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

A Business Proposal
(사내맞선 / Sanaematseon)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hiya! I come back to you with a new review before the end of the month! I hope everyone is still keeping healthy and happy out there. I have to say, now that I started working 4 days a week instead of 5, I feel much more rested and I love that I now have some extra time fulfilling that need for rest by watching more drama series, as well. So the drama I watched this time is a very recent one, I decided to put my to watch list on hold for a moment to catch up on some highly anticipated 2022 dramas simply because I could not wait to watch them. This is number one and I can say right off the bat that I’m really glad I watched it now and didn’t force myself to wait. I really liked it. It gave me all the feels of a classic romcom K-Drama, but with actual straightforward, contemporary characters and even though the humor at times got a little slapsticky, it never got annoying or too much. I think it was a very nice mix of classic tropes, but it was also very refreshing because of it’s simplicity, not too much heavy emotional stuff, and very effective chemistry between the main characters. Without further ado, let’s go!

A Business Proposal is a 12-episode Netflix K-Drama with each episode lasting about an hour. It’s about food researcher Shin Ha Ri (played by Kim Se Jeong), who works at a company called GoFood. She’s really good at her work and belongs to Product Development Team 1, so she actually gets to develop new food products with her team. Her family consists further of her parents – I’ll call them Mr. Shin and Mrs. Han – (played respectively by Kim Kwang Gyu and Jung Young Joo) and her younger brother Ha Min (played by Choi Byung Chan). Her parents own a chicken restaurant at which she and her brother also occasionally help out. Ha Ri’s best friend is Jin Young Seo (played by Seol In Ah), who is from a rich family, but who is like a second daughter to Ha Ri’s parents and the two girls hang out a lot and get drunk together occasionally, they are the bestest of besties. On a side note, Ha Ri has a college friend, Lee Min Woo (played by Song Won Suk) on whom she’s had a crush for 7 years, but he never gave her the chance to tell him her feelings since he keeps going back to his ex – despite clearly having some unresolved feelings for Ha Ri too. Min Woo is a chef who also gets involved in a collaboration with Ha Ri’s company at some point, but in any case, he’s Ha Ri’s first love.
On the other hand, there’s Kang Tae Moo (played by Ahn Hyo Seop), he is the CEO of Ha Ri’s company GoFood. His grandfather (played by Lee Duk Hwa) is the Chairman of this company. Anyways, Tae Moo is a very stoic guy who’s a complete workaholic and has little interest in anything else. His secretary and also brother-like best friend is Cha Sung Hoon (played by Kim Min Gyu), and although he tries to alert Tae Moo of his occasional rudeness to people, he mostly just goes along with what he does. When they are together, they always pull a lot of attention since they are both considered to be very handsome.
One day, Tae Moo’s grandfather tells him that he is setting him up on blind dates since he wants Tae Moo to settle down and get married. As a workaholic with no interest in finding romance, Tae Moo refuses but then agrees to go on one date, even if it’s just to keep his grandfather pleased and not hear anything more about these blind dates. The date he’s set up with is, miraculously, Jin Young Seo, Ha Ri’s friend.
Young Seo receives notice of this blind date while she’s out drinking with Ha Ri and begs her friend to take her place in the blind date to scare him off, as Ha Ri has done for her multiple times before. After initially refusing, Ha Ri agrees that it will be the last time and she meets up with Tae Moo while dressed in a very extravagant way with a lot of makeup. She does her best to come off as raunchy as possible, and after she leaves the date she feels confident that he’ll never want to see her again.
But then the news reaches Young Seo that Kang Tae Moo is actually very interested in seeing “her” again – something went terribly wrong with messing up the date and Ha Ri is forced to meet him again a couple of times, although she keeps saying that she doesn’t want to marry him.
Of course, it’s a very complicated situation for Ha Ri since she found out during the blind date that this was her own company’s CEO (she’d never actually seen him before in real life) and she’s terrified that he’ll recognize her at work. So then there’s a part where she regularly has to change between her blind date persona and her real identity in order not to get found out and risk being fired.
It doesn’t take long for the partial truth to come out that she is not Young Seo, but then the story becomes that Young Seo hired her and they don’t actually know each other. Ha Ri tells Tae Moo that her name is Shin Geum Hee (incidentally the name of the protagonist of a very popular drama series in the show that everyone’s constantly watching in the meantime), and she’s even introduced to his grandfather.

