Letter #73: Celebrity

Good morning, Erin.

I know—I know: I’m supposed to be finishing up Secretary Kim. And I was. I was motoring right along (with the exception of your request to start I’ll See You in My 19th Life (which absolutely needs to be on more than once a week!)), and then I saw that pretty actress from Sweet Home and It’s Okay to Not be Okay and said, “Oo, what’s this?” and then stayed up all night binging Celebrity. And now we’re here.

And I hope you’re here with me—that is, that you’ve seen it, as well. Because there are things I need to talk to you about with this show. And I don’t want to be super-vague about them. 

So, here’s the deal: I’m going to do my usual non-specific chatter because I don’t know if you’ve seen this or not, buuuuuuuuut I’m going to talk about one very specific thing very specifically and spoilery, with a clear indication of when that will be, so you’ll be able to skip it, if you want. 

…but also go watch it so that I can talk to you about it ‘cus I really wanna talk to you about it. 

Cool? Cool!

1. Right off the bat, there’s no hiding any of the Hyundai logos, so you know we’re in for a treat. 

2. You know how I am with first-time character introductions, on these shows. And we started a chunk of it with a bunch of women specifically glammed up in a way so as to seem somewhat indistinguishable from each other. I genuinely couldn’t tell if I was supposed to pay attention to them or if they were just one-off examples of the kinds of people the show would be dealing with.

2A. Turns out they were the main supporting cast. But they get easy to recognize (in a group, at least) pretty quickly. And the show does this better than, say, most of the historical dramas I’ve watched. So there’s that. 

2B. Relatedly: #MinHyeBestGirl. Despite most every character on this show being the absolute worst representation of humanity you could find outside of violent criminals, they’re pretty much all well written and typically well-acted. For my money, I ended up enjoying the leader(?) of the gaggle of glammy influencers best. I thought she got the best writing and turned in the best performance (possibly because she had the best writing). 

2C. …also the really spoiled girl may have made me feel things maybe but we don’t need to talk about that.

3. I want to take a moment to applaud the behind-the-scenes folks who had to put together these 85 billion fake instagram feeds and messages and strings of conversations. It all looks great, yes, but…goodness me, they had to sit some of these actors down for what must have been hours to get this many shots of them in different outfits and doing stupid little drink reviews. Like, I know some of it is just pulling in pre-done stuff from, like, their real social media posts (don’t think I didn’t notice that clatch of Sweet Home girl’s feed that had her hair at a different length—you can’t fool me!), but the amount of work that must have gone in to A LOT of the details on this show was…I’m just saying I noticed and was impressed. 

4. The show looks great, by the way. Including some solid cinematography, at times. 

4A. Okay, so, there’s this great overhead shot of a mass of people staring upwards with their hands in the air mock-typing as a way to represent all the people currently online and interacting with all the Instagram posts, and it looks f***ing rad—and it’s on screen for, like, two seconds. I’m telling you, they put in a stupid amount of effort for things that disappear from the screen in the blink of an eye. 

5. Whatever my thoughts on the series overall are (and we are going to get to them, I promise), they need to teach the end of the first episode in classes, because THAT is how you hook an audience.

6. Being an Instagram person seems exhausting. I know it’s nothing new to say that fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but…ugh. So much stress. 

7. For a show full of cameos, I really didn’t recognize very many people in it—cameos or otherwise:

• Ju-ri from It’s Okay…/Guitar Girl from Sweet Home as A-ri, our protagonist

• the main dude’s ex-wife(?) from Because This is My First Life as the “older” influencer

• the best friend from A Business Proposal as an actress at a party

• the jerkface step-dad from Start-Up (etc) as A-ri’s family friend

• the long-haired manager/friend from Love to Hate You as…himself, I think

• the police station vending machine corner from Glitch AND May I Help You?

8. And can we talk about A-ri’s haircut for a moment? It is a really tough one to pull off, and that there were moments throughout the show when even she couldn’t quite pull it off proves it. 

9. There is a FANTASTIC moment of symbolism, in the first half of the series, where three characters are standing in a triangle, and one of them is sort of caught between the other two…with one wearing black, one wearing white, and the one caught between them wearing black and white. 

10. …of course, I say it’s symbolism, but it kind of isn’t. I mean, for that moment, it certainly is meant to show that she’s caught between the influences of the other two, but that’s not really how the story plays out. Which is kind of true of the show overall: what starts out and plays out over the first half absolutely does not rule the day in the second half. Which I think is the biggest downside to the whole endeavor: that the story is kind of a hodgepodge of plot elements that don’t really feed into each other. The momentum of the first half is totally undercut by the structure of the conflict in the second half because it all but doesn’t need the first half to have happened AT ALL for the plot to play out the way it does.

11. Actually, wait, no: the biggest downside is how it eventually relies on stock cliches that undermine both its driving themes and the strength of its characters. But I’ll get to that.

12. Also, there’s this issue where the show doesn’t seem to know if it wants to criticize influencers or influencer culture or just sort of present both neutrally, so there are some lopsided moments (and some shallow or empty moments), come the second half. 

