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

The Secret Life of My Secretary
(초면에 사랑합니다 / Chomyeon-e Saranghabmida / Love At First Sight)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hello hello hello! It’s review time again! I’m so glad that my schedule is a bit less busy than the past few months and I was able to watch this (and some other shows) without too many breaks in-between. I was really excited when my Wheel of Fortune app landed on this show because it’s been on my list for ages and I was ready for a new cute office romance story. It had some actors that I was familiar with and I had only seen some minor clips of it before (mostly just the iconic Veronica Park introduction). Apart from that, I had no idea what the story was about and I like going into something without any idea of what to expect, so that was nice. Of course I’m going to be sharing my thoughts and opinions in more detail throughout this review, but all in all I can say that I found it enjoyable. Although it was a bit silly and unserious at times and lacked some depth here and there, there were cute and touching moments and I found it amusing to watch.

The Secret Life of My Secretary is an SBS K-Drama which you can either watch as 32 back-to-back episodes of 35 minutes or as 16 episodes of about an hour. I watched it in the latter format on KissAsian. The story is about Jung Gal Hee (played by Jin Ki Joo), who works as a secretary for Director Do Min Ik (played by Kim Young Kwang) at T&T Mobile, a mobile media company. Despite being the middle child, after losing both her parents Gal Hee was put in charge of taking care of her two siblings. In order to take care of her older brother Joong Hee (Seo Dong Won), who is blind, and send her younger sister Nam Hee (Kim Ji Min) to study abroad, Gal Hee has devoted all of her energy and focus in her job as a secretary. She’s worked herself to the bone under Do Min Ik for the past year, even sacrificing her own meals in order to get everything in order for her demanding boss. With her signature appearance and characteristic red cardigan, everyone has come to refer to her as the OG minion of the company. What’s kept her patient throughout her job is her family motto: “One moment of patience may ward off great disaster.” She strongly believes that as long as she remains patient and keeps her head down, she will ultimately be rewarded for it.
Her boss, Do Min Ik, is one of the head directors of the company. His mother Shim Hae Ra (Jung Ae Ri) is the Chairman and his uncle Shim Ha Yong (Kim Min Sang) is the CEO. However, Min Ik is not actually blood-related to his mother and uncle – he was born out of an affair on his father’s side. After his father passed away he was kept in the family but never completely accepted as a member of it. He, his mother and uncle are basically putting up a show of a happy harmonious family for the public (reminiscent of the male lead’s family situation in Radio Romance). After surviving the accident that killed his father (if I understand correctly) at the age of seven, Min Ik severely hurt his head and had a surgical clip installed. Ever since then he’s been very cautious about getting into any kind of situation where he could get hurt. Apart from that, having been raised in such a ‘pretense’ family environment and being betrayed by a very trusted secretary once, Min Ik has closed off his heart and trust to anyone he hasn’t known for an extended period of time. After the secretary betrayal he has also consistently taken on a new secretary every year, never extending any contracts. His most trusted person at present is his childhood friend Gi Dae Joo (played by Goo Ja Sung), who also works as a director at T&T. Min Ik’s main talent is that he is excellent at reading people and remembering faces and names after only meeting someone once.
Despite Gal Hee’s devoted service and strong belief in her family motto, she faces a harsh disappointment when she too is fired after her one-year contract ends. However, her anger towards her boss is short-lived when she witnesses him getting attacked by a masked person and taking a serious fall from a balcony.
Due to this fall, the clip in Min Ik’s head moves and results in a serious case of prosapognosia – the inability to see or read people’s faces. In fact, it’s so serious that he stops being able to see people’s faces altogether, they just turn into blank canvases, which causes him a lot of anxiety and stress. That is, until Gal Hee appears, because for some reason, she’s the only person whose face he can still see. It turns out that, because of her consistently familiar appearance, the image of her in her signature red cardigan was imprinted on him. With Gal Hee literally being the only ‘familiar face’ around, Min Ik begs her to stay on as his secretary for as long as he has trouble seeing people’s faces.

I typically mention comments on the series’ title at the end of reviews, but I just wanted to point out that I really like the original Korean title, ‘Love at First Sight’, as it directly refers to the cognitive error aspect of the series. The English title ‘The Secret Life of My Secretary’ refers more to the misunderstanding that occurs once Min Ik’s prosapognosia causes a mix-up between Gal Hee and his blind date, Veronica Park (played by Kim Jae Kyung). I still think ‘the secret life’ may not be an entirely appropriate reference, because it’s not like Gal Hee is actively impersonating Veronica Park as a secret second identity or anything. It’s more A Business Proposal than Her Private Life, if you get my drift. Gal Hee gets herself into trouble which results in her having to pretend to be someone else to her boss. So yeah, I actually like the Korean title a bit better as it is both a play on a common expression and refers to the sight-related issue in the story.