Okay, so this is basically where all the issues start in the story, with Ha Ri digging herself deeper into her own lies. As I mentioned in the introduction, there were a few situations that became a bit slapsticky, and these were mostly situations in which Ha Ri tried to escape events that would threaten her identity to be exposed. Looking at it realistically, of course she wouldn’t actually have to resort to such dramatically comical solutions, but it did make for a good laugh. Honestly, I couldn’t with the one incident where she almost ran into Min Woo while dressed as Geum Hee and she just folded over and blindly headed towards the open door of a randomly parked car and hid inside. I mean, she probably thought it was an empty taxi or she just thoughtlessly climbed into a stranger’s car (of course it was Tae Moo’s car), but that really got me shaking my head because she could’ve literally just walked by Min Woo with her face averted and he wouldn’t have even noticed her. Maybe I’m being too serious here, but this just got me facepalming, haha. Anyways, there’s multiple of these situations that’d make me go ‘oh, girl, come on, there is most definitely a better and more natural way to get out of this’.
Her situation seems to be solved once Tae Moo suddenly contacts her saying that she (Geum Hee) is fired and they don’t need to meet again. This is when Tae Moo has discovered her true identity. They’ve been on several dates by this point and he actually started developing some feelings for her, but then while driving by the chicken restaurant, he sees her come out as Ha Ri carrying the trash. He harrasses her a bit at work in the week after that, but he can’t stop himself from constantly thinking about her while he’s on business trips and such, so he decides to forgive her. All seems to be good and well as the two come to terms with the whole situation and they actually start growing towards each other for real, but there’s one mistake that Tae Moo made that still makes what happened an open case – he never informed his grandfather of the truth about Geum Hee. As it happens, while Grandpa really warmed up to Geum Hee, he’s gotten into a very embarrassing situation with Ha Ri during a field trip for her team at work, a situation in which Ha Ri once again tried to hide from him so he wouldn’t recognize her face. Several occasions have happened since that have made Grandpa very suspicious of Shin Ha Ri, and when the truth finally comes out, it’s also not easy for her to win back his trust.

While this whole situation is playing out between Ha Ri and Tae Moo, there’s also the interesting pairing of Young Seo and Sung Hoon. They meet by chance at a convenience store one time and for both of them it’s like ✨D E S T I N Y✨. They both fall in love with each other at first sight. Of course, since we first only see Young Seo’s side of the story, we’re not sure of Sung Hoon’s side, but they keep meeting in fateful ways, at specific restaurants, and they even become nextdoor neighbors when Young Seo cuts herself loose from her father’s influence and starts living on her own. Sung Hoon initially draws a firm line between them, since there is the incident of her fooling his boss and sending someone else instead on her blind date with him. But it doesn’t take long for them to admit to their mutual attraction and they get physical with each other quite easily (although it probably helped that Young Seo was drunk the first time). Anyways, they manage to resolve any misunderstandings and start happily dating. While the main story is about Ha Ri and Tae Moo, Young Seo and Sung Hoon are definitely two very firm pillars and I would also like to call them fellow main leads rather than the ‘second leads’ because they were just as important to the story.