13. …okay, so I’m not the biggest fan of the second half. But I didn’t have any gripes with the first half! 

14. The gaggle of glammy influencers have an actual lair that they go to for meeting up and scheming and I f***ing loved it. 

15. Fun detail: all episode titles are hashtags (for plot reasons), but they’re also conveniently all written with underscores between the words in the hashtag so that the audience can read them more easily. Perhaps not the most realistic element of the story, but certainly an efficient choice. Which I appreciated. 

16. There’s a lot of handwaving about how computers work, but the show also doesn’t really hide that it’s doing that, typically having one character say, “That’s weird, isn’t it?” and another confirm that it very much is weird…and then everyone just moves on. Which is brazen. And I admire the moxy. 

17. PLEASE WATCH HEART SIGNAL 4 I AM DYING TO TALK TO SOMEONE ABOUT IT AND IT’S SOOOOOOOOO GOOD!!!

17A. …sorry. I’m just really, really enjoying it. Like, I might like it better than Singles Inferno 2. And—while no girl will ever unseat So-e in my heart—I think this reality show has THE BEST romance plot in any of these dating shows I’ve watched…and it might be the best romance plot I’ve seen in ANY SHOW this year. 

18. …to wit: Celebrity. 

18A. SPOILER ALERT. This is the section to skip. Or, like, all the “18” points are what you should skip. I’ll pick it up again at #19. Which, no, will not feature a reference to pig testicles, but which I hope you will enjoy at least half as much. Well, 20% as much. It’s hard to beat dangling porcine gonads. 

18B. The romance on this show—and I really hesitate to call it that—is absolute garbage, and I hated it. I mean, I absolutely HATED the male lead and his stupid handsome face. He was just a series of red flags sewn into the shape of a person, and the one saving grace was that the show had him do aaaaaaaaaallllllll the typical silly K-drama things where the love interest is absurdly aggressive…but, rather than the context for these things being played as romantic, A-ri looks at him like she would in real life: like he was a creepy, disgusting predator to be avoided at all costs. AND IT WAS GREAT! It highlighted and reinforced the willfulness, personal agency, and independence at the core of her character that drove her choices in every other part of the show. I loved it. Just look at my notes and see how much I loved it. BUT THEN the second half decides that, nope, she was actually totally smitten with him the whole time and just didn’t want to admit it, and then they become a thing, and it comes out of nowhere and I hate it. Yes, because I hate him and his stupid handsome face and why does he get to smooch A-ri and I can’t, but mostly because it so thoroughly undermines everything we’ve seen and know about A-ri to that point. Ugh, it was infuriating. 

18C. Okay, SPOILER OVER, it’s safe to read on. Unless you read it because you did, in fact, watch the show, in which case we need to talk about this show, right?

19. The internet won’t tell me who plays the really spoiled girl, and it has ruined my vacation. 

20.  Here’s how utterly shameless I am: at one point, A-ri was wearing a Nirvana t-shirt like a total poser, and I literally wrote in my notes “a very, very pretty poser.” 

21. All the influencer ladies on this show are in their 30s. And they’re not playing 25-year-olds but women in their 30s. I found that fun and interesting. I mean, their ages never come into play, but…I dunno, I just think it’s not the first choice anyone would have made for this kind of series. And I liked them all, so obviously it worked out. 

22. I’m not especially concerned with cars, but…there are some sweet cars in this series. 

23. …including the perhaps most cynical piece of product placement I’ve ever seen: two characters are driving and (to varying degrees) fretting over something terrible that has happened and is burdening them (...or maybe just one of them, I don’t really remember). Well, the one who is most upset says she needs to get some air and wants to pull over. But the guy who’s driving just puts the top down on his convertible…and it’s the most lingering, adoring shot of this cool feature on this totally swish car he’s driving, and it’s just hilariously tone deaf for the emotional moment.

23A. Now, if she’d said, “I need some air,” and he’d said, “Okay, let’s stop at Subway,” that’d be something else entirely. Because all Subway product placement is amazing. 

23B. Y’know what had some sweet Subway product placement? Heart Signal 4 okay I’ll stop. 

24. Yes, I did manage to figure out the secret identity of this show’s Gossip Girl. Well, sort of. Like, I made one solid guess, and one off-hand one, and the off-hand one was correct so…still the world’s greatest detective. 

25. …unless people change their haircuts, which is cheating. Just…just remember that. 

And that’s #that. (Tee-hee.)

I enjoyed this…but, essentially, the show feels like a piece of internet gossip, providing you with a momentary rush of excitement, a passing feeling of moral superiority, and then a lingering sense that none of it really matters—which you know you're still going to consume anyway.

So, yeah, I may not remember this show in a few months, but I basically watched the whole thing in one sitting instead of going to sleep at a sensible time, so…I guess those The Glory-esque perfect episode lengths really did the job. 

Anyway. Secretary Kim is next—or, as I like to call it, “Park Min-young in pencil skirts: the show!”

…th-there are other things in my notes, too. 

I think.

—Daryl