Letter #98: A Good Day to be a Dog

Good morning, Erin.

Okay, now that we know the space-time continuum has not been ruptured beyond all repair, it’s time to get into something far less controversial and far less rant-inducing: A Good Day to be a Dog, which is about Ji-su from Sweet Home turning into a puppy every night because she accidentally kissed the “Nice” Guy from True Beauty. 

It looked like silly, fluffy, anime-romcom nonsense, which you know I like—but we both know I was here for my girl from Sweet Home, no matter what it turned out to be. Because I’d follow her to just about anything she wanted to be in. 

…which reminds me that, yes, I’m actively working on a list of closest-to-my-type (looks-wise) actresses, and, yes, Park Gyu-young is going to be on that list (Maybe in the top four. I dunno. It’s very competitive.)—but that’s not why we’re here. Plus, I’m not quite done with it, and I wouldn’t want to give you unofficial results—but mostly that’s not why we’re here.

No, we’re here to (un-spoilery) talk about A Good Day to be a Dog, so let’s do just that, hm?

1. I think we’re going to start with the list of everyone I recognized:

• Ji-su from Sweet Home (etc etc etc) as Hae-na, the language teacher and our cursed female lead

• “Nice” Guy from True Beauty as Mr. Jin, the math teacher and our male lead.

• the kid with the missing girlfriend in Dream as Mr. Lee, the history teacher and Hae-na’s crush

• the “gossipy” coworker from My Mister as Yu-na, Hae-na’s older sister

• the techy boyfriend of the girly friend from Because This is My First Life as the bully/reporter

• the mechanic friend from See You in My 19th Life as the “shaman” girl in Hae-na’s class

1A. Our leads are both adorable and very charming. Mr. Jin is decidedly not an actor, but, as with his turn in True Beauty, he has this very likable quality about him that sort of makes up for that. And, honestly, he’s actually pretty good, here. Hae-na is likewise not a great actress (I find her to sometimes be too deadpan at times), but she’s still very much an actual actress and doing a more than good-enough job in this show. I like them both (to different degrees) generally, but they both gave quite enjoyable performances in this series, particularly when playing to this show’s brand of humor. And…look, they make a very handsome couple. Which doesn’t hurt.

1B. You know who does a really good job, though? The dude from Because This is My First Life. He plays probably the most believable scumbag side-character I’ve seen in a K-drama. Very grounded, believable performance. Like, a blood-boilingly believable performance. The writing for his part of the story is a little…50/50, I’d say, but he nails all of it. 

1C. Because I mentioned the guy from Dream: my family was entertained enough by Dream that they laughed at the jokes and sniffled at the sad parts, when I forced them to watch it with me for my birthday. They then claimed it was kind of whatever. Well,  my littler little sister didn’t, of course, because she was asleep for the whole thing. 

1D. I also recognized the waterfalls from Kingdom. Really. It’s not me being waterfalls-racist. 

2. We start this series establishing that she and her boyfriend have been dating for a year—and have never kissed. Which led me to immediately ask, “How does she date a guy for a year and get away with not kissing him? Are they both totally chaste? Or does she give a kind of ‘everything but’ offer? And, if so, how would that even work for an entire year?” And, to its credit, the show almost immediately answers those questions. It answers them in a very “don’t think too hard about it!” kind of way, but…still, credit for both understanding they would be obvious questions and then not ignoring them.

3. That said, the show gives us an explicit explanation for one specific thing that it only holds itself to when it’s convenient: her clothes. We are told that, obviously, she will fall out of her clothes when she’s a dog—which makes perfect sense, given that, y’know, a tiny dog wouldn’t fit into human clothes—and will therefore be naked when she transforms back into a human. Except this only ever happens when it would specifically cause drama for her to be naked (such as when she wakes up in her student’s bedroom or when someone needs to seem thoughtful for bringing her clothes in the morning). In every other instance, she is miraculously fully dressed—including the very first time she transforms: after her sister and her sister’s best friend fly into a panic about how she’s going to wake up naked (in her own bed, at home, in all ways safe and sound), we see her wake up in the morning for the first time since falling asleep as a dog fully dressed. Somehow. 