Moving on to my analysis – I think I’ve covered the summary of the series now more than enough – I would like to start with the relationships between all the characters, because I really liked the dynamics between the four of them. I will talk more about the romantic relationships, but first of all let’s start with the friendships.
I LOVED Ha Ri and Young Seo’s friendship. They were so comfortable with each other, it was really nice to see a realistic friendship between two women in a K-Drama where there was no shame, no need to hide anything, no need to keep up appearances. The last drama I remember seeing with this kind of female friendship was Because This Is My First Life, it’s just so refreshing to see two adult women in such a steady friendship like this. Ha Ri could’ve gotten angry at Young Seo for making her go to all those blind dates in her place but she never did. Young Seo could have become angry at Ha Ri for failing to scare Tae Moo off the first time, and while she did get a little annoyed, she never truly blamed Ha Ri for her or held it against her. They were just so loyal to each other and they trusted each other so much, like actual sisters. It was really nice to see them act like teenagers on one moment, and then really being there for each other, emotionally supporting each other the next. I think this might be one of my most favorite friendships depicted between women in a K-Drama so far, I really enjoyed their scenes together, there was never a dull moment.
On the other hand, there’s Tae Moo and Sung Hoon, and while they seemed to be a bit more distant than the two women, there was definitely some real bromance going on between them. That scene when this nurse came in while Sung Hoon was helping Tae Moo get dressed at the hospital and it just looked like they were hugging and the nurse was just like “I’ll give you two some space 👀” SENT me. I also loved that she just accepted it and got all giddy about it herself, haha, we’re all for acceptance on this issue in Asian drama series! Anyways, how Tae Moo started teasing Sung Hoon after that happened was so great, because you could finally see this mischievous side come out off him, and he’d probably never act like that with any other guy. I loved how Tae Moo and Sung Hoon were like actual brothers, and how Grandpa also just took Sung Hoon in as his second grandson. It was so touching when Sung Hoon finally called him ‘grandpa’ at the end after they found out he was sick. Their friendship and living situation also reminded me of the one of the male leads from Love Alarm. I have to admit that I think I missed the full explanation of how Sung Hoon came to live with Tae Moo and his grandfather, was the lady from the orphanage his biological mother? I thought she was, but did that mean she just couldn’t take care of her son full-time because of the orphanage? I’m sure they talked about it but I didn’t catch the full story, so if anyone managed to pick that up, do let me know!

What I really liked about this series as a whole was how it was so light and simple. It incorporated a lot of classical tropes and cliches but made it modern, and I also like that they used the show about the Geum Hee character in the background as a sort of reflection, because that was definitely an example of a very old-fashioned cliche drama series. It was like they made a parallel by letting the two shows exist alongside each other to create a comparison between old-fashioned and modern-time drama series.
I also have to say that it was very refreshing that there was no real, as I like to call it, ✨destiny✨ element in this series. With this I mean that there was no event that linked the characters to each other through the past, nothing that fatefully brought them back to each other as if they were meant to be. Before becoming a couple, the characters were completely unrelated to one another. They met in the here and now through self-created circumstances.
The only childhood trauma story was that of Tae Moo being triggered by rainy days. His parents died in a car accident on a rainy day while rushing to see him for his birthday, and he’s always blamed himself for that. It’s used more as a character development tool than as a defining back story in my opinion, because Ha Ri actually helps him get through it. She picks up on it by coincidence when she hears some people talk about it and then tries to accomodate him as much as possible so they won’t have to go out in the rain and while she doesn’t literally tell him “I’m doing this because I know about your trauma”, it was probably the best way to deal with it, because in that way Tae Moo also picked up on what she was trying to do for him without her having to explain it to him. I think it was really wonderful to see how close they became, they really became each other’s solace, each other’s rock. Ha Ri comforted him during rainy days and Tae Moo helped her get closure with her feelings for Min Woo in a time when they weren’t even officially together yet. It was heartwarming to see that their romance went as far as becoming emotionally dependent on each other, they opened up about their true feelings and especially for Tae Moo this was a pretty big step since he’d always kept stuff inside. It was so satisfying when he confided in her how worried he was about his grandpa when they found out about his illness. He asked her to come with him to the US, but was completely aware that this might be a selfish request and he was completely okay with her refusing, he didn’t even try to persuade her any further, he just said ‘I already knew, but I just had to get it out’.
I think the relationship between Young Seo and Sung Hoon was also very contemporary and realistic. I only got annoyed with Young Seo at ONE point, when she became really petty during the mountain climbing scene. Then I was just like, where did the Young Seo I loved so much up until now go?? But on the other hand, it was also to demonstrate that both of them needed to put in effort to make their relationship work. They couldn’t just rely on falling for each other at first sight and expecting everything to be perfect from then on. So I think it was good that they had these fall-outs as well, because they just proved to be obstacles that they could figure out together.
I think both couples represented mixed social rank romance, of each couple one party belonged to a higher social class than the other, and that also made it a bit reminiscent of High Society. In the end, while Ha Ri and Tae Moo did get the approval of Grandpa, they didn’t need to overcome that many other obstacles in regards to their differing social ranks, and Young Seo also cut herself loose from her father and his company in order to stay with Sung Hoon, even though it was hard to turn her back on her family. But I hope this is just another contribution to showing that love knows no boundaries, and definitely no differences on social ranks. People should all have the right to fall in love and be with the person of their own choosing, love should not be a business proposal.