At some point, shortly after Min Ik stops being able to see faces, his mother sends him on a blind date. She and Park Seok Ja (Baek Hyun Joo), the CEO of Park Group which owns the several “CinePark” cinemas, decide that, because they have a son and daughter of the same age, their children should meet. Min Ik’s intended blind date will be Park Group’s eccentric heiress Veronica Park (NEVER to be named by her original name Park Ok Soon!), who is not only renowned for her critical eye regarding movies, but also for her notorious reputation with men. Her nickname is literally ‘Suction Pump’, as she ‘sucks in’ men and goes through them in a very quick succession.
Gal Hee actually worked as Veronica Park’s secretary before she came to T&T, and she is NOT keen on seeing her more often, so she really hopes her boss won’t date her. However, because of a mix-up with a different appointment at a different meet-up place, Veronica mistakenly ends up going to the wrong hotel and meets Min Ik’s friend Dae Joo instead, for whom she falls immediately. Anxious to fix the mistake, Gal Hee (who was just about to go clubbing with some other secretaries and therefore happened to be all dressed up) goes to the hotel Min Ik is waiting at to tell him about the mix-up. Instead, Min Ik mistakes her for Veronica Park because of her outfit – he doesn’t recognize Gal Hee without her cardigan and there wouldn’t be a reason for her to turn up at his blind date dressed like that. Meeting her boss like that, Gal Hee succumbs to the temptation of finally being on the receiving side – to have someone serve her and cater to her instead of the other way around. Just for one night, she thinks, I’ll allow myself to have a fancy dinner with my handsome boss. The idea is to repel Min Ik from wanting to see Veronica Park again, so she tries her best to come across as extravagantly and off-putting as possible, but the caring secretary in her still ends up being considerate enough to make him interested in her. As expected, it doesn’t stop at ‘just one night’. As Min Ik’s feelings for her version of Veronica Park increase while he simultaneously starts trusting her more and more as his secretary, Gal Hee ends up stuck in a web of lies and pretense. It only gets more messy when she starts developing romantic feelings for her boss herself.

All in all, the central trope of this drama is the classic ‘one time mix-up leads to lie that keeps growing bigger and bigger until it explodes’. It reminded me a lot of shows like I’m Not a Robot (where the male lead also had some sort of handicap and starts relying on the female lead) and A Business Proposal, (where it also all starts with a blind date that leads to a misunderstanding, and the repelling actually leads to increased interest on the male lead’s part). In this case, the problematic part is that Min Ik actually couldn’t see faces, so it felt extra wrong that this was taken advantage of.
Besides the main storyline of Min Ik and Gal Hee/fake Veronica Park, there’s also the love story between the real Veronica Park and Dae Joo. While Dae Joo initially only approaches Veronica Park for work reasons, Veronica Park’s infatuation with him ultimately results in affection from his side as well.
Apart from the romantic storylines, there’s a third supporting plot in which Dae Joo’s secretary and aunt Lee Eul Wang (played by Jang So Yeon) secretly started a fund to compensate drivers and secretaries within the company who suffered from bad treatment or actual injuries on account of their bosses, with money that was illegally obtained by the company through bribes and wasteful expenses.

Much according to Min Ik’s wavering trust in people, we as viewers are put on the wrong path and led to suspect the wrong people from the get-go. We see Dae Joo meeting up with Min Ik’s uncle in secret. We see Dae Joo inviting Min Ik to their special boat where Min Ik is then surprise-attacked. We see Dae Joo is spotted interacting with the masked guy on CCTV and we see him getting his alibi debunked. Everything points towards the suspicion that Dae Joo has something to do with the attack on Min Ik, and this is only emphasized when he suddenly raises his hand against Min Ik during a vote concerning Min Ik’s potential presidency. Min Ik’s prosapognosia is a very inconvenient factor in the police investigation, because even though he saw the guy’s face during the attack, he’s now not even able to recognize him if he were standing right in front of him. This, again, is taken advantage of. Shortly after the incident, Min Ik is appointed a new driver, Eun Jung Soo (Choi Tae Hwan), unaware that this is the same man who attacked him and caused him to fall. Seeing Dae Joo and Jung Soo’s short interactions at the company, it’s suggested that they know each other and/or are in cahoots with each other. It’s all very suspicious.
The only ‘villain’ character that remains consistently bad throughout the series is Min Ik’s uncle, Shim Hae Yong, because he takes every opportunity to use anything he can against Min Ik. Finding out his nephew has a severe cognitive illness is the best news he can get.
My point is that in this regard, we as viewers are very much led to sympathize with Min Ik as he now can’t even rely on his talent of reading people and determining who is on his side anymore. He can’t even recognize the people he grew up with, so this hits him very hard. Again, it reminded me a lot of the male lead’s situation in I’m Not a Robot because he actually developed an illness which was directly linked to his ability to trust people.

