Letter #62: Love to Hate You

Good morning, Erin.

So…have you figured out who my fave from BTS is, yet? No? Well, don’t worry too much—this is the Love to Hate You letter, so you’ve still got time!

I know, I know—you can’t believe it’s taking me this long to watch a few 30-minute episodes of the world’s biggest(?) international superstars being personable and fun. But, in my defense, I have a lot of difficulty with recognizing people when they have different hairstyles every time I see them, so there’s a lot more effort than you would think being put into me properly following along from video to video.

…/maybe I thought I had finished them all and then realized I still had two left to watch maybe I dunno I’m just spitballin’ it could be the haircut thing who can say.

Regardless, I’ve finished Love to Hate You, which is the third show (out of four) on your most recent “Watch These Now Ignore My Previous List” list, and so we are going to have a little chat about it. Spoiler free, of course, because, last I heard, you haven’t quite given it a go.

Ready? I…assume you said yes, let’s go!

1. The opening 10 minutes of the series is fantastic…and the rest of the show never quite reaches those heights again. Which I hoped it would, but which I assumed it would not. Which is not an indictment of the rest of the show, just acknowledging that the hit-the-ground-running first couple of scenes are more like dynamic exposition than a promise of what’s to come. 

2. Love that theme song. Never skip it. 

2A. …I mean, it’s 10 seconds long, but it’s still worth fighting that impulse to hit the Skip button that Netflix has engrained in us. 

3. I only recognized two of the actors in this series, and they both appear in the first episode:

• Young Stewardess Bully from The Glory as the temperamental actress 

• the friend/pretend dad from 18 Again as the temperamental actress’s agent

4. Also, they use the exterior of the fancy club that Mr. Oh worked at in My Liberation Notes as…well, as a fancy club. But I recognized it. So…put that one up on the board, as well. 

5. Overall, this is an enjoyable, well-paced, dynamic series that does a pretty good job at discussing sexism—and those who are fixated on sexism—without sacrificing the idea that a story needs to be a story before you can worry about whatever themes you hope you explore…until it either gets lazy or reaches beyond its grasp and tries to retcon established facts to better suit the lesson of the show. (Specifically, what is explicitly portrayed as deliberate promiscuity at the start of the show is quietly reframed as “dating” when the plot needs to make someone seem more innocent than she actually is, later on. It’s an unnecessary change, insofar as the overall point is concerned, but it sure does make it easier to emotionally manipulate the audience.) But, even so, the theme-y stuff never takes priority over the story.

6. I have…complicated feelings about Mi-ran, our female protagonist. In that I don’t know how to feel about how much I like her. 

6A. She’s a really good character, for the record. And I think the actress who plays her does a really good job—particularly since she has to do myriad different things (humor, physical humor, physical stunts, intense vulnerability, be alternately likeable and unlikeable without turning off the audience) and make them all seem like different facets of the same character. I don’t know that I thought to put her on my big list of favorite K-drama characters, but I should probably give it some thought. 

6B. That said, the writing sort of fails her in the same way it fails to keep the theme-y stuff in line the whole way through. As often as Mi-ran’s bad behavior is held to account (morally, if nothing else), she frequently gets a pass for similar actions when the show wants to make a joke or couldn’t think of a better way to put her in the right. 

6C. Also, she’s a lawyer at a fancy firm, and she goes to work in blue jeans. What the f***?

6D. All that aside, though, the actress is a blackbelt in three forms of martial arts or something crazy like that, and the show absolutely takes advantage of her skills. It’s great. And she’s very impressive. 

6E. What would have been more impressive, though, is if she’d allowed her to strip down at all. Wait, that’s not—hang on, what I mean is I wish we’d been able to get a look at her physique, given what we see her do. (I mean, she does these super-crunches, in one scene, and her breath isn’t even straining as she speaks!) I couldn’t help but think about that scene of the firefighter lady crawling into the vents in her sporty undergarments on Sweet Home and how ripped she looked. Is Mi-ran ripped? Is she lither than her obvious strength would imply? I’m just curious, is all. They managed to have the male lead show off his body (however briefly), and he didn’t even do anything impressive. 

6F. Which is a really long way of saying that she was (to me) the best part of the show.

7. …but the real best part of the show was obviously how it did the [REDACTED], which you know is one of my favorite things ever. 

8. This show is rated TV-MA, and I cannot work out why. Is it the occasional swear word? The one scene where nudity is blurred out and played for comedy? How grown adults flagrantly admit to holding hands with each other?

9. Part of the plot involved the male protagonist doing a movie, and I don’t know what era its supposed to take place in. Sometimes it looks like it’s the 1930s, and the rest of the time it appears to be modern day. And there’s nothing to indicate it’s anything time travel or characters-who-are-immortal related. 

10. There are at least three scenes in which the actors have to do some silly running around stuff, and the actress who plays Mi-ran can only go so long before she breaks out in a huge grin, even if it makes no sense for her character to laugh in that moment. Which I found quite amusing. And more than a little bit charming. 

11. Going back to the sexism stuff…I’m not one to get upset about stereotypical stuff in TV shows, for the most part, but when the show goes out of its way to get on a moral high-horse about the treatment of women in one scene, I frown a bit when they follow it up by tacitly approving of sexist treatment of men in the very next scene. Not to make a point about how the characters (and we in the audience) are hypocrites, even if they are mostly in the right, but just because lol jokes and other such excuses. The worst part being I’m pretty sure the show doesn’t even know it’s doing this. 

11A. Or, to put it in terms I know you understand: remember the whole thing in Because It’s My First Life with not-stalker Secretary Brother (from A Business Proposal) and how the girls would complain about sexual harassment in one moment and then treat him like a piece of meat in the next? Remember how the show doesn’t address this double standard? It’s kind of like that. 

12. We get a look at some of the side-street/backstreet areas you can drive through, in Seoul, and they are so narrow and convoluted that it finally made all the “ooo, you’re a good driver!” talk on Transit Love 2 make sense. (Though…the women would also start cooing about the guy’s driving while they were out on the open highway, so…maybe not as solved a mystery as I immediately thought. Hmm.)

13. There’s a lot of A happens to justify B which leads to C so that we can do D, in the story. That is, that very deliberate “we want to do D how can we do D.” It’s not that any of the A/B/C to get to D is unbelievable or even particularly contrived, but that it is all reverse engineered to get to D is very obvious, which, as a person who claims to care about storytelling, I feel I need to make note of.

13A. That said, there’s a scene where Mi-ran kicks 30 shot glasses into beer mugs, so it’s fine. 

14. Okay—if nothing else I have said about this show has lured you in: there are a plethora of Hyundais. Check and mate. 

And that’s where we’ll leave that, I think. 

I know you said it didn’t grip you, when you tried to watch it, but I think it’s worthwhile. Everything after the first episode is pretty recognizable, as far as romcoms go. It’s only 10 episodes, so there are moments that are shortcutted or handwaved, but it’s a fun time, regardless. 

As fun as BTS in a town-sized game of Mafia? Well…maybe. I mean, who’s to say? Possibly not me. I may not have seen that one. If it exists. Which maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I’m making it up. 

And maybe we’ll find out next time.

Maybe. 

--Daryl