I haven’t talked about Ha Ri’s colleagues yet and I really want to because these people were awesome. So Product Development Team 1 further consisted of Head Yeo Eui Joo (played by Kim Hyun Sook), Deputy Head Gye Bin (played by Im Ki Hong) and new employee Kim Hye Ji (played by Yoon Sang Jung). It was just so nice to see that Ha Ri had a solid team behind her at work, even though they were quite chaotic. Even when rumors started spreading that she was dating the CEO and even that she was two-timing him and Min Woo, her colleagues still had her back and stood up for her against gossipping employees. The dynamics between them were really nice and funny, and I also really liked how Ms. Yeo and Mr. Gye became a couple, especially because the dynamic between the two of them was opposite of what you’d might expect. I think the Product Development Team 1 scenes probably made me laugh out loud the most. I couldn’t with Hye Ji getting super drunk at that team dinner and just blurting out stuff, the drunk scenes were acted out really hilariously.

There’s two more side stories I have to address before I move on to my cast + final character comments.
The first one is the one of Min Woo and Ha Ri, and consequently, Min Woo’s ex turned girlfriend again, Go Yoo Ra (played by Bae Woo Hee). Just to cut to the chase, Yoo Ra is a real bitch. She only started dating Min Woo because she knew Ha Ri was interested in him and she just wanted to bother her. But then when Min Woo started rising in status as a chef, she suddenly starts wanting to get him all the press and attention to boast with him being her boyfriend. Her intentions were never clean with Min Woo, but as soon as she sees how much he still cares for Ha Ri, even as a friend, she still gets jealous. In my opinion, she really shouldn’t have poked her nose in their friendship to begin with. In the beginning it’s really obvious how much Ha Ri likes Min Woo, and we just feel so sorry for her when we see he’s getting back with his ex. But on the other hand, as soon as Ha Ri and Tae Moo start dating, we see Min Woo getting uncomfortable with that. He claims that he just doesn’t want Ha Ri to get hurt, but there really seems to be more going on. Of course, he’s already missed his chance by then, Ha Ri is already getting over him, and he never actually spoke out how he truly felt about Ha Ri, but I think it’s safe to say that they had feelings for each other but probably just never found the right timing or something. And then Yoo Ra started butting in, of course. What I did love about Ha Ri was how mature she remained, even while knowing that Yoo Ra wasn’t being very decent. She left it all up to Min Woo to sort out his own stuff rather than rat her out to him because that’s the mature thing to do. She was the kind of person who would just silently step back instead of forcing her own feelings onto him, and that was really characteristic of her, all the more in comparison to Yoo Ra who just went for keeping up appearances. In the end I really did hope that Ha Ri and Min Woo could be at least friends again, although I imagine it would take time, the two at least expressed that they’d be up for trying again. I’m glad it worked out between them.

Lastly, and this is something that I just felt like I had to bring up because it’s become such a meme online: Jo Yoo Jung. At some point, Young Seo’s cousing Jo Yoo Jung (played by Seo Hye Won) appears at their family’s company. She’s a very extravagant character who uses a lot of English in her sentences and acts very dramatically. She has a short story arc in which she is set up for a blind date with Tae Moo, but since Tae Moo goes off to confirm his love for Ha Ri, he asks Sung Hoon to go in his place. What happens next is that Yoo Jung actually falls for Sung Hoon on the spot and keeps bothering him even when he’s made it very clear that he has a girlfriend.
Like, I get that the “YOU KNOW I HAVE NO CHINGU” scene was very iconic and meme-worthy, but honestly, I didn’t really understand her contribution to the drama. It’s not like she formed an actual threat to Young Seo and Sung Hoon’s relationship, she was just a funny comical side character that disappeared again as soon as her antics were over. I wasn’t exactly sure what her deal was, in the first place, only that she was Young Seo’s cousin and that they were like cats and dogs but then Young Seo did also comfort her and you could see that, if they’d put their judgements aside, they might actually be able to get along. She did cause an incident that made Young Seo’s annoyance with Sung Hoon’s devotion to Tae Moo flare up, though, so she might have been a plot tool to cause that kind of situation to be brought up. Young Seo got pissed at Sung Hoon for always blindly following Tae Moo’s orders, mostly because they always caused him to lie to her about what was actually going on. In the end, the issue was resolved when she found out about his past, his mother who ran the orphanage, and Tae Moo formally apologizing to her.

