Watch Episode 12 of Lie to Me. Seriously! I tried embedding the player in the post, but ah. It didn't work. And I might have broken something.
The first drama I watched was My Lovely Sam Soon, which was a great way to get into the whole drama-watching field. It was short, only 16 episodes, which I find is ideal for me. If you go over 16 episodes, I start to lose interest, or the plot begins to resemble something closer to American Soap Operas, with someone falling off a cliff or slipping into a coma or something. Also, Sam Soon was fantastic because of Daniel Henney, who I love. He's my secret husband. (Please don't tell my boyfriend.)
After Sam Soon, I watched Spring Waltz, basically because it also had Daniel Henney in it. This one was a little too melodramatic for me, and also the fact that Daniel never gets the girl becomes irksome because... hello, have you seen him? How in the world could he not get the girl? Also, if I just spoiled the drama for you. Um. Sorry.
The drama watching period gets hazy here, probably because I saw a lot, or started to see a lot and then stopped. I think the next one that I watched all the way through was Boys Before Flowers. This drama was ridiculously popular, and I liked the fact that I could discuss what was happening with my students. This one fell prey to the "more is less" syndrome, and started to get a little ridiculous halfway through. I think the drama people realized that they were in the midst of a national phenomenon and decided to get as much out of it as possible. There were Boys Before Flowers things everywhere. And I do admit, I bought some F4 stickers. I excused it as a purchase for my students, but I did take the best stickers out first and put them in my organizer. I really liked Lee Min Ho in this, probably because he was tall, which resulted in me watching
Personal Preference, and yes, I realize that these are out of chronological order. They're not in the order of how I watched them either, but hey, it's cool, we can still be friends, right? ...right? I liked this drama, it was short, Son Ye Jin played a cute female character and Lee Min Ho remained tall. I can't stress enough the importance of the female character in the dramas. I mean, yeah, they're necessary because you can't really have a love story with just one guy. Well, you could but gross? But I digress. Geum Jan Di in Boys Before Flowers just got to be kind of annoying. Goo Hye Sun is adorable, but the way Jan Di was written eventually became really... not fun to watch. I don't much care for dramas that have contrived conflicts that could be easily remedied if one party talked to the other party. Personal Preference wasn't bad, and the story line was unusual because it dealt with *gasp* homosexuality which isn't such a common topic in Korea. As a friend told me, his adult student explained that they simply "don't have that here [in Korea]".
Which brings me to Coffee Prince, also unusual in that the female romantic lead dressed up (and looked) like a boy throughout most of the drama... and the male romantic lead fell in love with him. Her. Whatever. Yoon Eun Hye played the female lead well, and it was interesting to watch almost all of the male characters fall inexplicably for their "male" coworker, and then try to deal with what it meant. The writers never really answered what it meant. Maybe you're meant to fall in love with one personality, regardless of what that is housed in?
You're Beautiful also had the whole gender-bending phenomenon, and the whole straight man falling for another (seeming) man and questioning themselves. But this one is probably my favorite drama that I've watched. Park Shin Hye plays the female lead and her twin brother, and she was cute without getting too annoying, droopy, whatever. The male lead was Jang Geun Seok, and his character always wore eyeliner which was basically the hottest thing in the world. (Please don't tell my boyfriend.) The idea for the drama was there was a popular band led by Jang Geun Seok's character, but to add to their popularity, they brought another member into the group. Unbeknownst to the music label management, the additional member got a botched plastic surgery job and the man who recommended that brought in his twin sister to replace him until he could get the plastic surgery fixed. Fortunately, despite their gender differences, the twins looked and sounded exactly alike and the story goes on from there but I'm not going to get into it. The soundtrack for this drama was great and I may or may not (totally may) have favorited the last scene on youtube so that I could watch it whenever I wanted. Don't judge. You watch it, you're going to do the same thing.