I’d like to go over the four main characters of the series in a bit more detail before I elaborate on some minor characters and my more critical opinions of the story.
First of all, Gal Hee. From the moment we are introduced to her, we can see that she is a very caring sister who is willing to sacrifice her own (mental) health to work herself to the bone to provide for her siblings. After her mother died when she was nineteen, she has bulldozered on working as a secretary for many demanding bosses, accepting her fate as a minion while believing that one day she would be rewarded for her persistence and patience. That in itself already shows a lot of determination. You almost wouldn’t expect it from the way she presents herself and how submissively she acts, but she actually does have a backbone. This is also shown initially when Min Ik asks her to come back as her secretary after firing her, because she doesn’t hesitate to voice her disagreement with the situation and she doesn’t shy away from standing up for herself on how hard she works. What I liked about her was that, contrarily to my expectations when she was first introduced, she wasn’t as much of a passive insecure heroine as I thought she would be. Usually, when characters are portrayed like her, this is immediately linked to an image of being ‘unattractive’. Despite the stark contrast between how Gal Hee looked and how she dressed up as Veronica Park, there wasn’t any recurring element of Gal Hee being put down for her looks per se, so that was nice. She also didn’t keep putting herself down compared to other women, she really stuck to herself and her own strengths and that was admirable. The simple fact that she got angry at Min Ik for firing her because she knew she was worth more than that was so great.
It was nice that it didn’t start out as a romantic story with one party already harboring feelings, because it would’ve been so frustrating to see Min Ik’s behavior at the beginning being condoned through rose-colored glasses. He actually treated her like a doormat, I couldn’t believe he actually made her apply his lip balm for him and called her away from her own meals to feed his office fish. Of course, once the whole fake Veronica Park thing was set in motion, things became messy and complicated because she just couldn’t bring herself to tell the truth and put an end to it. On this topic there’s actually something I need to reflect on, because I usually tend to get too frustrated with characters that start making up excuses so they won’t have to tell the truth. I remember how frustrated I was while watching Gisou Furin because the female lead was getting so stupid in ‘missing’ every opportunity to be honest. In the scene where Min Ik came to confront Gal Hee with the fact she’d been lying to him when she was just planning on telling him and all she could do was apologize, I was all, ‘well if that’s all you’re gonna say he’s never going to understand!!’ I remember being frustrated with Gal Hee for not standing up for herself more in that situation. But then, when she got back home and had another ‘talk’ with her mother, she came back to it and admitted that she hated how she couldn’t say anything else even though she prepared a whole speech, and that actually took away my frustration. Additionally, I’m also in a situation at the moment where I’m not 100% honest about my feelings for someone out of fear that it might ruin things, and I can admit that it’s definitely NOT always a matter of ‘if you wanted to, you would’ve done it already’. I actually started relating to keeping quiet about some things more than I did before. Still, when it involves actively tricking someone and lying to them about pretending to be someone else, it’s a bit different, but at least I stopped getting too annoyed with Gal Hee’s struggles in trying to muster up the courage to tell him.
I liked Gal Hee’s ‘talks’ with her mom, by the way, especially because it tied in with the fact that she was still relying on her mother’s presence so much when trying to take care of her siblings. I thought it was really sweet that she made up an image of her mom to go to for comfort when she was feeling down. In the end it made me feel like Gal Hee was making up sweet and encouraging words from her mother as a way to keep picking up the pieces by herself. When in the last episode her mother told her that she wouldn’t come back now that Gal Hee had another person to seek comfort with, that pretty much confirmed it for me.

I think it’s safe to say that Do Min Ik is the character that goes through the most significant development in this show. I really liked how gradual his development occurred, how it just went from an inconvenient situation to him actually realizing how important it was to keep his friends close while not closing himself off from everyone. He went through a very traumatic experience, not only physically from the fall but also mentally as he suddenly couldn’t see faces anymore and that made him feel so incredibly lonely. Imagine being alone in a crowd of people you don’t know and suddenly seeing one friendly familiar face, the only one you can make out well enough to ask for help – that’s the kind of person Gal Hee became to him. To be honest, I wondered about his true feelings for his secretary for a long time before he started thinking about it himself. There were just some things he did and said to her that really didn’t seem like things a boss would do/say to his secretary without any meaning behind it. Sometimes he’d look and smile at her and I would be like, bro, that’s definitely not how a boss should look at his secretary when he merely just ‘appreciates her work’.😏
You could say that the prosapognosia ultimately led him to develop feelings for Gal Hee. He had no one else he trusted enough to rely on besides her, and I honestly don’t feel like anything would’ve blossomed between them if they’d just parted ways after she was fired. In that regard, it wasn’t a typical ‘meant to be’ romance story, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it would’ve been even more typical if it had been revealed that their pasts were also linked in some way. But I still found it interesting to realize that if it weren’t for the prosapognosia, they would probably never have grown closer. Min Ik started developing feelings for Gal Hee next to his blooming feelings for (fake) Veronica Park, so I don’t feel like it only started after Gal Hee pretended to be his blind date.
I saw a lot of synopses of this show that described Min Ik as a ‘cold-hearted boss’, but I actually don’t agree with that. He seemed to be a very mischievous person from the start. Even when he called Gal Hee over and asked her to do all kinds of tedious stuff, there was always a twinkle in his eye that made me feel as if he just liked teasing her. He may have only started becoming aware of everything she did for him later on, but I don’t actually feel like he thought she wasn’t good at her job. He may have held onto her purely because of his prosapognosia, but remember that he also ended up coming to that company sports event that he never went to and even did a piggyback ride with her, purely because she (unknowingly) persuaded him to come. Even though he was going to fire her, he still did something she wanted, to show at least some appreciation for her. I just don’t agree with the use of ‘cold-hearted’ here because that’s not what he was. If you look at his relationships, with his mother and uncle and Dae Joo, you can see that he cares a lot and it actually hurts him to mistrust them. I personally think his upbringing didn’t make him a cold person, but rather someone who hid how much he actually wanted to trust and rely on someone. After being betrayed by a secretary once, I think he just became more cautious in getting attached and started setting boundaries by only employing secretaties for a single year. I think he just spent a very long time trying to protect himself (from both people and situations that might (physically) hurt him) whilst maintaining a cheerful and sharp-witted attitude. He never seemed cold-hearted or shallow to me from the start. Think about it: he literally couldn’t see faces. He fell for (fake) Veronica Park without even knowing what she looked like. His entire attraction to her was based on Gal Hee’s considerateness and kindness, not on her looks. Of course, he kept thinking about what she looked like and how pretty she must be, but he still fell for her without knowing. Falling so hard for someone purely based on their actions and personality is quite rare, because looks always play at least a little part, whether we want to accept that or not. On the other hand, he also fell for Gal Hee knowing what she looked like and didn’t even care that she was his secretary when he finally admitted his feelings for her. All in all, I just want to say that Min Ik wasn’t as bad of a guy as he was made out to be. He lost his most defining ability and fell into a pit of anxiety and loneliness, only to fall in love with what he thought were two different women whose faces he couldn’t even see. He went through a lot of emotional rollercoasters and ended up resenting a lot of people who (sometimes inadvertently) caused him all this, and still he could find it in himself to forgive Gal Hee and even support her when she joined the secretary hunger strike protest against his own presidency. He literally gave up his own chance of becoming the next president so he could get Gal Hee to eat something. You can say a lot about him, but not that he was ‘cold-hearted’.