Okay, so now we go onto the cast + character comments!

First of all Kim Se Jeong. Oh, how I love this girl. I’ve loved her since Produce 101 and I really like that she’s been picking up acting, because she’s really good at it. I might have been a little bit disappointed with School 2017, I am SO glad she got casted in this. I enjoyed every single scene, her bubbliness and quirkiness just splashes off the screen and she just had me flying with the little ‘rawr’ ad libs and her drunken acting behavior. I read on DramaWiki that the role of Ha Ri was first offered to Jo Bo Ah, so I am IMMENSELY grateful that Se Jeong accepted it instead of her. She just made this drama, she was amazing, I loved her performance from beginning to end.
Ha Ri is just such a grounded character. She’s really rational and smart, she’s not passive, she doesn’t let herself get swept away in stuff without having a strong personal opinion about it. She feels herself falling for Tae Moo quite quickly, but she never oversteps her boundaries and she only allows herself to think about it once he’s made it clear that he has feelings for her. And even then, she is constantly considering the possibility of them being together, she has legit worries since they’re from different worlds. You can just see how she doesn’t allow herself to get swept up in her emotions, she continues to be as rational as possible. She’s not insecure about herself, she has a natural confidence and it’s not that she lets herself be compared to anyone else. I thought she was a really likeable main character and her chemistry with Ahn Hyo Seop was really good.

Talking about Ahn Hyo Seop, it hasn’t been too long since I finished Abyss, after which I mentioned in my review that he’s become one of my new favorite actors. This drama confirmed this once again. He has certainly proved his versatility in acting because he was a completely different person than in Abyss. I honestly felt a bit weird about him playing the handsome stoic CEO character in the beginning, but he actually pulled it off pretty well! He’s just such a puppy in my eyes, it was kind of refreshing to see him as this kind of mature business guy, but what amazed me the most was how he pulled off the passionate scenes. The kissing scenes between him and Se Jeong were AMAZING. Like, nothing left to be desired for me. Especially the final one at the end of the second-to-last episode, I was really vexed when it ended there and the next episode just started with the morning after. I was like NOOOO!! I have mentioned it before, but I’m a sucker for really good passionate kissing scenes and when they get good, I just don’t want them to end too abruptly, haha. Anyways, I think he showed yet another side of his acting, although I think I still prefer him as a puppy, I’m not ready to say goodbye to puppy Ahn Hyo Seop yet. T^T
Out of every character in this series, Tae Moo most definitely had the most character development. I mean, just look at how he was in episode 1 versus episode 12. The way his heart was opened up to Geum Hee/Ha Ri slowly but surely was really natural and satisfying to watch. You could just see how it became apparent that all this time he just never allowed himself to be happy, to look for more in life than just his work. He blamed himself for his parents’ deaths and it had just imprinted this idea in his brain that they wouldn’t want him to be happy after that, that his parents also blamed him, which was of course absurd. But Ha Ri was the one who opened his eyes to the fact that none of this was his fault and that he had every right to search for his own happiness, as much as anybody else. Their relationship went from simply cute to really heartwarming and I loved that.
I still have a couple of Ahn Hyo Seop dramas left on my to watch list, and there’s no doubt he will continue to appear in many more dramas in the near future, so I’m definitely here for that!

I recognized Kim Min Gyu from Because This Is My First Life, but I see he was also in Who Are You – School 2015, The Sound of Your Heart, Just Between Lovers, and also in a couple more that are on my soon-to-watch list. He has a very unique face! I’ve never seen this kind of role from him either, or at least such a main role, I suppose, but I liked his character in this series. Sung Hoon was really mature and rational, and his patience with Young Seo was admirable sometimes, haha. I liked the plot twist of him also being struck by love at first sight by her, because he didn’t let on that this was the case right from the start. It was just nice in general to see two main couples with such good chemistry, the kissing scenes between him and Seol In Ah were also really good. The focus was on the first main couple, but I do like that they also showed some scenes from the relationship between Young Seo and Sung Hoon, in that way the two main relationships were still levelled out, like in Fight For My Way, for example. Anyways, it was fun seeing him act in this drama because it also brought a funny side out of him and I got to see a new side to his acting, which was nice!