3A. We get a similar treatment in a flashback to her childhood that is meant to serve as an explainer for the audience: her sister (who has the same kiss-to-dog curse) kisses her male best friend to prove to him that she’ll turn into a dog…which she does. The friend is then told that he has to kiss her in dog form to immediately return her to her human form. Which he does. So she pops back to being a human…and is fully clothed. Because it would obviously be more than a little awkward for a little girl to suddenly appear on screen naked. But my point is that they could have come up with a way to do this (here, and with our protagonist) if they’d put some effort into it. 

3B. …also, if you aren’t aware, the curse works thusly: when she kisses a member of the opposite sex, she turns into a dog until about 6AM the next day. This will happen every night between 12AM and 6AM until the guy she kissed kisses her in dog form. This will then stop the nightly transformations (...unless she kisses another dude, and then it starts all over again). But she has to do this within 100 days of the kiss or else she’ll be a dog forever.

4. This is a very comfy series, very enjoyable—though I would never quite describe it as good. The pacing is terrible (particularly early on), several episodes are filled with runtime-padding gags, and there are times when the plot inexplicably becomes deadly serious—or, well, becomes serious for explicable reasons, I guess, they just happen suddenly, jarringly, and in stark contrast to the tone of rest of the story (and, in one case, in contrast to how some of the characters deal with the undeniable seriousness of the situation they find themselves in). But it’s also funny, fluffy, and—whether it’s being ridiculous or believable—cute as heck. All of which outweighs any of the negatives. 

5. To wit: once the romance plot starts in earnest, it is soooooooo frikkin’ adorable.

5A. The curtains, Erin. THE CURTAINS. 

5B. No, seriously—Episode 9 is solid gold. 

6. Ms. Yoon, Hae-na’s romantic semi-rival for Mr. Jin’s affections, is utterly ridiculous and hilarious and needed to be in the show way more than she was. I don’t exactly know how they would have managed that, but…still. She cracked me up—especially once the romance plot started in earnest. 

7. Similarly, the three-girl friend group in Hae-na’s class was great, and I loved that they were always around, wafting in and out of the story at perfect intervals. My favorite was, of course, the one with the big crush on Mr. Jin. (Just…the curtains, Erin.)

8. But I think the undisputed champ of the series is Yul, the student in Hae-na’s class who immediately figures out she turns into a dog. Despite his initial appearance in the story giving off the sense that he’d be an annoying side character, he turns out to be the funniest and sweetest character in the series, and he is also undeniably the hero that none of the other characters deserved. The half of my notes that aren’t gushing about the leads being cute together are mostly about Yul being the absolute best. I won’t get into it any more than that (except to say: the arcade, Erin—THE ARCADE), in case you haven’t seen it yet, but just know that, if I knew you had, a lot of this letter would be me recounting every scene he was in and describing why he was awesome in it. There weren’t many moments that weren’t immediately made better by adding him to the mix. 

9. It’s possible there may have been a fake relationship subplot, and it may have been the best thing ever. 

10. I definitely felt no connection to either Mr. Jin’s flashback montage of falling in love with Hae-na or his faltering attempts to woo her. Nope. Totally alien stuff. 

11. I still can’t believe they visit a donut shop called KNOTTED on a show that (abstractly) involves a romance with a dog. That…that can’t be an accident, can it?

12. Nice try, subtitles, but I knew those people in Episode 7 were swearing. You can’t fool me.

13. And don’t think I didn’t notice that Mr. Jin gave Hae-na two yellow bags in Episode 3—but that she arrives home with one yellow bag and one pink bag! I AM THE WORLD’S GREATEST DETECTIVE!