You may have noticed that so far I’ve referred to Veronica Park by her full name and not just by calling her ‘Veronica’. There’s a simple reason for that: Veronica Park is not just a name. It’s a statement. As I mentioned in my introduction, I’d only ever seen clips of Veronica Park’s iconic self-introduction before I started watching this show. I had no idea who she was going to be – for all I knew she was the female lead. I know that she’s a very popular character and I’ve seen many comments saying that they finished the show because of her. I’d like to contribute to that.
Veronica Park is introduced as a very strong caricatural character, from the way she talks to the way she walks. Her use of exaggerated gestures and expressions immediately causes her to appear as a comical character. I have to admit that I was a bit sceptical in the beginning because I don’t really care for characters that are comical for the sake of being comical. If she’d continued to remain such a caricature, I probably would’ve gotten a bit tired of it eventually. However, she grew on me more than I expected, especially after finding out that Gal Hee had been impersonating her. I am so glad that they motivated her personality with the story of how she never thought anyone would go the extra mile for her. Everyone she met was always just interested in her money and heritage to her family’s company so she just gave up on finding something genuine and started having fun. The side of her that came out during the part where she confronted Gal Hee with the impersonation and tried to convince Dae Joo of her true feelings for him was my favorite. I really loved seeing that mature side of her come out there, it really made me respect her character a lot. She was probably the last character you’d expect a heavy background story from and although it wasn’t that heavy, it was still enough to make her character more appealing to me, so I’m grateful for that. Apart from that I also came to like the eccentric ways in which she tried to seduce Dae Joo. She somehow managed to be vulnerable by completely going for it and that actually made me want to try being more honest and direct about my own feelings as well. She won Dae Joo over by being her genuine messy and funky self, no shame and no regrets, and I think that’s something to be admired for. I also loved how unapologetically crazy she was together with her mother. I mean, you could see where she got it from, lol. I loved how her mother also introduced her to Min Ik’s mother as ‘I have a crazy daughter available’, lol. Like, even her mom didn’t try to hide that she was eccentric or try to make her behave differently, and I really liked their dynamic.

Because of the misleading events in the beginning of the story, I really wasn’t sure what to think about Dae Joo initially. For me it was mainly because he was already shown having secret dinners with Min Ik’s uncle before I got a good understanding of what kind of person he was. From then on, everything just seemed to point towards him as being suspicious and secretly villainous. Honestly, I kind of judged him for lashing out at Min Ik when he openly confronted him with his suspicions. It couldn’t be denied that the circumstances were suspicious and everything seemed to point to him. Also, it was clear that Min Ik didn’t want to believe it but just needed clarity about the situation. The way Dae Joo started guilt-tripping Min Ik for suspecting him didn’t seem very Dae Joo-like, although I understood how hurt he must have been by the suspicion itself.
Apart from that, Dae Joo was a perfectly pleasant character. Pleasant, leaning on bland, if I may honestly say so. I didn’t really feel much for him throughout the show, only that he was a good friend with a nice personality. I actually feel like he gained more personality throughout his relationship with Veronica Park, although I definitely cringed when he said, “Awesome~!!” in the same way as her in the final episode, lol. She definitely rubbed off on him. But yeah, even his background story was mostly explored through the eyes of his secretary, and he never talked about what losing his mother at a young age was like for him, so there weren’t that many aspects about his character or story that allowed me to get more (emotionally) attached to him. I would’ve liked to get a bit more in-depth information from him about how he was always the poorer friend to Min Ik, or how him having to work his way to the top from a poorer background shaped him as a person. I liked the scene where he gave Min Ik his boat as a kid because he felt bad for how his mother treated him and then later admitted that it was a lie that he gave that boat away willingly. Like, there were some aspects of their friendship that came out that I liked, but I still don’t feel like his character was explored as much as the other three main leads. Everyone else had at least one crying or emotional confession scene, but Dae Joo remained pretty much out of sight in that regard. Although I think that putting him next to Veronica Park made for a very interesting romantic dynamic, I do feel like his character could’ve been attributed more characteristic features or interesting elements, because now he just kind of went along with what happened to the other main characters.

