Letter #99: Welcome to Samdal-ri (...with an asterisk)

Good morning, Erin.

If you’ve read my Backstreet Rookie letter, I’m sure you’ll remember that, in discussing my reasons for starting Backstreet Rookie, I more or less tipped my hand about my opinion of Welcome to Samdal-ri—which is to say, I didn’t like it. Like, enough that I came thiiiiiis close to doing the unthinkable, Erin: dropping the show entirely. 

I know. Can you even imagine. 

But, in the end, I did not drop it—though I also can’t truly say I watched it. I mean, I did watch it. Just not all of it: from about Episode 13 onward, I very deliberately skipped over scenes about the main duo and only watched stuff with the supporting cast. (And we’ll get into it, don’t you worry.)

Fortunately for all of us, this means my notes on the show are shorter than they’d typically be—especially since…well, you’ll see in a moment.

Ready? Me neither—let’s go!

1. Daryl, circa a few minutes into Episode 1: “Oo, the sister with a kid seems like she’s my type of girl. She’s got a bob, she’s cute, she—wait a sec, IS THAT MINA?!” Why yes, Daryl. Yes, it is.

1A. I’d started the show because I think Shin Hye-sun is a great actress, but my reason for watching IMMEDIATELY changed upon seeing Miss Intern was in it. Because…gosh, I like her. 

1B. This is also a big part of why my notes are shorter than usual: most of them are just variations of “Mina is so frikkin’ hot!” in big, block letters. Which is maybe a little shallow, but…I mean, she is. What am I supposed to do, not notice? 

1C. I’m not sure if you remember this, but I think Miss Intern was the first girl of my K-drama journey I told you I thought was pretty. Obviously, I eventually said that I was in love with IU, and I certainly told you that I loved Ms. Jang from the start, but…I’m 90% sure Miss Intern was the one I mentioned first, in terms of fanboy crushing. Alas, I suppose we’ll never know for sure.

1D. I mean, we certainly know that I think IU is the prettiest girl in the world (probably), so there’s that. But we also know that Miss Intern is very, very, very much my type. And she’s absolutely in the running for top spot on the closest-to-my-type (looks-wise) list of actresses I mentioned working on in my A Good Day to be a Dog letter. 

1E. Which, yes, is absolutely me stalling so I don’t have to talk about Samdal-ri just yet.

1F. In fact, f*** it, let’s stall some more—with the top ten contenders, listed in no particular order but also in the very much unofficial order (from 10 to 1) I have them situated in:

• Han Ji-min (Ye-bun from Behind Your Touch)

• Jung So-min (Ji-ho from Because This is My First Life)

• Lee So-e (yes, from Single’s Inferno 2)

• Kim Yoon-hye (Piano Girl from Vincenzo)

• Choi Yoo-jung (my bias from Weki Meki)

• Kang Han-na (Big Sister from Start-Up)

• Seo Hye-won (Excessive English Girl from Business Proposal)

• Park Gyu-young (Ji-su from Sweet Home)

• Kang Mi-na (Miss Intern from Hotel Del Luna)

• Jeon Hye-won (Chae-ran from Our Beloved Summer)

Y’know…just for reference. 

2.  …actually, maybe So-e should be moved ahead of OKAY FINE I’LL TALK ABOUT THE SHOW.

3. We’ll ease ourselves into this with the list of everyone I recognized:

• Ji-eum from See You in My 19th Life, of course, as Sam-dal, our female lead

• Miss Intern from Hotel Del Luna as #BestGirl Hae-dal, Sam-dal’s little sister

• the female lead’s mom from Crash Course in Romance as Sam-dal’s mom

• the pawn shop owner husband from Vincenzo as Sam-dal’s (ex-)brother-in-law

• the scarred-up military leader from Sweet Home 2 as (male lead) Young-pil’s dad

• the Angry Man’s servant from The Matchmakers as a weather forecaster

• the main guy’s dad from Revenant as Young-pil’s “dumb” friend

• the main guy’s grandfather from Revenant as the (ex-)brother-in-law's assistant

• Vincenzo from Vincenzo as the only one I recognized among the celebrity photos on the wall

4. Even from the start, I felt the show had a big tone problem, with the goofy antics of Sam-dal’s return to her hometown acting less as a relief from the severity of Sam-dal’s situation than an inappropriate shift. I understand it being a very different place and being totally separate from everything in Seoul (which, yes, is part of why she goes there), but it’s often as if the show forgets that the driving force to the narrative is that there’s this terrible thing looming over her as it engages its supporting cast of locals less as levity (or as unhelpfully indifferent to her problems) than as participants in a small-town, fish-out-of-water story like Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha. I get what they were going for (...I assume), but I don’t think it was the right choice, given the setup.

