Letter #75: B**** x Rich

Good morning, Erin.

So, being in the middle of (I think) four separate series that are several weeks from completing, I thought a nice, quick, five-hour jaunt into some high school social class nonsense might be a good distraction as we wait for the next big thing to end.

…plus, if I’m watching this, I’m not starting Nineteen to Twenty, which is getting increasingly harder and harder to stop myself from doing.

Now, as ever, this being a show I don’t think you’ve seen means I won’t be getting into spoilers or big plot details—and it also means I am probably going to hide a big personal secret or two in the middle of the letter because there’s a chance you’re not going to read it. 

Which, in this case, could mean this letter will mostly be big personal secrets, because there ain’t a lot to go over about this amateurish first draft of a series. 

So, um, B**** x Rich. I guess.

1. Really, the only reason I thought about giving this show a shot (before looking for something quick after Secretary Kim) was because the lead actress played my favorite character in All of Us are Dead, and I thought, “Oh, she was cute.” And I am a simple man, Erin. 

2. Oh, and the other lead actress was a member of Red Velvet, which means I don’t really know her so much as I’ve probably seen her before this show. 

3. If I had to pitch this show, I’d describe it as Celebrity meets the high school sections of The Glory. 

3A. Of course, if I wanted to be honest, I’d add “on a niche YouTube series budget.”

3B. And, if I wanted to be really honest, I’d add “but without the passion that usually goes into those niche YouTube series.”

4. The very first thing that pops up after we get the title card for B**** x Rich is a big “thank you to the Korean Tourism Board!” splashed across the screen, which I found to be a hilarious tone shift after the somewhat indelicate sound of the title. It was less hilarious when I realized the Korean name for the show was Cheongdam International High School. Which is less indelicate. 

5. There are a lot of points at the writing level to discuss about why this show doesn’t work especially well, but one of them has got to be that the plot doesn’t start until the end of episode three. I know the show is only 35 minutes an episode, but it’s also only 10 episodes long. I’m not sure how you can justify spending 30% of your total story setting up THE SETUP to the plot. 

6. There’s one legitimately good character on the series, and he’s not in it anywhere near enough. He’s charming and fun and easily the most dynamic character in the whole thing. His first appearance is probably the first time the show felt like it fully knew what it was doing and how to execute it. (And let’s acknowledge the dude he was sharing time with in that scene, because, though less dynamic a character, his acting was also solid…he just disappeared from the story entirely after that scene, I think.)

7. …which is not to say that the other characters are bad, exactly. I think there are a few that are interesting, in one way or another—and I quite liked the actors in some of them, as well. It’s just that none of them quite works, in one way or another, even beyond whether they’re given enough time to develop as characters. Which is unfortunate. Because—and this is true of the whole show—a little polish and script revision would have left us with a pretty darn good, scrappy little series. (...that would have been an awesome YouTube-level series.)

7A. Now, I also want to make clear that the actors aren’t particularly good, overall. Some of them are clearly pretty good, but none of them is anywhere near good enough to make up for the bad writing and poor directing/editing choices. Like, sure, actors can only elevate poor or stilted dialogue so much, but sometimes they stand in a funny position or make a natural gesture that looks silly on screen, and it’s somebody’s job to prevent or hide that. 

8. I’ve talked about the inconsistency of subtitles just about every time I’ve written one of these letters, but…this has to be one of the least consistent fansubs (I assume) I’ve ever seen. Like, whoever’s doing each episode can’t decide if money should be noted in dollars or won—and, even then, they can’t decide if won should be noted as won or KRW (in case people are too stupid to know that won is not the English word past-tense of win). And it only gets sillier from there. Like, not even consistently translating a flashback to dialogue that happened three minutes ago in the same episode. That level of silly.

9. One of my favorite moments is when the mean girl main character mouths off to the English teacher by dunking on her pronunciation skills and repeating the English paragraph the teacher had just read to the class in what is supposed to be a better enunciated fashion but which I literally could not recognize as spoken English. 

9A. And, yeah, you can do sexy popstar lips at me all day, girl from Red Velvet, I still think the teacher was easier to understand.

10. Credit where it’s due: the main girl does a couple of things that I was screaming at the TV for her to do that I never would have thought they’d actually have the character do (not because it would have been out of character but because I didn’t think they’d have the guts to do it). I can’t say that these moments made sense or landed correctly, necessarily, but I sure as heck enjoyed that they were there. 

11. We don’t need to get into the details of why this is, but I finally found the full version of your “Same Boat” cover, and I am going to need you to do the full Lizzy McAlpine catalog for me, please.

11A. No, genuinely. Please?

