I will preface this by saying that I went into this drama with absolutely no expectations and started it only for Park Bo Gum. There will also be many spoilers so beware if you haven’t watched the drama yet.

THE START

When I first started watching the drama, I was lead to believe that it was going to be a romance and coming of age story. It was new to me in terms of the roles that the actors were playing as I’ve never seen a drama that centered on a makeup artist and a struggling wannabe actor so I was intrigued.

The first few episodes were interesting albeit slow, showing the struggles that the FL, ML and supporting roles were going through. It was also interesting to see how much focus the supporting roles seem to get as well. The contrast between Hae Hyo’s privileged background with a ‘momager’ so keen to make him successful and Hye Jun’s humble background and mixed opinions family was fun to watch. The frustrations were shown well when it came to the jealous senior in Jeong Ha’s work place, Hye Jun’s unsupportive father and brother and Hae Hyo’s mother’s dissatisfaction with the amount of work he was getting. The blossoming relationship between Jeong Ha and Hye Jun was lovely and sweet to see as well. Everything was just quite refreshing to say the least.

THE ROMANCE

As Hye Jun rose to fame, I felt like the writers pretty much decided to throw the whole romance away and Jeong Ha started to get sidelined. We start to see more text messaging, phone calls and only the occasional physical meet up. Gone are the refreshing straightforward conversations and cute scenarios, the romance is just...gone. Instead we just keep seeing more and more of Hye Jun dealing with his newfound fame as Jeong Ha just stared out of a bus. While I guess it’s sort of a realistic take as superstars likely find it hard to take time out for their relationships, I felt like it was a huge waste of Park So Dam’s abilities. Looking the relationship overall, while it was a mature take of a romantic relationship, there was no passion at all.

THE MAIN ROLES

1. Hye Jun

This entire drama should’ve probably just been based on Hye Jun and his struggles and rise to fame instead of trying to force a romance in. We see Hye Jun try so hard to succeed that while it was satisfying to see it happen, it just because so bland after awhile. The parts where he finally does especially the one where he gave a speech so awfully reminiscent of PBG irl when he won for his role in love in the moonlight.

2) JeongHa

PSD’s acting was wasted as she barely got any good scenes to act out. The scenes of her taking no shit from her manager and bring independent overall was good but her character is then shoved to just be a sort of conflict between Hye Jun’s love for her and the need to maintain his career.

THE SUPPORTING ROLES AND THEIR STORIES

1. Hae Hyo

The start where Hae Hyo seemed to be doing much better than Hye Jun due to his background and connections was interesting to see. It let viewers understand just how unfair the world is. It was also nice to see how their individual successes didn’t seem to tarnish the strong friendship between them. That being said, WHAT WAS THE POINT OF HIM CRUSHING ON HIS BEST FRIEND’S GIRLFRIEND? I felt like there was no basis to him developing a crush on her and the way that he still tried to crush on her despite knowing that both Hye Jun and Jeong Ha were dating felt so forced. We also barely see a conclusion or any drama happen in this plot line, I was expecting to see Hye Jun find out about it and start a big fight but nothing happened!! I also did not see the point of the forced ‘friendship’ between him and Park Do Ha who was just an a** throughout everything.

2) The unsupportive dad and brother

At the start, while it likely made the viewers angry to see them being so unsupportive, I felt like it was a realistic take on how unsupportive family can be when you want to pursue your passions (especially that of the ‘arts’ field, especially in an Asian family. The push to ‘get a real job’ does strike home. But I felt like too much focus was put on this storyline. While they eventually became supportive because Hye Jun finally got his big break, the overdrawn part where his brother would constantly defend him online and eventually get sued was weird and just didn’t seem to serve anything in the drama. In fact, far too much time was spent on the legality of being a troll online in SK.

3) The ex girlfriend.

I was expecting to see some sort of hard drama when she was introduced but her role was just to be a lawyer for Hye Jun’s agency and to be willing to publicly defend him during his scandal with the fashion designer. There was no growth for her character, she was one dimensional and she didn’t seem to serve an important part in the drama whatsoever.

4) Hye Jun’s ex manager, the reporter and the fashion designer

Such a huge chunk of the drama centered around the first two causing so much trouble and showing the possible behind the scenes of scandals in the entertainment industry that it really makes me wonder whether this drama was meant to be more of a commentary on the industry rather than a coming of age romance. The death of Charlie Jung was dragged on for so episodes and yet the drama behind it was squashed in mere minutes by a simple release of text messages.

5) The mothers

While it’s funny to see two women who are frenemies (?), comparing their sons to each other which is extremely common in Asian culture. Their relationship eventually become pointless to me and I felt like it would’ve been more beneficial to focus more on Hae hyo’s mother’s momager actions and Hye Jun’s mother’s supportiveness instead.

6) Hye Na and her boyfriend

Their storyline served to show the control that her mother has over her and I suppose the class difference between both of them. But I truly don’t think it contributed a lot to the drama overall.

Overall, this drama was a huge disappointment to me as shown by my rants above. I do think that the writers were ambitious and wanted to write about so much more but 16 episodes just isn’t enough for the story they wanted to tell. Anyway, this is just my personal opinion and I would love to hear what others think about it and whether I’m just being too harsh.