5. …which is funny, because I think the supporting character/hometown stuff is really, really good—if you separate them from the main story/main duo (who are terrible). Because, on their own, it’s a cast of solid actors playing charming characters with compelling narrative arcs. Their stories are appropriately their own but also connected to each other, and they all strike an excellent balance between the lighthearted and zany and the grounded and serious. And once I unburdened myself of the main duo and just skipped to scenes of the supporting cast, I really, really enjoyed the show.

5A. Like, seriously: you edit down the show so that it’s about Jin-dal (Sam-dal’s rough-and-ready older sister) with Hae-dal as the second female lead, and I think you’ve got a darn good short series. 

5B. Of course, doing this would effectively eliminate my favorite character, Sang-do (Sam-dal’s wealthy friend who is in love with her), from the series. And that’d be a pity. Worth it, I think, but a pity. 

5C. And no, saying that Sang-do is in love with Sam-dal is not a spoiler, if you haven’t seen it yet. The show definitely wants you to think it’s a dramatic reveal when they let you know he likes her, but you’d have to be blinder than a bat with a bag over its head not to see it the moment he’s first introduced into the story. 

5D. Relatedly: his unrequited feelings are easily the most compelling character story of the series. It doesn’t become any more complex or expansive than an unrequited feeling story, but it is probably the most succinct, grounded, and easy-to-grasp conceit for any character in the series, regardless. I wish he’d been a more important figure in the story than he ended up being (also not a spoiler), but he’s functionally more of a “necessary” convention for a romance series than any kind of narrative influence. And yet I not only liked him but found him so much more interesting than the leads.

6. Oh—speaking of the supporting cast and how much I like them: Jin-dal and her ex-husband probably have the best relationship storyline in the series, and their actors do a really good job playing fairly exaggerated characters in a very believable way—particularly our old friend the pawn shop owner dude from Vincenzo, who is surprisingly adept at playing the wussy idiot for laughs without sacrificing any of the character’s sincerity. But, yeah, I’d say their stuff just edges out Hae-dal’s storyline with her daughter, which is also really good. 

7. If you’ve seen the show, you know that this is where I put an obligatory lamentation/rant about the media, gossip mongering, and the insidious thirst for blood within the populace that’s been carefully cultivated by the levers of power. Absolutely f*** that noise. 

8. I’ve avoided talking about the leads because they nearly killed the show for me, but I can at least say this: the actors were both more than fine. In fact, I quite like them both. And, honestly, even their individual characters were fine. But the romance storyline for them was…ugh. Exhausting, I think, is how I’d describe it. I just didn’t care, and the more the story wanted me to care, the less I wanted to care. It started to feel like a burden to watch each new episode, to have to sit through these dull and joyless will-they-won’t-they/can-they-can’t-they scenes that offered me no emotional purchase. I’ll get into more of why later on, but I just want to make it clear before we get there that it wasn’t the actors. 

9. Speaking of our leads, though—or, well, speaking of Shin Hye-sun: after the whole thing with her in her introduction in Mr. Queen, I actually paid attention to Shin Hye-sun’s feet to see if they seem particularly, y’know, manly, as I assume Mr. Queen was trying to imply. And…I have the same opinion that I had back in the other show: her feet are certainly not dainty, but they also aren’t deceptively masculine. Like, she’s tall, so maybe—maybe—they’re “big” relative to the average woman, but…I conclude my investigation giving the same shrug with which I started. 

10. When things go wrong for Sam-dal at the start of the show and all her big, famous city friends start to abandon her for fear that associating with her will hurt their reputations, Sam-dal slumps down in the middle of the exhibition of her photos, all of which appear to be the backs of famous people. So, she’s surrounded by people who have turned their backs on her, in a sense, just as people in her life are turning their backs on her. Do you get it? It’s a visual representation of the emotional reality of the situation the protagonist is in. Should we make it more obvious? IT’S SYMBOLISM! DO YOU GET IT?!?!?!

11. An equally subtle moment is when Hae-dal runs into her obvious eventual love interest and the show stops to remind you that she’s a widow, so, sure, she has a kid, but her husband is dead, so it’s totally fine for her to have a love interest. Also, because she’s a single mom, we want you to know that she had this kid with her husband—like, after they were married. But she isn’t married anymore, though, because she’s a widow, so it’s fine for her to maybe flirt with this guy. Because she’s a widow. So she’s single. And a single mom—but only because she’s a widow. And she was definitely married at the time of her child’s conception, so she’s only a single mom because she’s a widow. Which is also why it’s fine for her to maybe flirt with this guy. Because she’s a widow, you see. 

