K-Drama Report: Love is for Suckers, Part II

Episodes 6-12

Something I’ve long found interesting in media studies is why people decide to watch what they watch. What goes into the decision, if a decision ever comes from the endless browsing across multiple platforms? In this most academic pursuit, I’ve been privileged with a curious, compelling subject – myself – and every now and again, he baffles me. At the moment, I’ve got at least two shows running: Love is for Suckers, and season two of The Shield. That follows. It’s season two because I watched the first way back in college, during the great mania around prestige television. Unfortunately, it vanished off streaming, and I’ve only returned to it ten years later. It’s good. It’s probably the best police procedural I’ve ever seen (if The Wire and Mindhunter are just stage-left of procedural), in part because it’s honest and seems to have a mission. In its exploration of police corruption, we see the grisly effects but we also understand the very logical cause. The bad guy’s gonna get away with it, so we want Vic Mackey to step in with his extrajudicial methods. Why wouldn’t that impulse exist in the real world, and is the system strong enough to resist it?

In a strange way, it’s been a nostalgia trip. I’d kind of fallen off of those prestige dramas around 2019, the time of my big hallyu awakening. I remember watching the final episodes of Deadwood season two in the airport waiting on the flight to Incheon, and I’ve never finished that show. I like The Shield for its screenwriting lessons in particular, that it manages to balance everything and build up to a violent payoff each episode, but its juxtaposition with Love is for Suckers provides a telling contrast: there’s no down time. These are great characters, but they struggle rather than live. And as we’ll discuss, the machinations of a K-drama plot are often ludicrous compared to the subtleties of American television, but I’ve really come to appreciate the feel of shows like Love is for Suckers, how I can sink into them. Neither approach to storytelling is necessarily better, especially theoretically, so what I really love is when there’s a balance of both. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was good about that, as was Search: WWW. Generally speaking, I want to feel more emotions than what comes from the verb of the show.

Love is for Suckers has no verb. It’s almost indescribable. In the previous post, I was wowed by its structural audacity, that it would erect an entire mini-show as setup to the premise. Through the middle episodes, I’m definitely seeing how that wasn’t a once-off but rather the narrative ethos. The show goes really big, often when it doesn’t have to. It’s instilled in me a kind of hissing Pavlovian response, that when a new plot-line begins to spool up, I get anxious that it’s gonna pull me away from what I was just getting used to. I loved the world of the first four episodes, with the male and female leads living in an awesome two-unit building. Then the show hit the accelerator and she moves out, but this did lead to a dramatic climax. Accelerator again, and we’re doing the reality show. But with the Other Woman especially, Han Ji-yeon, I was able to, you know, move the mountain in my heart and accept that, too. So please don’t tease a knife-wielding maniac who’s gonna come in and ruin everything!

Before we get there, we have what feels like the climax of the whole show, or at least, Choi Si-won’s character Park Jae-hoon. Maybe this is how you get me to “sink in,” by expanding outward and turning 16 episodes into what feels like an infinity – how many arcs can one character have?! So we learn that he used to be a prized neurosurgeon, but something happened and now he’s doing cosmetic surgery out of a teeny-tiny office. In the last post, I bravely predicted he killed a patient, and I think the series writer Kim Sol-ji was anticipating that. It is, after all, a romance show about a romance show; she knows the tropes, and there are some winking meta moments.

It turns out, on the day that Lee Da-hee’s character Goo Yeo-reum broke things off with her fiancé, Jae-hoon’s hospital was flooded by patients from a nearby explosion. He has to make a triage decision between two: a middle-school kid and an old man. In that split-second, he reasons that the old man won’t have as much of a chance, and sends the kid into the operating room. After the successful surgery, he learns that the old man died, and was his own father.

Oh, come on!

It sounds like a bad joke. And it plays kind of hinky, too, where first a rumor leaks online that Jae-hoon left the hospital because of medical malpractice, and because he isn’t quick to deny it, I’m falling into Kim Sol-ji’s trap: maybe he did kill someone! This storyline is about a favorite – and deserved – punching bag of K-dramas, the netizens, who spread misinformation and come to unfair conclusions in real life, too. But almost immediately, someone comes forward with the truth, blaming himself for Jae-hoon’s exit, the news of which had put the reality show Kingdom of Love in a precarious position. I know the episodes are long, but we didn’t even get an episode to deal with this conflict. I don’t know if it lasted ten minutes!

The young man who comes forward is the middle-school kid, now grown up and with aspirations of becoming a neurosurgeon like Jae-hoon, but he blames himself for what happened to the good doctor’s family. In a convergence of events – which requires an uncharacteristically passive Yeo-reum – Ji-yeon and the Kingdom of Love cameras are there for this teary reunion on the beach, which elevates Jae-hoon to, like, the greatest reality show contestant in history. I mean, nobody could touch his performance here. He embraces the young man as Yeo-reum, Ji-yeon, and the ice-queen producer Kang Chae-ri watch on, all three women hoping to jump his bones. It’s pretty funny.

And despite how it looks on paper, it worked for me, though only barely. It really comes down to Jae-hoon, and what these wild events are doing for him as a character. And I really like him, so it’s interesting to see him react. But indeed, Chae-ri starts to show signs of Jae-hoon fever as well, and honestly? Why not? Introduce as many possible plot threads and complications as possible. It’s fun! Just call it Bioware Syndrome. Everybody wants to fuck everybody.

