Letter #95: Backstreet Rookie

Good morning, Erin.

So, this one is kind of a chicken-or-the-egg deal.

I’ve been watching both My Demon and Welcome to Samdal-ri since they debuted on Netflix—despite not being particularly enthused by the trailers—pretty much exclusively because of the lead actresses in both shows: Kim Yoo-jung in the former, and Shin Hye-sun in the latter. And, predictably, making my decisions based on who I want to swoon over for 16 episodes has resulted in me finding myself not having as much fun as I want. 

Now, of the two ladies, I was particularly excited to see Kim Yoo-jung, because I loved her in 20th Century Girl but—for reasons I will never be able to conjure—had not taken care to track down anything else she’d been in. So you can imagine how disappointed I was when I grew increasingly tired of My Demon as the weeks wore on. 

I felt a similar (but lesser) disinterest in Samdal-ri, but I’d also found that I quite liked the actor who played the male lead. I didn’t like his character much, but there was something…pleasant about the actor’s disposition, I guess. 

Which is when Netflix’s big stupid algorithm chimed in: “Hey, Daryl, have you seen Backstreet Rookie? It has actors in it from the shows you’re watching right now! Isn’t that your favorite genre: actors you’re currently watching in other things?”  

To which I thought, “Ugh, why are you like this, big stupid Netflix algori—wait, I do know these actors! That’s Kim Yoo-jung and…um, the dude from Samdal-ri. I didn’t realize they were the leads in this show. This takes my TV watching in a whole new direction!”

…actually, I just sort of shrugged and thought, Well, it’s not like I want to catch up on the other shows, and clicked on it.

And then the first episode started—and I fell in love.

This show was GREAT (until the last couple of episodes, but whatever), and I burned through it during New Year’s weekend, literally watching it as we flipped into 2024. I couldn’t put it down. Like, I think I only stopped at about 6AM New Year’s Day because eating pizza rolls all night finally zonked me out. I don’t know that I could have found a more perfect series for my mood at the time, but even that aside it was just a fantastically funny and endearingly romantic show that pretty much immediately jumped waaaaaaay up my list of favorites. If you haven’t seen it—see it. Big ol’ recommend from me.

And I probably wouldn’t have watched it without first having been disappointed by both My Demon and Welcome to Samdal-ri. It’s funny how things work out, sometimes. 

…also, having already mentioned My Demon, I’ve sort of backed into a Kim Yoo-jung trilogy. So, that’s exciting.

So, with a similar amount of excitement as I had for my Matchmakers letter, let’s have an approximately similarly spoiler-free chat about Backstreet Rookie, shall we?

1. This is a weird place to start, given the above, but…what a bad title. I can kind of contrive where it comes from (she’s from the backstreets, kind of, or maybe the store where everything takes place is on a backstreet…and she’s a new employee, so she’s technically a “rookie” at working there), but it really does take effort to get there—and is utterly meaningless, regardless. The original Korean title is “Convenience Store Saet-byeol” (that being her name and where she’s working) which is not really better, I concede, but at least it’s easy to see the correlation to the core concept. I’d probably have gone with “A Part-Time Inconvenience,” if it were up to me (because she’s a part-timer whose presence at the convenience store is frequently—but not always—an inconvenience to the male lead), but…no one asked for my input. 

2. This show basically opens with a mega-cliche slow-motion, surrounded-by-cherry-blossom-petals, literally-bump-into-each-other-in-passing moment, and it’s like they wrote it just for me. 

2A. Plus, it’s an age-gap romance! Who doesn’t love that?

2B. “Okay, but how much of an age gap are we talking abou—” JUST DON’T THINK ABOUT IT!

2E. …seriously, though, they never really address the age gap. They don’t try to hide that there is one, but also no one ever mentions it in any context at all. Except that she’s in high school when they meet at the start of the show (before a time jump), and he mentions that he clearly is not. They’re both adults (and, further, both good people with pure intentions), so I don’t care. I just thought it was interesting that literally—and, in the case of one character in particular, shockingly—no one even notes it in passing. (There’s a 13-year age difference between the actors. Just…for the record.)

2F. Relatedly, of the three shows that will make up this Kim Yoo-jung trilogy, I think this is the only one where she plays a character that is more-or-less her real age at the time of filming. For the other two, she’s playing a few (or more than a few) years older than she actually is. Which I only mention because I think it’s something that affects her performance. (For the positive, here. But more on that later.)

3. One of the things this show is good at is getting away with being a little bit cheat-y with relaying information to the audience: it tells certain details rather than allowing us to be shown them—but it disguises them in dialogue juuuuust natural enough to not feel like blatant exposition. 