12. Also, did I mention Mina is #bestgirl? And that she is hot? Because she is. (And she soooo is.)

12A. “But Daryl, you fastidious splitter of hairs,” I hear you say, “how is it that you’ve tentatively ranked Mina so much higher than Yoojung on your list when you explicitly stated that Yoojung beat out Mina for your I.O.I bias, starting you down a nigh-embarrassing path of Weki Meki media consumption (which I assume you will later collect in an overlong letter that no one else would have interest in)?” To which I say: well-remembered, Erin! But, as I’m sure you know, Yoojung being my bias is about more than just her appearance, and hers—though she is adorable—is objectively less within my usual wheelhouse than Mina’s. So, though it can be argued that I have more of an attachment to Yoojung, given my recent dedication to Weki Meki (and maybe all the dramas Yoojung has starred in maybe who’s to say), absent any other context, Mina would be much more likely to catch my eye.

12B. Again, just for reference. 

13. There’s a scene where Sam-dal and Hae-dal are forced to help the town do some work, essentially picked up off the couch and dragged to the seaside. Between the couch and arriving at the site, Hae-dal has changed her shirt…but Sam-dal has not. Now, it would make sense for Hae-dal to change into something she doesn’t mind getting dirty, and it would make sense for Sam-dal to either not care or not be motivated enough to change—but we are given no indication of either. So, with no other context, it certainly appears as though the production just lost track of what Hae-dal was wearing from one scene to the next. Which is especially noticeable since (just as a reminder) Hae-dal is Mina, and we’d all obviously be most focused on her. 

14. Speaking of my being the world’s greatest detective: Jin-dal threatens someone by throwing a high kick at his throat that she stops just shy of contact—and she holds it there while she talks to him. When she goes to put her leg back down, though, you can see the actress lift her leg ever so slightly before she does so, clearly taking it off of whatever she had been propping it up on to simulate holding the kick in place. Can’t get that kind of thing past me!

15. There are a couple of fight scenes that are meant to be really funny and are, instead, total duds. For the same “don’t care” reasons that plague the leads. 

16. Just how “don’t care” were the leads? Well, obviously very, since we’ve already established that I literally skipped through their scenes in the last four episodes. But as a further example of how much I didn’t care, I thought their big smooch was pretty good—and I just checked my watch to see how much longer the episode was going to be.

17. Disposable cameras play a not-insignificant part in the series, and, not gonna lie, I was pretty excited to see them. I know you can still get them, but it’s not the same as it used to be. They were all the rage, back in the day, and they were everywhere, with their iconic grinding crank as you moved the film to the next unused frame after every picture. Man…we had the coolest, least utilitarian stuff, back in the past. You woulda loved it, Erin. 

18. The show does a flashback to when the main duo’s mothers were young, and, to help distinguish that these scenes are set in the past, the flashback is played in a 4:3 aspect ratio, like TV from the past—except these scenes were not filmed in 4:3, nor were they cropped into 4:3. Instead, they were filmed in normal widescreen format and resized into 4:3, making everything in the flashback look squished and elongated. I don’t know if this was a late-stage production decision or if someone really, really screwed up, but…looked real bad, regardless. 

18A. And, in fairness, the mom’s storyline is also not very interesting. (Coincidence that it’s also the storyline most closely connected to the leads’ storyline, or…?)

18B. Though, in fairness to that, Young-pil’s father has a pretty good storyline that is directly tied to the leads’ storyline—or, well, it’s pretty good if you ignore how it’s written terribly, executed terribly, and contributes in a major way to why the leads’ storyline annoys the tar out of me and just focus on the core details motivating his actions. 

19. The little girl playing Hae-dal’s daughter isn’t great, but she’s got the whole little-kid-is-the-adult exasperation angle down to a science. So, she’s quite effective. I mean, she’s not the little girl from The Good Bad Mother, but very few kids are. 

20. The episode epilogues suck. Universally. Start-Up, this is not.

21. Credit where it’s due: the wardrobe department put some real effort into covering up the logos on shirts, in this one, by finding material that matched the color of the shirt so that the logo-covering wouldn’t stand out as much as when they’d just use a strip of black electrical tape. 

22. I was surprised as the episodes went on and Sam-dal’s two assistants from Seoul never really left the story (pleasantly surprised, of course, since you know I love a pair of tertiary assistant girls (like in 100 Days My Prince)). I was less surprised to see they were still in the story once I realized that Sam-dal had two single guy friends back in her hometown. Then I just got excited.