I want to talk a little bit about Lee Eul Wang and her secret secretary organization. It’s revealed at some point that Eul Wang was the sister of Dae Joo’s mother, and that the two sisters used to work for Min Ik’s father. There’s a flashback of the two at Min Ik’s house when he was little, and they were also seen in a flashback running errands for Min Ik’s father at the company, which simultaneously reveals that he didn’t treat them very well. One day, Dae Joo’s mother got into a car accident while trying to save the fish that was meant to be a gift for Min Ik. After losing her sister, Eul Wang decided that she would try to do what she could to compensate drivers and secretaries suffering at the hands of their bosses. She started to intercept items that were bought with bribe money and replaced them with fakes, for example. She managed to get together a group of drivers and secretaries to help her out, ultimately forming the organization Euldoguk.
I remember being very intrigued by her relationship with Dae Joo in the beginning. It seemed like they grew up together although she was clearly older than him, but he still called her ‘noona’ rather than ‘imo’. I do believe that she was his aunt, his mother’s sister, but it’s also not that she took over the motherly care for him or anything. I found it quite mysterious. It was clear that she cared about him more than a secretary would normally are about her boss, and this was later confirmed when she told him she’d promised his mother she would keep protecting him. This also resulted in the fact that a large part of the money from the fish incident was given to his tuition to study abroad. Other than that, Dae Joo didn’t have anything to do with the organization – he didn’t even know it existed – and his previous encounters with Min Ik’s driver were also purely coincidental.
Eun Jung Soo, Min Ik’s attacker-become-driver, was also a victim that Euldoguk strived to protect. He used to be the driver of Min Ik’s uncle, but was mistreated so badly that he got into a traffic accident and ended up at the hospital with several fractures. Seriously, this made me so angry. Shim Ha Yong was literally kicking him in the shoulder from the back seat, screaming at him while they were on the freaking highway. He caused the accident by himself and then proceeded to sue Eun Jung Soo for intending to harm him. Eun Jung Soo didn’t get any compensation for getting hospitalized, and Eul Wang reached out to him. The attack on Min Ik was unintentional, as Eun Jung Soo was only trying to get back a USB stick with the information of Euldoguk that Eul Wang had entrusted to him. After that, Eun Jung Soo met Dae Joo, who just happened to know that Min Ik was in need of a new driver. Eun Jung Soo didn’t even know that the client he was getting introduced to was the same guy he attacked before. In any case, none of it was intentional or part of some plan to undermine Min Ik’s chance at becoming T&T’s new president.
While the last couple of episodes reveal what had truly happened and kind of redeem Eul Wang and Eun Jung Soo’s actions, I still think they could’ve made themselves way less suspicious from the start. While I thought it was nice to have some underlying mystery story to be solved besides the main love stories, I did feel like it could’ve been built up a little better. They made Eun Jung Soo seem like such a suspicious person despite his timidness, and the in-between random scenes of the secretaries running errands for Eul Wang, such as stealing that painting from Shim Ha Yong’s office, were kind of confusing. In hindsight I understand it better, but throughout the rest of the series I couldn’t really find myself to be that invested in what was happening in the background.

Before I move on to my main criticism of the show, I want to devote one last paragraph to the secretaries at Gal Hee’s office. Their bond really reminded me of Jugglers, which is also basically an homage to secretaries who have to bend over backwards for their demanding bosses. Goo Myung Jung (Son San), Ha Ri Ra (Kwon So Hyun) and Boo Se Yeong (Choi Yoon Ra) were three other secretaries that stuck with Gal Hee throughout the show. They were the people Gal Hee was closest to in the office, but they were also active members of Euldoguk without her. I found them a very funny trio and I enjoyed their scenes, especially Myung Jung, she cracked me up.
Speaking of these three, does anyone know what the heck happened to Mo Ha Ni? Ha Ni (Han Ji Seon) was Shim Ha Yong’s secretary and seemingly the secretary Gal Hee was closest to at the office. It seemed like she’d get a much bigger part to play when Shim Ha Yong asked her to keep an eye out for Min Ik and his secretary, and all the more when it was revealed she knew Eun Jung Soo, she even called him ‘oppa’. I was so intrigued by how she could be related to Eun Jung Soo (although now I suppose she just knew from Euldoguk) and if she would go against Gal Hee as Shim Ha Yong’s secretary (again, Jugglers flashback) but she just disappeared altogether! I think the last scene where she appeared was during the funeral where Min Ik momentarily regained his cognitive ability, when she called Eun Jung Soo to get out of there, but after that she never appeared again. That was kind of a bummer. I always find it a bit sloppy when series don’t deal well with the sudden disappearance of a character. Even if an actor is cut from the show halfway through, at least make up an excuse of what happened to them. Sometimes this doesn’t make it better (I remember this happening to a key character in The One and Only and the excuse they made for it was also very sloppy) but don’t just omit an entire character and stop mentioning them altogether after giving them some interesting information that could impact the plot. Maybe not everyone who watched it noticed this, but I did, and I want to know what happened to Ha Ni.😤 Anyways, I liked the secretaries, they were a fun bunch.