I’ve seen Seol In Ah in several dramas before, I immediately recognized her face. She appeared in Producer, Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, and even in School 2017 along with Se Jeong! Record of Youth is also still on my list. I really liked her performance in this drama. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen her play a main role, but she really impressed me. I just loved her friendship chemistry with Se Jeong, their interaction just looked so effortless it wouldn’t surprise me if they were really close in real life. Especially her drunken antics made me crack up every single time, the scene where Young Seo and Ha Ri were brought home by the police because they had gotten too drunk to walk by themselves was hilarious.
Young Seo is really the best loyal friend anyone could wish for. She may have her petty moments and her own issues to deal with, but she was always on Ha Ri’s side, there to comfort her and join her in cussing out annoying people. I loved that she was more than just ‘the main protagonist’s best friend’, she really had her own life, she didn’t exist purely as Ha Ri’s support system but she was always there for her when she needed it. I liked how she just made her relationship with Sung Hoon work, too, not caring about anyone else but just going for it, following her own heart. I really liked her, apart from that one scene where she acted like a spoiled child, I really just loved her.

Can I just give a shoutout to Lee Duk Hwa who played the Grandpa? I LOVED him in this series. I’ve seen him in several dramas before, like Hide, Jekyll, Me, Suspicious Partner and Go Go Waikiki, but he really cracked me up in this drama. It’s like, even when he was being strict, he always had this mischievous twinkle in his eye like he wasn’t really angry, he was just trying to lure people out of their shell. After Tae Moo’s backstory was revealed and that he was with his Grandpa that night when his parents died and his Grandpa was right there when he saw them lying there and was trying to cover his eyes and yelling out of sorrow for this horror, it really said a lot about Tae Moo’s relationship with his Grandpa. He had taken in his grandson without a second of hesitation and raised him as if he were his father and mother in one. He really was the best supporting family member for Tae Moo and I love how he was also so welcoming towards Sung Hoon, even calling him his ‘other grandson’. It was fun seeing him pretend like he couldn’t accept Ha Ri, even though we already know he would break at some point, because he couldn’t deny what the two were feeling for each other and come on, if Tae Moo had forgiven her for the whole Geum Hee think, if the two of them had already resolved things, then why should anyone else have any objections towards their relationship? In any case, I really liked the Grandpa and also how he got so invested in that drama series. Again, how they did not make a link any sooner that Geum Hee was a fake name, but he just went ‘Shin Geum Hee? Hey, what a coincidence, that’s the name of the female protagonist in my favorite show!’ I really liked his performance in this series.

I’ve seen the actors playing Ha Ri’s parents multiple times before too, but for the father it was the first time he actually played a character that I found sympathetic, haha. I feel like he always plays the nosy reporter guy, haha. Anyways, I’ve seen Kim Kwang Gyu before in Oh! My Lady, Sungkyunkwan Scandal, I Hear Your Voice, Pinocchio, Gogh The Starry Night, Hwarang: The Beginning and Thirty But Seventeen. I liked to see him as the soft-hearted dad, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him play a father before, to be honest. I think he did very well, I liked the scene at the end when Tae Moo has just asked them for their blessing in dating Ha Ri with marriage in mind, and he just expressed his honest feelings of being worried of his only daughter facing evil gossip and things like that. They had a real heart-to-heart right there, and it was nice to see MEN talking about their FEELINGS and WORRIES. Normalize that!
Jung Young Joo is such an iconic actress. I’ve seen her now in Cinderella and the Four Knights, Jugglers, That Man Oh Soo, My Mister, Gyeryong Fairytale and Move to Heaven. She’s so extra, she’s played such extra roles but then it’s always funny to me when she gets casted as a mom because then she just becomes this extra mom and I’m always like, how did the dad end up marrying a woman like that, haha. I really liked her as Ha Ri’s mom, though, because her extraness didn’t become too much. She wasn’t just a comical character, I think she established Ha Ri’s family situation very well. You could say she was just more of a ‘tough love’ kind of mom, haha.

