A little over a month ago I jokingly put on the first episode of random k-dramas on Hulu when my brothers and I were bored on Thanksgiving and now we are stuck in the halyu wave without the will or desire to surf our way to shore.
I ended up watching Oh My Ghostess by my lonesome and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. The first thing that drew me into the show was its clear attention to the cinematography. The setting revolves around a restaurant and the show lovingly and respectfully spends a lot of time just to show the characters working with the food, gracefully panning across a filet as a knife slices though and emphasizing the change of texture as someone torches a desert. The direction felt surprisingly natural as well. It’s certainly funny and dramatic but the direction and acting did not revel in operatic excess or melodrama, instead feeling more like something I’d expect out of Western TV dramas. The main cast have an incredibly charming chemistry, even the side characters with no major character development or plot relevance, and I especially love the way the male lead acts when flustered- playing a character who values his pride and superiority, he does this thing where you can tell he’s trying really hard to maintain composure but has this huge urge to smile and laugh. It’s very charming.
While the basic plot premise is that a young woman working for a star chef is possessed by a ghost whose lasting grudge is that she died a virgin, it quickly becomes apparent that the story is more thoughtful than it initially sounds. The first episode, and in fact the first several episodes, treats the female lead really as a side character in the life of the star chef male lead whose life takes focus. As mentioned before, he’s prideful and arrogant, and the beginning of the show is really just about how his personality has affected his relationships with his workers, his family, and his friends. You don’t learn anything about the female leads but you learn a lot about his personal issues and see him develop as a person. The show eventually goes in directions I really did not expect but I honestly enjoyed the show a lot.
Curious after finishing Oh My Ghostess, on Christmas I made the mistake of putting on a couple of episodes of My Love From Another Star. This was another show we had initially watched the first episode of over Thanksgiving. I had heard of this show before and knew it was an absolute phenomena in Korea and especially China but none of us really liked the first episode. We persevered through the first several episodes, I so that I could figure out why it was popular and my brothers probably because they just didn’t have anything else to do, and it was just this absolute smorgasbord of interweaving plots and character relationships. Every character in the show was a horrible, broken person who was enabled by someone else in their life and they just kept pushing this on to every other character they met. The show would just keep on introducing more and more characters who all have unique, longtime relationships and backgrounds with most other characters that were just incredibly hard to keep track of. It didn’t even have any kind of forward momentum or main thrust aside from the viewer’s implicit understanding of where the main romance must go due to genre conventions. Every time a new character appeared we all audibly groaned because there was even more information to remember.
But when the main through line plot is established after several episodes we found that the show had actually created a large cast of characters who had layers depth thanks the complex web of relationships that revealed the different faces of them all. From then on the show rarely needs to establish or harp on any backstories since the viewer is able to understand and infer character motivations from then on. When characters are horrible to each other you’re able to follow layers of character development under it without the show needing to be explicit about the characters’ feelings or reactions.
It also helps that the show is about an alien with godlike powers who keeps pulling new abilities out of his pocket every other episode. There’s some silliness in there but there are actually some nicely dramatic ways his alieness is integrated into the romantic plot. We haven’t finished this one but I think my mother has gotten into it when we she saw the last couple of episodes we were watching.
Tell me why I’m wasting my life and what I should waste it on after My Love From Another Star.