I also fear I like Chae-ri more than I should. I think she’s supposed to be a more comical figure than she’s turned out to be, where her steely exterior is sometimes undermined by accidents, but she’s still a little too evil. There’s a parallel between her and Chef John, where their initial antagonism toward Yeo-reum is being gradually revealed as social awkwardness. When Jae-hoon returns to the Kingdom of Love house after his scandal’s subsided, he’s given a big welcome by the contestants and they have a drink. A little later, John sidles up next to him with a beer and says that the online negativity only means he’s famous. As usual, Jae-hoon teases him, and John claims he’s just imparting advice as someone more versed in the influencer world. After an awkward silence, John goes, “Cheers?” and the scene abruptly cuts. It has the affect of a blooper, as if either actor forgot his line and they were about to burst into laughter.

John finally puts his culinary skills to use in wooing Jang Tae-mi the weather girl, cooking up a nice meal that earns plaudits from other contestants. Unfortunately, Tae-mi takes one bite and excuses herself to go to the powder room. It isn’t bad food, but it turns out she’s bulimic. Park Yeon-woo’s performance as John is interesting because he has to play a likeable unlikeable guy, who ends up being far more comical than Chae-ri. He tries to step up to Jae-hoon early on in Kingdom of Love, and Jae-hoon simply puts him in a headlock. Naturally, he’s a big scaredy-cat in the haunted house. So I’m reading the micro in his face, and the disappointment he expresses signals the start of his arc. But I also thought it would be the start of Tae-mi’s arc, too. Like, he thought she was kind of shallow, but maybe she’s going through something and he should be there for her. But no.

Instead, we start to build toward an unexpected triangle, between John, creepy guy Kim Joon-ho, and “fat girl” Park Ji-wan. This is the contestant who charmed Yeo-reum during auditions, but Chae-ri didn’t want her on the show because she isn’t a hottie. She’s a nottie. But the webtoon artist is kindhearted, if a little naive (I always thought being introverted gave you wisdom, but maybe it’s just the illusion of wisdom. I am kind of an idiot out in the real world). Joon-ho keeps picking Ji-wan as his partner on the show because he thinks it’ll help boost his profile and, ultimately, serve as marketing for his business. Ji-wan goes along with it because she didn’t expect to field any male attention on the show, but she’s clearly uninterested.

There’s a production snafu where Ji-wan reveals that her reticence with romance and sex comes from being molested as a kid, and gopher Sang-woo deletes the footage at her request and nearly gets himself fired. Way to handle that one, Yeo-reum, by the way. She goes to Chae-ri and doesn’t say, “It was my responsibility, so the only name I’ll name is mine,” she blames Sang-woo and expects Chae-ri to go easy on him. She suspends him from the shoot! Anyway, John goes to throw his uneaten meal away when Ji-wan stops him. They sit down together and she shows the appreciation for it that he was hoping to get from Tae-mi. This is gonna be the unlikely relationship, and that’s fine. I don’t love that it comes at the expense of Jang Tae-mi, nor the extremes by which people can appreciate food – it’s fine.

But then the knife-wielding maniac! So this guy comes in and attacks Sang-woo and Chae-ri, then goes after his true target: Joon-ho. He knife-swingingly exposits that he and his family were financially ruined by Joon-ho’s manipulative business practices until he’s wrestled to the ground by the two himbos (well, one mega-dummy and a silly actor man) and arrested. This is what really sets John and Ji-wan on the path, and again, it feels too extreme. That’s the ethos of the show. How do we make Yeo-reum unavailable to Jae-hoon? Blow up her wedding hours before Kingdom of Love starts filming. How do we shift the relationship John pursues? A knife attack. Like, you were already trending in that direction. It feels self-conscious. The show doesn’t trust itself with its own developments.

It’s the same problem I had with Hello, My Twenties!, something like scope creep. Like, why go so big? And this gets to the mental comparison I’ve been making the entire time. I really like Love is for Suckers; I think it’s a great K-drama so far. But I also really liked Search: WWW, and that was a great television show. One of the things with Search: WWW is that it lived in small moments. There were big things, like when the heroine Bae Ta-mi was trending online, but nothing seemed to come in from the outside and disrupt what was going on. Instead, there were scenes where Ta-mi’s paramour Park Morgan was sick and so she lies next to him in bed and whispers, “Get better soon, Park Morgan,” as “The Milky Way Between Us” spools up – gets me every time – or when she tells minor character A-ra in the car that she misses her friendship, and A-ra turns away, eyes fluttering, barely holding back tears. That’s K-drama bread and butter.

There aren’t really characters like A-ra in Love is for Suckers. There’s writer-nim and some of the contestants are amusing, but I do recognize the potential for more. In fact, by now, my love for Han Ji-yeon has ballooned to the point where I’m actually rooting for her over Yeo-reum. I mean, the actress really does do sad super well. Meanwhile, the distance between Yeo-reum and Jae-hoon feels a little contrived. I’m always forgetting what Yeo-reum’s hangup is before I remember it’s that, oh, yeah, her wedding exploded. How do I not remember that, but I still remember “Get better soon, Park Morgan?”