4. This absolutely felt like a comedy. Which it is, of course—but by which I mean that it tried to be as funny as possible as often as possible in the most believable-to-the-situation way possible without drifting away from telling its story. Its characters are exaggerated, but they aren’t so absurd as to not feel real, particularly because the tone of the world immediately allows for absurdity (particularly once you get to Saet-byeol’s first scene) but never lets things stray so far that the mundane “outside elements” in the story feel like they’re out of place. Plus, pretty much all the situations, no matter how silly, feel like organic consequences to established moments in the story—even those that happen prior to the start of the show.

5. Before I get into some other things, I think we should go over who I recognized in this one:

• our lead girl from 20th Century Girl as Saet-byeol, the female lead

• Young-pil from Welcome to Samdal-ri as Dae-hyeon, the male lead

• Secretary Brother from Business Proposal as “Puppy”

• the lead PTA Mom from Crash Course in Romance as Dae-hyeon’s mom

• the pawn shop lady from Vincenzo as Saet-byeol’s best friend

• Restaurant Friend from Our Beloved Summer as a girl-gang leader

• Third Girl from Thirty-Nine as Dae-hyeon’s sister

• the old convenience store owner jerkface from Sweet Home as one of the dad’s friends

• #BestGirl from That Winter, the Wind Blows as Dae-hyeon’s old girlfriend

• the jerkface boyfriend from It’s Okay, That’s Love as Dae-hyeon’s girlfriend’s boss

• the psychic dairy farmer from Behind Your Touch as the real estate scammer

• the white girl from When the Camellia Blooms as a woman at the hotel

5A. The pawn shop lady and Restaurant Friend are hilarious. Very strong comedic performances from both—particularly the pawn shop lady, who, yes, was in it waaaaaay more than Restaurant Friend’s lone scene, but who also had to do something far more complex with her oddball character: be both ridiculous and grounded. Which I think she nailed.

5B. Speaking of nailing it: Kim Yoo-jung is INCREDIBLE, here. She sure as heck can act, yeah, but when she’s on, she is pure charisma. (Or, like, 90% charisma and 10% ludicrously HOT—because, yeah, she’s obviously a very pretty girl, but she’s got every possible metric turned up to 11, in this, and I have dozens of notes telling her it’s downright malicious for her to look as ravishing as she does literally every second she’s on screen.) Again, she’s got weight behind her performance, so she’s not just being really cute or even just charming—but she’s so in-tune with the character (and, as I mentioned earlier, I think being roughly the same age as Saet-byeol has something to do with it) that she elevates her above even the already-strong writing. I defy anyone not to fall in love with her, forget about the male lead. I mean, apart from the fact that the moment she steps into the convenience store, anyone with any life experience at all knows she is trouble with a capital T: you let her in AT ALL, and you’re hers forever—whether she keeps you or not.

5C. But it’d be a crime not to make a separate mention of the actress playing Dae-hyeon’s mom, who, along with the actor playing her husband, delivers a genuinely powerful dramatic performance IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS ABSURD COMEDY. I don’t want to spoil more than that, but suffice it to say that there’s a serious (as in, non-comedic) plotline that crops up involving the parents…and they just get to perform an uninterrupted 10-minute stage play, essentially, that is as heartbreaking to watch as it is incredible to witness. Credit all around: the script is excellent, the actors kill it, and the choice to let it all play out IN FULL was inspired. 

6. The fight scenes are pretty darn good—maybe even really darn good. They’re clearly done slowly and with careful choreography, but, even so, the way they’re shot/edited makes them seem dynamic and exciting, which is more than good enough. 

7. I really liked Saet-byeol’s little sister. She was good times. I just wish there had been more reason to have her around. I mean, she gets her own subplot, but…I still wanted more. 

7A. Also, I feel bad for the girl who played Saet-byeol’s little sister—in that she’s a very pretty girl who has to stand next to peak-gorgeous Kim Yoo-jung and, as such, seems much less pretty than she is. 

8. Speaking of sisters, though, a fun detail the show never calls attention to is how Dae-hyeon and his sister are both a cross of their parents—but in opposite directions: he is a mix of their mother’s diligence and their father’s relaxed temperament (their good qualities), while his sister is a mix of their mother’s uncouth loudness and their father’s near-constant selfishness. 