22A. Given my feelings about this show, I leave it to you whether this excitement gets rewarded by the end of the series. 

22B. Actually, speaking of 100 Days My Prince, my ever-growing dedication to Weki Meki had me scouring YouTube for videos of Yoojung doing dance covers—which is when I saw that she was featured in a popular (celebrity) girls’ cover of EXO’s “Growl.” Knowing nothing about the song or the group, I looked up the original video to get a sense of how well the girls did the boys’ choreography (answer: very well indeed), only to be reminded that, of course, bane of my K-drama existence the 100-day prince is very much a member of EXO—but…what he lacks in acting he almost makes up for in being a pop star: dude’s got a set of pipes. 

23. And while we’re still talking about Sam-dal’s assistants: someone tries to differentiate between which of the two girls he’s talking about by referring to her as “the one with the big eyes”—except, of the two, she’s the decidedly not one with big eyes. And I know that because I am the world’s greatest detective. Or because I  thought the other one (the one who actually has big eyes) was a total cutie, so I was paying extra attention to her. One or the other. Who can say.

24. Which brings us to the big topic: why I absolutely could not be bothered with the main duo and their story. The bottom line is that I did not for even a moment buy that they were some great romance that, having fallen asunder in the past, needed to be brought back together—and, as such, did not feel bad that they were broken up to begin with. And so the innumerable scenes of laboriously detailing how they’re both constantly straining against their feelings drove me nuts. The more the show insisted I care, the less I cared—and boy-howdy did the show insist that I care. I mean, it was the whole point of the show, after all.

24A. Worse, the setup for their breakup and for continuing to be apart is really, really stupid. Not unrealistic, exactly (and I think possibly more believable to the Korean audience), but it’s about as external a reason as you can imagine—and, as such, it feels extremely flimsy, in terms of narrative justification, like it’s just an excuse for the will-they-won’t-they/can-they-can’t-they tension the story needs to exist rather than a genuine, complicated obstacle in their way. 

24B. And then there’s the time jump. Which doesn’t really have anything to do with the main duo’s storyline, but…it didn’t help. You know how I feel about time jumps.

24C. I was going to compare it to Our Beloved Summer, which, as I’m sure you’ll recall, was another show where I was supposed to hope a broken up couple would get back together and I was just not game for it…but I can’t remember why they broke up in that one, so, um, I can’t.

24D. Maybe I just don’t like stories about exes getting back together? No, that can’t be right, can it? I mean, I’m big into Transit Love, and that’s about exes getting the chance to get back together! Or, well, ostensibly it’s about the possibility. It’s mostly exes fighting and having way more success with other people. So, okay, that’s not really a great defense, but…look, I’m sure if I think about this long enough I’ll be able to figure out if it’s as simple as needing a better reason for the couple’s breakup or if there’s a deeper structural problem I have with this kind of backstory. Oh well. Maybe I’ll have more of an idea after I compare this to Dr. Slump. 

24E. …not that I’m watching Dr. Slump. Or enjoying it. Or crushing on the lead actress. 

24F. Point is: Sam-dal and Young-pil were desperately uninteresting as maybe-romantic leads, and being able to skip past their scenes towards the end made the show sooooo much better. 

25. But let’s not end on a low note. Instead, let’s end on a fun Mina-related fact: Hae-dal eventually tells us that she used to be a swimmer—as in, she had been on scholarship to a fancy college to train to be a professional swimmer (or maybe an Olympic swimmer; my notes aren’t clear on that) before she got pregnant (and became a widow (remember how she’s a widow?)). And I said, “What? A competitive swimmer? H-How?” Because Mina, as we have discussed before, is quite the buxom young lady, and you’d think that would be a hindrance in the water. Well, I decided not to just assume I was right and—for once in my life—looked it up. Turns out, it doesn’t make much of a difference, if there’s any difference at all. And what difference there may be is probably eliminated by the super-tight swimsuits competitive swimmers wear. So, if the internet is to be believed, it would not at all be unbelievable for Hae-dal to be a competitive swimmer. 

And that’s that. 

So, yeah, not a great time—unless you consider enjoyment contingent upon excising the main plot to be not that big of a knock against the series, in which case it was pretty solid. 

Or maybe you’ve seen it and loved it, and I’ve found myself dropping yet another rung on your ladder of approval. Heh, assuming there are even still rungs for me to drop down to, right?

…there are still rungs, though, right?

Erin?

—Daryl