All this time I was thinking where I recognized Ha Min from and when I looked it up I discovered that it’s Byung Chan from VICTON! I knew him from Produce X 101, so I wasn’t expecting him to appear in a drama. Anyways, that was nice. Although he didn’t have a very big role, I really liked how supportive he was of his sister’s relationship with Tae Moo and when Tae Moo asked for Ha Ri’s family’s permission, he was just being that ANTM’s Alasia meme in the background, haha. He was just the typical little brother character, but at least his relationship with Ha Ri was good, I liked how her there were no tensions in her family whatsoever, she just had a really good support system.

I haven’t seen any of Song Won Suk’s dramas before, but for some reason he still looks familiar to me? Anyways, he seemed like the typical guy to be cast as the first love of the female protagonist, kind face, good friendship. I just wished that whatever he truly felt towards Ha Ri had come out earlier, because now until the end I wasn’t sure what exactly his deal was with her. He kept rejecting her, he never came to her, and yet he started acting jealous as soon as she moved on, that seemed a little weird to me. Anyways, I think it was for the better that he and Ha Ri stayed friends, it suited them way better.

I’ll end with the dramatic Miss Jo Yoo Jung, played by Seo Hye Won. Again, she looked so familiar to me, but DramaWiki is again telling me I haven’t seen anything with her before. It says she’s a musical actress though, that’s interesting. And I also see she’s in True Beauty, so I will see her in that once I get around to watch that.

The only series I’ve seen Kim Hyun Sook in was Are You Human Too? where she played Reporter Jo. I see she was also the main character in that renzoku drama Rude Miss Young Ae (I’ve never seen it but I’ve seen the name more than enough times to guess that it’s probably a classic kind of sitcom?). Anyways, I liked her character here, with her awesome glasses. She was so stoic, it was funny to see her try to suppress her cute side with Mr. Gye after they became a couple, but she was definitely wearing the pants in the relationship.

I liked that there were many actors that I hadn’t seen before, or that I now saw as a more major character for the first time in this drama. It really brought back the nostalgia of the classic romcom K-Drama with the many misunderstandings in the beginning, but it’s really nice how they managed to keep it modern. It was reminiscent of how it used to be, but executed as how dramas have developed through the years. As I said, I liked how the ‘Be Strong, Shin Geum Hee’ drama that was playing in the background seemed like a literal reference to those old-fashioned romantic dramas and it’s funny how they also showed the advertisement to the webtoon it was based on at a bus stop in the first episode. There were multiple of these subtle references to classic K-Drama and opening the fourth wall to the viewers.

Lastly, I REALLY loved the soundtrack for this drama. I’ve heard so many songs that I’m going to look up again to download, because everything was so cute and beautiful and fit the concept of the drama so well. So my compliments for the OST arrangement, and I also liked how they got MeloMance to collab with them on this drama by even making a guest appearance!

So yeah, I think this wasn’t a particularly long review but it didn’t need to be because the story in itself is so light and simple that it doesn’t need a full in-depth analysis. I just really enjoyed it, series like this make me reconfirm why I love K-Dramas so much. I’m glad I decided to watch this now rather than wait, and it’s made me decide to catch up on some other more recent releases first too before moving on with my original list. I’ve just become so hyped by all these exciting new dramas!
I think it’s important to keep including dramas that don’t necessarily cover heavy emotional themes, but rather focus on stories that feature modern, simple relationships, because it just makes them so accessible and enjoyable to watch. I would definitely recommend this if you’re looking for a good, light romcom. The whole vibe of the show was fun, the acting was good and I really want to give bonus points for the chemistry between all the main characters, because some moments were literally s i z z l i n g to watch. I also wasn’t surprised to hear that it was adapted from a webtoon, like it really seemed like these characters could be inspired by webtoon characters, in terms of personality and the dynamics they had between each other. One of my favorite runnings gags was definitely the “archaeopteryx” as a reference to Tae Moo, like how the heck did he look like that?? But I liked that they kept it in and the little dino bird popped out of Ha Ri’s phone every time he called her. It was also fun to see how, as time progressed, she wouldn’t flinch back because of it, but she’d actually enjoy it whenever the archaeopteryx came calling.
I also like that it again featured a line of business that isn’t very mainstream as far as I know, food production and food research. It was nice that the main characters already had their mutual interest in food products in common once they really started getting to know each other. I always appreciate it when women working in science-related jobs are highlighted through these representations.

I will be back with a new review probably next month, because again I really want to take my time with the next one. I’m already excited to get back to you! ^^

Until then!