9. There are a handful of movie references made throughout the show (one of which is, believe it or not, sort of a significant plot point), but one of them was so…unlikely, let’s say, that I had to go back just to make sure I’d heard it correctly: after speculating that a character had fallen in love with a program on his phone (rather than started a real romance with someone), one of the girls tells him that she toooootally believes that he really does have a definitely real girlfriend you betcha and wishes him luck with “Samantha”—which is the name of the A.I. in the 2013 movie Her, the plot of which revolves around the romantic relationship between a man and the A.I. assistant he talks to through his phone. So, it’s a perfect reference, absolutely, just…like, does anyone even remember that movie? Is this one of those after-the-fact cultural successes that I never noticed? (This happened with Mean Girls, a movie I thought I was the only one who loved…and then I saw the internet was obsessed with it, 10 years later.)

10. Oh oh oh oh oh—I can’t believe I didn’t tack this on to the end of the “folks I recognized” section! This had me FREAKING OUT, when I saw it, to the point where I had to stop myself from texting people in the middle of the night, I was just so overflowing with excitement: Dae-hyeon’s rich girlfriend and her family live IN THE PINK LIE HOUSE!!!

How crazy is that?! I didn’t even need to see the front of the house to twig that I knew the location, either: I watched one of the characters walking up the steps that lead to the front yard and said, “Wait, isn’t that…?” But hooooooooo-boy when they showed the shot above, I went nuts.

10A. Now, the extra-fun thing about this is that I’m extremely familiar with the layout of the house, so I laughed every time the production tried to imply that one part of the house led to some other part of the house in the next frame when I knew for a fact that it did not. The biggest one for me was the elevator that opens into the living room, which the show uses as a “family only” entrance to the house, presumably from the garage—because I know it isn’t attached to a garage but to the basement, where Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail were secretly observing the cast for the first couple of days. You can’t fool me, show! 

11. Similarly, there were two other locations I swore I recognized but couldn’t figure out from where: the house where Dae-hyeon and his family live, and the fancy lounge bar where Dae-hyeon’s girlfriend meets her mother for a chat. (The latter in particular gave me a very specific memory—or, I guess, a blurry memory—of a scene in which a gangster and his crew essentially get rolled early in the show by the female lead. I just…can’t put a finger on what that scene was from to even go back and check.) Which is really frustrating. Like, I spent a looooong time looking, and…nothing. 

12. Tons of Hyundais, though. (I know. This show is just that good!)

13. As much as Saet-byeol is #BestGirl—and I mean put her in the brackets for best girl in all of K-dramadom—and as much as I was rooting for her to snag Dae-hyeon like she wanted (does she manage it? You’ll have to watch to find out!), I was really shipping Dae-hyeon with the female police officer he keeps having to talk to because of the shenanigans he’s drawn into with Saet-byeol. She never becomes a romance option, but I immediately wondered if she was going to be the secret ending to what would turn out to be a story not about romance but about letting go of unrequited crushes. She just popped up too often for me not to keep it in mind. 

14. In terms of writing, one of the things this series does that I really like is avoid making Dae-hyeon’s girlfriend into some caricature of a bad girlfriend just so we feel good about rooting for him to end up with Saet-byeol. They put in the effort to make her flaws grounded and take care to (with a fair amount of realism) show her struggle with how she feels about dating Dae-hyeon, whom she both really likes and doesn’t feel entirely comfortable with. She’s a real person with real feelings, not just some two-dimensional plot point for Saet-byeol to overcome. 

14A. …of course, this may or may not go out the window in the last couple of episodes when the show has sort of already wrapped up and needs to fill time until the finale. But, if it does—and I’m not saying that it does (you’ll just have to watch to find out!)—it won’t be for too long. Which is nice. Um, potentially. If it were to happen.

14B. Y’know, even the girlfriend’s dickhead of a mom gets enough care put into her that she’s not written as an entirely two-dimensional villain.

15. Speaking of the girlfriend, though, she has some…interesting fashion choices, as the show goes on. Specifically, she starts wearing these very short or asymmetrical skirts, showing off A LOT of leg—which, yes, is sexy as hell, but I found it weird because her blouses are always mega-conservative. I mean, I know that, when you show off, you should pick either the top or bottom part of your outfit for this purpose and not go with both at the same time, and, as such, that going with a revealing skirt would mean her blouse should not be revealing…but, seriously, her tops are sometimes, like, Victorian-levels of conservative. (Am I wrong in thinking that’s weird? Have I veered so far outside my wheelhouse that I’m making a fool of myself?)

16. The production team isn’t afraid to not only let the actors adlib at the end of scenes but will frequently keep their little jokes in. (You can tell when they’ve gone off-script by how much more natural the actors' laughs seem.) Which is a lot of fun.