11B. I’m being serious! I like your versions of her songs better than hers.

11C. Okay, how about this: when I was in high school and college, I spent a lot of time with theater kids. And I spent a lot of time preventing them from singing. I just didn’t want to hear it. Friends, acquaintances, girlfriends—didn’t matter. I love singing as much as the next guy (listening to it, not, like, actually doing it), but it always felt…burdensome. It felt like some kind of heavy task to have to listen to them. They weren’t singing for me, they didn’t ask for my evaluation, there wasn’t any kind of obligation to enjoy it or even to listen to it—and yet I felt this unpleasant weight from it, each progressive note clinging to my chest, gathering one on top of the other, reaching up in a bid for my affection. There was no joy in it, no comfort, no beauty. Which…maybe that was down to my state of mind, at the time, or maybe I felt it was always insincere, narcissism baiting me with cheerful melody. But I wouldn’t stand for it. And yet…you sing, and I am rapt. Calmed. Perhaps by the same ethereal magics that make your instincts more suited for me than my own. Or perhaps I’m just much more sentimental, now, and more open to the simple wonders of a pleasant, familiar voice playing across my ears. And I can’t think of a single reason why I wouldn’t try to bring more of that into my life.

11D. …she’s not buying it, guys, back to begging—pleeeeeeease?

12. There was so much going on in this series that there just wasn’t time for. And, sadly, a lot of the late-coming threads that didn’t get enough time to flourish were the best things in the show, from character development to world-building to intertwining story. I really wish they’d revised the story a lot more and been able to bring most (not all) of these elements into the series fully before Episode 5. Of course, the series ends on a tease for a new (or new level to the existing) plot, so I assume the plan was always that it was going to go on for more than just the 10 episodes they made. Which means all of these new threads were meant to come to fruition in the next arc. But A) there may not be a second season, and B) as I mentioned earlier, there was no justification for spending three episodes out of 10 total setting up the setup to the story. Okay, the production team didn’t want to burn through everything right up front, but the stuff they do play with towards the end winds up more rushed or unnatural than they needed to be—which particularly sucks because they’re pretty much all really good.  AND THEN IT ENDS. 

13. I might be missing something about this, but…the main girl is poor, but she takes a picture with a very expensive purse which she posts on Instagram (asking the internet if it looks expensive, because she doesn’t think it does). This results in all of her classmates assuming that she’s doing the whole coy influencer thing and, more importantly, that she’s actually filthy rich and has been pretending to be poor this whole time. Now, to me, this means we’re not dealing with the world’s greatest detectives if they see one photo that doesn’t make sense and think, “Is she secretly rich?” rather than “How did you get ahold of such a fancy bag, person whom I know is poor?” But the universe of the show makes this seem like the common sense conclusion would be that she had faked being poor and suddenly slipped up. 

14. On the other hand, I did have a pretty good idea what the big twist would turn out to be, because I am the world’s greatest detective. 

14A. Well, a big twist. There are actually a couple of pretty decent reveals, to the show’s credit. 

15. I’m 80% sure the length of a girl’s hair in the series is meant to subtly symbolize the amount of money her family has, with longer hair being associated with wealth and shorter hair being associated with a lack of wealth. (The other 20% of me also believes this is the case, but wonders if this was not meant to be subtle at all. For…reasons.)

16. In a scene where everyone is super-dressed up, the mean girl wears some fancy-dancy high heels that, if I’m not mistaken, have soles so narrow that they  don't cover the full width of each foot. Which is a double-layer of unsteadiness to deal with that is both impressive and would seem to be needlessly dangerous. (I mean, if not for the floor-level camera shot from behind that shows us this, I don’t know how anyone would know these shoes were like this. Which would seem to defeat the purpose, no?)

17. Great out-of-context dialogue:

“You haven’t showered.”

“But I love you!”

18. I don’t think this is the intention, but the two main girls (who are enemies) have INCREDIBLE sexual tension. Like, I don’t say this to be crass, but I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to see two actresses start making out with each other more. 

18A. …for plot reasons.

19. I kind of love that the school this series is set in is very obviously not a school but some kind of office building, in real life. 

And I think that’s all my notes. Well, except for the constant wondering whether I thought the girl from Red Velvet was hot or not. And a lengthy self-discussion about one of the characters maybe being a hallucination. (Spoiler: she’s not.)

…um, so much for not having much to say. 

Further proof that I rarely make good decisions when left to my own devices. I say give it a pass. Unless you think the girl from All of Us are Dead is cute. Then watch it.

19th Life is next, I assume. Unless you demand I binge something before the weekend, of course. 

—Daryl