ drama, the story of Si Hyun and Tae Hee didn’t lose its spotlight. They were still prominently the main characters and overall it was balanced very well.
But there were just a lot of storylines that I didn’t find as interesting or necessary.

I would like to move on to some comments on the casting and then to my conclusion.

First of all, Woo Do Hwan, who played Kwon Si Hyun. He looked SO familiar to me! I kept thinking I knew him from some other drama, but this is the first I’ve seen of him. I think he was cast really well, his acting was really good. He’s also handsome and really sexy (hot damn those lips?) and in his scenes with Tae Hee he’s super sweet. The way he looked at her and smiled when she wasn’t looking was enough to pull some heartstrings. And even though he acted like a jerk a couple of times, his actions were justified by his struggle between staying with his friends and his growing feelings for Tae Hee. He was just trying to figure stuff out and what matters is that he always came through. I think he performed really well.

Secondly, yes I’ll say it again (I find I’m repeating myself a lot in this review but I have to): I was so impressed by Joy in this drama! Her acting in The Liar and His Lover was abysmal and I don’t wanna speak of it again, but I’m so glad that I saw this drama of her. She was cute and sweet, but still not a pushover. She stood her ground when it was needed. I was so happy when Tae Hee didn’t accept Si Hyun pushing her away and literally cornered him in order to tell her the truth.
Really, her chemistry with Woo Do Hwan was amazing and all those kisses!
Very well done. I’m glad I gave this drama a chance even after renouncing Joy before. Her acting really did get much much better in my opinion. I wasn’t irritated by her even once!

I have seen Moon Ga Young (Soo Ji) in a couple of dramas before. In Jealousy Incarnate, she was also part of a friend group with two guys and she was kind of a rebellious teenager. In EXO Next Door she was the main girl who had this blushing thing going on, which was completely different from Soo Ji. Soo Ji was a queen, gorgeous, elegant, dressed like a princess wherever she went, but also sharp and even poisonous at times. You really should not get on her wrong side. But on the other side she also had a really vulnerable side. Soo Ji was a very intricate character. I have to admit, at some point I was a bit done with how apathic she became when Si Hyun quit their friend group. She became so numb and she even attempted suicide and I was just like ‘Girl… what are you doing’.
But I really liked Moon Ga Young’s performance, her presence was really strong and she owned that dominant side of her character. Plus, did I already mention she is stunning?!
Her newest drama ‘Find Me in Your Memory’ is also on my list, looking forward to seeing more of her talent and beauty!

And of course, I cannot forget about Kim Min Jae. I love Kim Min Jae. I don’t know why or since when. I don’t think I’ve even seen that much of him, but his face is just so loveable. The last thing I saw of him was Busted, where he turned out to be a serial killer and I was just like ‘NOO not my baby!!’ Haha.
I only know him from Goblin and Romantic Doctor, Teacher Kim (I still have to watch season 2). And probably The Producers, although I don’t remember who he played there. But anyway. He has such an adorable flower boy face so it was a nice change to see him as a kind of rebellious bad boy character. Even though I briefly disliked Se Joo for telling Tae Hee the whole truth about their original plan out of revenge towards Si Hyun. I mean, at that point, the whole plan didn’t even matter anymore and it just complicated things even more. I always think: it’s not important where you started, but how things developed and at that point Si Hyun really was in love with Tae Hee. Of course, in the beginning their intentions were not good at all, but for my part the initial reasons could’ve been buried somewhere they’d never see the light again.

All in all, I enjoyed the drama (especially the romance ❤ ) but I think they crammed more stories and characters into the drama than necessary. The main storyline was very simple: a group of three close friends want to take revenge on a guy that wronged one of them and in the process of seducing the people around that guy, they become personally involved with them and their intentions and feelings change until they no longer control them.
I was impressed by the level of affection and passion depicted in the drama, starting from episode 1. Asian dramas don’t usually show this much sexual tension and skinship between characters, but I think in that aspect it may have been effected a little bit by the original novel (I just found out the story is loosely based on the 17th century story Dangerous Liaisons (or Les Liaisons Dangereuses), which is kind of cool! I think!).
There were a lot of aspects that I found very modern and almost Western for a Korean drama, also in the behavior of the characters. I’m so used to the innocently budding love between characters in Asian dramas that I was kinda shook when right off the bat Si Hyun and Soo Ji pretended to start making out and they got soooo close to each other. In that aspect as well, it sets itself apart from other typical K-Dramas.

Anyways, I’m very glad I was able to finish this review, it took a couple of days haha. I also purposely left some more details out because it was just too much content and in the end not everything was as important to mention. But please let me know what you thought!
I will continue with my list now, the next one is also an old classic that I still need to watch! See you next time with the next review! Bye-bye!