17. Now, while I am very, very high on this series, I think it’s worth noting that I saw a lot of people freaking out about it online—and by that I mean worth noting that their criticisms are almost universally nonsense. Why? Because the things I see setting people off are either A) actually totally fine—though they might not be to their tastes (which is fair enough)—or B) not “bad” for the reasons cited. In both cases, I feel like the people making these complaints are oversensitive and/or shallow thinkers, and, as such, I think it’s fine to ignore them. 

17A. That said…in one case in particular, these critics have broadly managed to identify something that really is amiss with the show. However, they lack the ability to identify why it’s a problem—specifically because they’re closed-minded about why it could be a problem. That is, they give reductive, reactionary, and surface-level justifications for their criticisms rather than digging in and making substantive arguments—because they think the reductive/reactionary/surface-level justifications they give are substantive arguments…and they are not. (It’s not exactly the same as when people demanded a high school not perform The Producers because it had swastikas in it (and swastikas are bad!), but it’s in the same vein.) Which is a shame, because, as I say, there are definitely valid criticisms to level about the things that upset these faceless folks online—like how the show doesn’t do anything to give certain odd details the in-universe justifications they’d need to go from being odd (or, to some, objectionable) choices to purposeful choices on the part of the writer. 

17B. …but I digress. 

18. I’m not sure what the point of having Dae-heyon wear buddhist prayer beads on his wrist was supposed to be. I feel like it’s supposed to let us know something about his character beyond just that he’s a practicing buddhist, but maybe it’s just more innocuous than I think, like if he’d been wearing a necklace with a crucifix. I dunno. 

19. In a moment that I think is a translation issue, Saet-byeol seems to forget what to call Hollywood…and so she calls it Hollywood. 

19A. Now, maybe I’m being a little bit picky with it, but here’s the line: “What was it called again? I heard you’re going to Hollywood, the place where Iron Man is.” You tell me.

19B. Obviously I don’t have the original Korean in front of me, but my gut tells me it’s a poor translation. I think she’s probably saying something more like, “I heard you’re going to…what’s it called? Hollywood? The place where Iron Man is.” But maybe I’m completely wrong. 

19C. Also, in the moment, I made a face and said, “Iron Man lives in Malibu, in the MCU.” Because I’m a massive nerd. (She clearly just means where the Iron Man movies were made.)

20. I am 90% sure I heard one of the characters speaking Korean with a Chinese accent. I mean, the character was Korean and had been living abroad in China for decades, so it would be perfectly logical for her to have picked up the accent—but I’m trying to emphasize that I’ve heard enough spoken Korean, now, that I can say, “I’m pretty sure that’s a Chinese accent,” and feel like I’m 90% sure I’m right. 

21. Dae-hyeon’s girlfriend speaks English with a French accent. (...90% sure.)

22. There’s a fantastic detail about where an advertisement has been placed on a door that I noticed immediately but which plays absolutely no role in the story whatsoever, to my chagrin. 

23. Dae-hyeon’s friends (the guy and girl) from the corporate headquarters are kind of great. They don’t have a lot of lines, and they don’t really have much time on screen, either—but every time there’s something going on with the main characters at the corporate office, these two are there to see it. Which turns out to be a lot of fun, if you remember who they are. 

24. I mentioned that the last couple of episodes are very much padding the overall runtime of the series, but I’d forgotten just how anime-nonsense some of the ways it tries to artificially create drama ended up being until I looked back at my notes for this letter. Oof. Not a great way to round out what is otherwise a fantastic series. 

25. …but then the actual very end of the series is a really nice sendoff for both the cast and crew. Like, even better than the typical behind-the-scenes photo slideshow that they usually do for these shows. 

And I think we’ll stop there. Just…go watch it. Unless you already have, in which case—did you love it?! You must have loved it. It was awesome, so why wouldn’t you love it?

Anyway. We creep ever closer to the all-important Single’s Inferno 3 letter, which I’m sure you’re dying to get to. It looks like that’s going to be letter #97—if you can even believe we’ve been doing this for that long. I just hope you can forgive how long it will have taken me to get it to you.

Well, unless I managed to…um, y’know what, never mind. It’s probably not going to happen. No need to get into the crazy details. It’ll just take as long as it takes to get to letter #97.

…unle—no, no, never mind. 

But, yes, I did hear IU’s lovely new song—and see the music video that felt like it was made specifically for me: IU in a bob, V, and a miniature Borg cube. Loved it, top to bottom. (...and maybe laughed at how much running they had IU do, because—I love her—she always looks so silly when she runs.)

More soon.

Stay warm, and watch out for marauders. 

—Daryl