I found Min Ik’s mother, Shim Hae Ra (Jung Ae Ri) quite difficult to gauge. In the first flashback we see of her she didn’t seem fond of Min Ik at all, but in the present I couldn’t help but feel like she was hiding the fact she actually developed affection for him. She appeared cold throughout the story and she kept telling him to put up a good show, but in the meantime I felt like she didn’t actually resent him. She even agreed to make his favorite dish for him after he’d be elected president and that wasn’t something they would show off to the public. It was nice that she finally accepted him in the final episode though, when she introduced him as her son to the new housekeeper. I found it hard to determine at what point her feelings might have changed or if they had already changed, but I kept feeling like she at least cared more about him in a sincere way than his uncle did.
Speaking of that uncle, I just need to address him as the official antagonist of the story. What a childish jerk this guy was. He literally didn’t care about Min Ik at all, family or no, he grabbed whatever he could to use against him, including such a delicate issue as his illness. He didn’t even stop to think about how awful it was for his nephew to suffer from this, no, it just meant he wasn’t qualified, ha! Also the way he treated Eun Jung Soo and the other secretaries was just wrong. For a middle-aged man he acted like a spoiled little child. He’d literally point and laugh at someone and then skip away humming as if he just stole another kid’s marbles. Pathetic little man, that guy. I don’t have any good things to say about him, really.

As I also marked down the previous series I watched for being a bit unserious regarding certain topics I hope I don’t seem too uptight about how I review, but I find it important to voice my own perspectives and opinions. I saw that this show got a lot of high ratings on MDL because people loved its unseriousness, so it’s really just a matter of taste. As I mentioned earlier, I had an overall good time watching this, so it’s not that the unseriousness made me dislike it, per se. It’s just a very typical K-Drama with typical tropes and misunderstandings, which has both its charming and frustrating aspects.
I think I felt it the most with Gal Hee’s older brother. The thing is, I felt like the fact that he was blind didn’t actually contribute as much to the story as it could have. The moment Min Ik lost his ability to see faces, I immediately thought that helping him out would actually suit Gal Hee well because she had a brother who couldn’t see. Like, I thought that aspect might have become a significant link to how she would start helping her boss out, because she knew how to treat people who couldn’t see (well). However, I don’t think they actually created a direct link from that at all. I think Gal Hee only once mentioned that she had a blind brother but never really made a connection between him and her boss. I don’t know, it just felt like her brother’s blindness would’ve actually contributed some more to the depth of their relationship or something. Contrarily, the brother was made into quite the comical character. While I was appalled by the fact that Eun Jung Soo literally broke into their house and attacked a blind person for a laptop, the scene suddenly became comical because of Joong Hee’s actions and that changed the whole mood of the situation. It was a serious break-in, but then I suddenly couldn’t take it seriously anymore. I guess I found it a pity that the blind person became the clown. I don’t know if his representation of someone with blindness resonates with some people, but I wasn’t really able to take him very seriously. On the contrary – it started to annoy me a bit at some point. While he was a very loving brother to Gal Hee, and their hugs really warmed my heart, I did start feeling like he was doing it on purpose or something. I wasn’t really sure what to think of his character.
I also had mixed feelings about Nam Hee. She lies to her older siblings that she’s admitted into Pennsylvania University with a fake admission letter, only to hide away and do some auditions to try and become ‘a star’. Like, I understand that she wanted to find a way to contribute to the financial situation and it was sweet that she wanted to do it for Gal Hee because she saw how much her sister was carrying on her own (Backstreet Rookie vibes). Still, I found it a bit random how she ended up at Veronica Park’s place because she didn’t actually do anything there, she was always just sitting around in her office, bickering with her. Gal Hee eventually busts her at a theatre show and then she comes back home and that’s it. I get that they wanted to give Gal Hee’s siblings some storylines of their own, but this again didn’t really add anything to the story for me.
The part in the second-to-last episode where Joong Hee and Nam Hee intrude on Min Ik and Gal Hee’s date, was one of my least favorite ones, lol. I got so annoyed at them for knowingly tagging along and then just changing the trajectory, making it impossible for the two lovers to spend a single moment together. What was that about? Was it a test or something? I was really irritated by their interruptions there, and I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t just allow them to go on a date together. It’s not as if they hadn’t been seeing each other before that, so why the sudden urge to intrude now? Again, maybe I’m just too serious but I didn’t understand why they had to do that.