14. Help me out, here: do the ladies who watch these shows have a particular fondness for watching handsome guys do elaborate cooking scenes? Is that, like, sexy? I mean, yeah, a girl who bakes is a real plus, in my eyes, but I don’t know that I would get anything out of a scene of, like, IU baking. 

14A. Now, we do get the obligatory male-lead-in-the-shower scene, which I understand.

14B. Of course, as always, we don’t get an equivalent scene for our female lead.

14C. Well, we sort of do. But it’s just her putting on a sock. Which…okay, actually, it was kind of sexy, but that’s just because Park Gyu-young is kind of gorgeous. 

14D. Speaking of: she looks really good in her lightened short-cut. I mean, I like her in whatever hairstyle she’s got going on, let’s not kid ourselves, but she was really rockin’ her look for this show. 

14E. To wit: there’s a scene where the joke is that she’s a mess because she’s come down with a bad cold, but the joke falls flat because she looks to frikkin’ pretty for it to work. 

15. Speaking of hair, though: it’s amazing that the “shaman” girl can go from looking like she’s a teenager to looking like she’s in her mid-20s based entirely on how the show styles her hair. 

16. …which might be a good segue into a vaguely spoiler-ish point about the latter part of the show, when they decide to show us how Hae-na’s family gets the kissy-doggy curse: it happens in the distant past, and all the people around at the time just so happen to be the past lives of our main cast (which is how we see the “shaman” girl being 17 and being 25)—a cliche turn that is obvious from the early days of the story, so that’s not much of a spoiler. But I mention this because past-life Hae-na and past-life Mr. Jin have a baby together. This baby is the first of Hae-na’s family to have the curse. Therefore, current-day Hae-na is a descendant of past-life Hae-na…who is romantically involved with Mr. Jin, whose past life was also one of Hae-na’s ancestors. So…do we think this is weird? Normal? Something they hoped I wouldn’t think too much about? I know it's not strange to see stories about reincarnating with the same people around you, but...never as the descendant of yourself and your current lover.

17. For the record, I’d have watched a full series of past-life Hae-na and past-life Mr. Jin.

18. Also for the record, the ridiculous introductory/expository scene for the “shaman” girl being considered a shaman by her classmates was exactly the kind of silly anime nonsense I signed on for with this show. 

19. The “previously on” section at the start of every episode goes on forever. Like, no joke, we’re talking 3 minutes of recapping. Every episode. And I’m not sure why. (I mean, okay, early on, there were some stupid-big gaps between episodes (because of the Korean baseball playoffs, maybe? I forget), so I thought it was kind of understandable for those couple of episodes, but…after that, what were we doing? Padding the runtime? Or did they genuinely believe we couldn’t remember anything from week to week?)

20. The CGI for the dog version of Hae-na was pretty good. 

21. I cannot figure out what this song in Episode 14 is, and it’s driving me crazy. 

21A. Relatedly: I swear this girl who’s dressed like a ghost in Episode 14 is Elly from Weki Meki, but the internet will neither confirm nor deny.

21B. …which, sure, I could be wrong, but the dude who plays Mr. Jin is from ASTRO, and Weki Meki is their, like, sister group. So it would be perfectly reasonable for them to pull someone in from Weki Meki for a cameo, right?

21C. Or maybe I think a little too much about Weki Meki.

21D. Pfft—as if you can think too much about Weki Meki.

22. “I keep a ‘disappointment notebook’ in my heart,” Hae-na says, early on, ensuring that I fall absolutely in love with her. 

23. That final kiss was…well…that’ll do, huh.

And that’s A Good Day to be a Dog.

It’s kind of forgettable, but I also think it’s something that you’d remember fondly if someone were to remind you that it exists.

Anyway. Hope all is well. Actually, no—I hope all is fantastic. Like, stupidly fantastic. I hope everything is so great that people around you are disgusted by how great things are for you, but they can’t do anything about it because even they know you deserve for everything to be stupidly fantastic.

More soon.

—Daryl