Jang Geun Seok was also the male lead in Mary Stayed Out All Night, and he played a poor struggling musician who agreed to enter a fake marriage with a poor girl in order to keep her father from forcing her to marry his old friend's son. Moon Geun Young played the poor girl, and I really like her as an actress. Her voice is all raspy and cute. She was A Tale of Two Sisters, which was creepy but I watched it anyway. I also always saw her on Mr. Pizza commercials. I liked Mr. Pizza. I also liked this drama a lot, too, though it did have several of those "Oh my gosh, talk to the other person already" instances, in which a lot of trouble (and probably several episodes) could have been avoided if someone would have just said something.
Moving on, Playful Kiss starred one of the actors from Boys Before Flowers. I actually watched it because it was recommended to me on Hulu, and I was so excited to see Korean dramas there that I started to watch it and got sucked in. Kim Hyun Joong was the spacy, perfect artist guy in Boys Before Flowers and he was kind of the same character here. The female lead was cute, she played her character well, but gosh, at this point I started to realize that there are way too many dramas with a perfect, rich man and an adorable but somehow flawed girl (she's usually poor, in this one she was dumb, too) that wins his heart through sheer persistence. Oh, and there's also going to usually be a boy that's consistently in love with the poor girl (though she never returns his feelings) and a perfect girl that the perfect boy wants before he decides to fall in love with the poor girl. Maybe these dramas are meant to give their audiences hope that they too will someday through sheer force of will cause a perfect, rich, handsome man to fall in love with them?
Baker King, Kim Tak Gu did not have a perfect rich boy as the lead. Kim Tak Gu was cute but oh my gosh, so emotional. I started watching this with my mom on KBS last summer and then finished it online and every time Tak Gu cried (and oh my, did he cry a lot), I would get teary eyed. Or cry. When I told my mom about it, she said she did the same thing. This story was different, which is probably why I liked it. Tak Gu was poor, the female characters were poor-ish, the bad guy was rich but he wasn't really the bad guy except for the fact that he was totally awful and... well... you'd have to watch it to understand. Unfortunately, this sucker is long. 30 episodes. And it has a lot of those easy-to-fix conflicts that make you so annoyed because you're so tense but you can't stop watching anyway because you want everything to be okay and for Tak Gu to stop crying already. Gosh.
All of this leads me to the episode that I linked to in the beginning of this entry. So far, Lie to Me has been an enjoyable drama-watching experience. It's also got Yoon Eun Hye, but she's not a boy the whole time this time! She plays the hard-working, kind of quirky, down to earth girl and she lies about being married to a perfect rich guy. She never explicitly says she's married to Kang Ji Hwan's character, but people see them together and the rumor spreads and he finds out and gets mad and is going to sue her but she asks him to pretend to be married to her so that she can get revenge on her college friend who stole her first love and he finally agrees after some interference from his younger brother and then shenanigans ensue and I'm on episode 12. I don't know how it ends and if I did know, I wouldn't tell you anyway. So there. I like this drama so far because there isn't a super evil villain character, it's funny and Kang Ji Hwan's character basically gives me unrealistic expectations for boyfriendly behavior forever now. I realize the big cultural differences between Korean men and American men. And I would never ask my boyfriend to buy all the tickets to a concert I was organizing or to give up his own professional well-being in order to make me feel happy. But some of those other things aren't bad. Like asking your significant other to tell you about their day. Or surprising them at their home. Drinking bowls full of soju is optional. (You can totally tell my boyfriend some of this. Unless he's reading it himself. In which case... hi, honey.)
Anyway, there are several dramas that I'm leaving out. These are the ones that stuck with me so far, and most of them are really good. They're also valuable learning opportunities to be found in the viewing of these dramas. You can learn how to be a rich, snobby guy which will lead you to fall in love with a cute, persistent girl. You can learn how to say the equivalent of "You suck" in Korean. You can find scenes to look up and favorite on youtube so that you can watch them over and over again whenever you like. Or you can decide to do any of these things later and fall asleep because it's late and you're tired and it's been a long day. But you still have to watch at least one of these. You (or your girlfriend) will thank me for it after you decorate an entire park in tiny Christmas lights in order to apologize after a tiff with your significant other.