My general criticism of the show is that I felt like it was a bit sloppy in terms of consistency. I don’t just mean the fact that they omitted a character without explanation, but the plot just felt a bit wobbly to me all in all, as if they went with the flow without paying too much attention to detail. The humor was a bit slapsticky and random and it lacked depth. I don’t like comparing things to each other, but one thing I liked about A Business Proposal for example, was that they used the classical slapsticky jokes and tropes as a kind of reference to the old-school series but supported it with two very solid love stories built on genuine trust and emotional connection. I felt like this series leaned too much on the comicalness of the tropes but struck out on adding a certain layer of depth that I personally would have appreciated.

The main inconsistency for me came from the details of Min Ik’s prosapognosia. When it first happens, we experience it together with Min Ik: first people’s faces start changing and morphing into other people’s faces, and then they disappear altogether, leaving a blank canvas. Even though he sees Gal Hee’s face, he later says that he still can’t read her expressions very well. As in, he can’t see if she’s laughing or crying. But, so, what, does he just see one neutral expression on her face the entire time? One time they were on the beach and Gal Hee was making a really troubled expression because she felt so bad for misleading him, yet she told him that she was smiling very widely because he extended her contract. Like, it was clearly audible from her voice that she wasn’t smiling, but apparently he missed that too? Also, even after it was established that he could only see Gal Hee’s face when she was wearing her red cardigan, there was also one scene where she was wearing the cardigan and he told her he couldn’t see her face. So… I didn’t get a very clear image of what exactly he could and couldn’t see, and how his prosapognosia worked. His doctor started sharing ways with him to increase his blood pressure, as this seemed to help with a different patient, but in the end his ability only came back on three occasions.
His illness is never fully cured, as the final dialogue in the last episode reveals that Min Ik and Gal Hee basically continued to thrive on the short-lived moments where he regains his sight and they can make out whilst he can actually see her face. Doesn’t seem ideal, but hey, if it works for them, who am I to judge? In any case, my point is that, while the prosapognosia was the key instigating event in the series, they sure managed to keep its details and conditions vague until the very end.

To conclude my main analysis, I want to go into a little more detail about things I liked about the relationship between Min Ik and Gal Hee. There were several scenes that I found really sweet and even gave me some butterflies. All in all, I really liked to see Min Ik register the level of considerateness Gal Hee was giving him, even when she was pretending to be Veronica Park. The way she jumped up when she saw him eating peanuts, how she massaged his hands to stop his indigestion. Things that she learned during her work as his secretary now suddenly got a more romantic layer to them, and it was nice to see Min Ik suddenly take in those gestures differently. Receiving this treatment from fake Veronica Park ultimately made him realize that Gal Hee was the one who’d always treated him like that, which made him come to accept his feelings for her. Sure, it was a bit awkward to see him struggle with his feelings for both women, not realizing they were the same person, but I do think that the way he bounced back had a really good build-up to it. The time it took him to forgive Gal Hee was also well-paced, it wasn’t too short or not too long.
The scene that probably gave me the most goosebumps was the scene where he helped her wash her hands in the sink. I don’t know, it was oddly sensual. Also I have a thing for hands. Anyways, it was so weirdly sweet and typical that Gal Hee was the only one going, “uhm, sir?? 😳😳” while he was so focussed going, “no, we have to finish all the steps, Secretary Jung.”😂 I think that was even before he admitted his feelings for her, so it just added to the things he did and said to her that made me sceptical about whether he really didn’t realize his true feelings for her way earlier than that. I mean, he was so incredibly sweet to her. He hugged her and sent her appreciative texts… I mean, I don’t think that’s the norm for typical purely professional boss-secretary relationships.

I’d like to go over some cast comments now!
Since the last association I have with Kim Young Kwang is that of a psycho serial killer, it was kind of refreshing to see him in an innocent romantic comedy again! I’ve seen him in a bunch of shows such as Pinocchio, Go Ho’s Starry Night, Lookout, Room No. 9, and most recently Somebody, and his appearances throughout have ranked him on my list as an actor I always like to see in dramas. I feel like there are so many sides to his acting and it’s nice that he gets to explore a wide variety of roles in his repertoire. I think he had a very nice character presence in this show. It was nice to see Min Ik grow as a person in a very gradual and natural way. I honestly felt for the guy, because there were a lot of shitty aspects to his life and the way he grew up but he couldn’t exactly step away from those things either. In hindsight I really think that he knew his family wouldn’t fully accept him no matter what he did, and that he thought he ended up at least protecting himself by staying out of trouble and keeping people he spent a lot of time with at bay. He needed a caring person like Gal Hee to lower his walls a bit and admit that he needed some real comfort and TLC. I liked seeing Kim Young Kwang in this, it was nice to see a more comical side to his acting again after all the angsty stuff I’ve seen of him lately. I always like seeing him portray different emotions like sadness and fear, because he just naturally exudes confidence.

I’ve seen Jin Ki Joo before in Moon Lovers Scarlet Heart Ryeo and Come and Hug Me. The latter was the first main lead role she landed, and it was nice to see her as the female lead in a romantic comedy, as I hadn’t seen her in that genre before. Can I just say that she has such a cute doll face and the most adorable smile ever? Every time he faced changed into a smile I was like 🤗🤗. Anyways, it was nice seeing her portray the character of Gal Hee, as I had never seen her in something comical before. Come and Hug Me was a love story but with a super intense layer to it so I don’t remember her smiling a lot. It was nice to see a different side of her acting and she surprised me, to be honest. Her emotional scenes in particular were very good, but it was also funny to see her expressions go all over the place in the more comical scenes. Now that I’ve seen her in three completely different roles, I’m curious to see more of her. I’m still a bit new to her even though she has been a leading lady for some time now. I guess I just have to see more of her!

As iconic Veronica Park’s character was, I was actually surprised I didn’t know Kim Jae Kyung from anything else. I see on MDL that she was in Madam Antoine, but I don’t actually remember her from there, it’s too long ago. I think her performance was my favorite in this show. She did a great job at balancing Veronica Park’s eccentricity with the deeper layer that was beneath it and the switch to her more serious acting happened so naturally, it really surprised me. She’s the kind of comical character that I like because despite her caricatural tendencies, she delivered 100%. I’ve said this multiple times before in series, but for me humor only works when the actor isn’t trying to be funny and it’s just the character that takes themself super seriously. In Veronica Park’s case, she may have been a bit cray-cray but she never once apologized for it, she embraced it and the actress embraced it and that’s ultimately what made me love her so much. In fact, she even inspired me in a way, because it actually dawned on me that being unapologetically yourself, not caring what other people say of you, can also attract the right people. I would really like to see Kim Jae Kyung in some other show again, I really loved her performance.

For some reason I expected Goo Ja Sung to be an idol actor or something, but he’s not. He’s the same age as me, I found out! He hasn’t done that many acting jobs yet and I haven’t seen him in anything else. I hope he’ll get more opportunities to act in the future. As I said in my review, his character didn’t leave as strong of an impression on me as the other main leads did. However, I don’t want to blame the actor too much for that, because it mostly has to do with the fact that I feel like the show could’ve given Dae Joo much more to work with in terms of storyline and character development. He remained the same throughout the show and I would’ve really liked to get some more emotional depth from him. His acting was good and I liked the unlikely couple he made with Kim Jae Kyung. I just wanted to get a more insight into his background and perspective of the story.

Ever since I discovered Jang So Yeon in Touch Your Heart, I keep discovering she’s in so many other (older stuff) as well! She also appeared in While You Were Sleeping, Something in the Rain and Crash Landing on You and probably a lot of other shows that are still on my list. I really like her as an actress. She has such a sweet motherly face but I really like when she gets a role that has some edge to it. I liked seeing a bit of that edge in her character Lee Eul Wang, fighting for fair treatment of drivers and secretaries belonging to large companies. Despite the futility of it I really liked her spunk when she started calling Shim Ha Yong out for his mistreatment of his employees and how she was prepared to take all the blame for what she’d done and wouldn’t even judge the others for wanting to stay on with the company. On the other hand, I would’ve like to see her relationship with Dae Joo get established a bit more thoroughly. It kept me guessing as to how exactly they were related and I really liked their dynamic in the few scenes they had together, so I would’ve liked to see a bit more of that. I really like that Jang So Yeon keeps popping up in both new and old shows I watch, it always makes me go, ‘Hey, it’s the lady with the nice face!😀’ I hope I’ll get to see her in more series to come.

Note: I am aware that my cast comments have started to become shorter recently. I’ve started focussing more on the lead actors and only adding comments on specific supporting characters when I really want to give them a special shoutout. In this case I didn’t really feel the need to do that, as I’ve already mentioned the characters in my review. That’s not to say I think the cast was bad! Just thought I’d clarify that.

We’ve reached the end of this review and it took me an entire day, again. To sum up my thoughts about it in one concluding paragraph: I thought it was amusing. I had a fun time watching it, it was a very typical romantic comedy with some occasional emotional and touching moments that added a bit of depth to it. It reminded me a lot of several other shows, which I have also referred to in the review. It was kind of mixture of classic office romance dramas that I’d watched already, so it felt very familiar.
Still, it was a little bit too slapsticky and tropey for my taste and I missed that bit of depth. While I do like me some light and comical stuff without too much drama every once in a while, I would’ve liked to get some more depth and consistency within different aspects of the story. The love stories were all very lovey-dovey and sweet but lacked real passion, I didn’t feel as much chemistry between the respective couples as I would’ve liked, and I feel that that’s because of the light and comical tone of the show. Nothing became too serious or too heavy and that’s definitely not a bad thing, but I guess I was just in the mood for something more serious and passionate. It happens. Still, I don’t want to take away the fact that I found it very entertaining to watch and some scenes really put some things into perspective for me. I’m glad I finally got to watch it.

My hope is that I can’t finish another show before the end of May, but on the other hand this month is going to get a bit busier again with some deadlines (including me finishing my thesis) so we’ll see when I’ll be able to upload the next review! I’m super excited to spin my Wheel of Fortune app to see what’s up next, so I’m going to do that for starters.

Until next time! x