Letter #154: Social Savvy Class 101

Good morning, Erin.

I am very excited to update you about the progress I’ve made on some of my writing projects—but, seeing as you’ve gone back to dropping kickass covers on TikTok like it’s no big thing, I am suddenly far less enthusiastic about drawing attention to my creative endeavors.


…which—twist!—is not some empty preamble, dear seonbae, but a pertinent segue to what we’re discussing today! In what way? Stick around to find out!


Because we are about to discuss Social Savvy Class 101, a short series that slots in nicely to our Phase V promise of thematic blocs after Friendly Rivalry, as we follow a high school girl trying to navigate the social order of her class. 


“But Daryl, you prolix-adjacent weaver of words,” I hear you say, “are there bullies? A murder plot? Clashes over class distinction? An alluring, if narratively frustrating, bathtub scene?” 


To which I say…well, popularity is like a class distinction. So, if you think of it like that, you can definitely see where both shows are…well, clearly both are digging into the underlying…heart…of the…


…


Okay—it’s just that it’s also set in a high school. We’re doing high school shows. That’s the theme. I know it’s not a very exciting reveal. 


At least, it’s not a very exciting reveal when compared to finding out you’re back at the song cover game! Woo! (Psst—The Pipettes, “The Burning Ambition of Early Diuretics.” Just sayin’. Bad for hashtags, but great for you.)


…you’re gonna keep doing them, right?


1. If you think I started this show with no idea what it was about, utterly unconcerned with its premise or contents because all I knew was that Kang Na-eon’s face was on the poster…well, let me tell you a thing or two about how obviously right you are. And, on that front, I was not disappointed.


2. In fact, let me go over everyone I know in this show:

  • the stressed-out cutie from Crash Course in Romance (Kang Na-eon) as Ji-eun, our lead


2A. Yes, that’s it. 


2B. Y’know what, let’s get all the Kang Na-eon “meta” stuff out of the way:

  • She’s the only real actor in this series—and it’s not like she’s particularly great. And yet…lightyears ahead of the rest of the cast. 

  • She’s waaaay too good looking to be “the girl no one notices” (especially among the group in this show), but she’s also the kind of pretty that, with an adjustment to her makeup, can easily go from super-pretty to TV-show-plain—and that’s kind of what they’re going for: she’s pretty, but, because she’s not doing anything to stand out socially, no one sees it.

  • Yes, a lot of my notes are just about how pretty she is. 

  • I quickly discovered she’s dating the main male lead from this show in real life, which soured me on his character quite a bit. (I mean, good for them. But I didn’t need to know that!)


3. There’s a fake love confession plot, which is kind of like a fake dating plot, so that was a plus.


4. Oh! So, Ji-eun’s whole deal is that she has “no presence” to help her classmates notice her. Which is exactly like Seul-gi from Friendly Rivalry’s whole deal! So, see? Connections!


5. Heh, to that point: Ji-eun tells us that she was once the last man standing in a game of dodgeball, but her team lost because no one noticed she was playing. Which is such a good joke. 


6. Ji-eun has no friends who want to listen to any of her interests, so she spends most of her time texting with an A.I. chatbot. So, I was immediately onboard with her. 


7. So, the plot is that Ji-eun stumbles across a magic cell phone that lets her see the real names of her classmates on their school anonymous message board, and she wants to use this insight to game her way into successful interactions with the other students. She begins this foray into social skills with an attempt to curry favor with a couple of anime nerd girls by talking about a hot anime boy they both like. Which goes well…until the girls say they can’t wait to celebrate the hot anime boy’s birthday, and Ji-eun asks how cartoons can have birthdays. Like a total normie. (Hilarious.)


7A. Which is to say, she’s about as bad at making friends as I am.


8. Speaking of anime, though: Ji-eun’s romantic rival is the quintessential “class rep” character, who is brilliant and charming and good at everything. So, appropriately, this girl is the best dodgeball player in the school—resulting in about 8000 posts on the anonymous message board by adoring fangirls who call her “the goddess of dodgeball,” which is one of the most “anime” things I’ve seen in a Korean TV show. And which made me laugh.


9. Speaking of the class rep, though: I want it on record that, for once, I was not rooting for the mean, jilted girl who wages a psychological war against the female lead.


10. There’s a reference to something being “Lucky Vicky,” which I know is a concept tied to Wonyoung from IVE! Which is doubly amusing because Kang Na-eon was, of course, in Pyramid Game with Wonyoung’s sister. Well, doubly amusing to me. I don’t know your feelings on Wonyoung or her having a sister. 


11. The subtitles censored all the swearing, which I liked. Because it’s funnier than having the swear words or swapping them out with not-swears. 


12. It’s pretty easy to tell who’s a main character and who’s not: the boys’ shirts are always unbuttoned so we can see the cool graphic tees they’ve got on; and the girls’ skirts are really, really short. 


13. This show’s not exactly a prestige series. The writing needs another pass, the editing choices are a bit weird—a lot of pacing decisions, favoring plot over character. And there’s this thing where they end Episode 1 with showing you Ji-eun has a magic phone, but not how she got it or why it’s magical, and it pulled me right out of the show with all the questions I was asking about it. It’s meant to be a tease, I think, but it totally fell on its face. And then there’s the, again, bad acting. Which, when paired with the bad editing (and script issues), kills a lot of the otherwise solid comedy moments. 


14. THAT SAID…this show is weirdly good at shooting a scene the same way from multiple angles, so we can see it play out, then see it in flashback from an uninvolved third party’s POV later on in the show. The actor’s positions and inflection match really well to the previous scenes—which is not easy to do!


15. Speaking of flashbacks, one of the subplots of the series is an instagram reels competition where students submit instagram reels of them doing…I’m assuming it’s just TikTok dancing, but I’m not sure. For the purposes of the plot, it’s doing TikTok dance challenges. This year, Ji-eun will be dancing with the class rep who wants to destroy her (and who thinks she’ll embarrass Ji-eun by making her look bad…which doesn’t work, because of course it doesn’t)—but last year she submitted a video of herself dancing alone, attempting to do the dance from Jisoo’s “Flower,” which I:

  1. immediately recognized! 

  2. knew had to be performed in as embarrassing a way as possible for the joke to work—but which I found particularly funny because, having seen Kang Na-eon as an idol trainee in Pyramid Game, I know she’s a pretty good dancer. 

  3. found additionally particularly funny because Kang Na-eon clearly has to stop herself from laughing on two separate occasions.


15A. See? I told you talking about your song covers wasn’t just preamble. It’s all a carefully calculated plan, seonbae. 


16. There’s a great bit of background acting by an extra that I noticed in in Episode 5: a girl gets up to leave for the day, pulling her school bag onto her front (as the kids sometimes do), and, as she walks down the aisle, the girl—without looking—sort of drums her fingers on the top of her friend’s desk, letting her know she’s leaving and would like to leave with her. it’s this really small detail in the background as we’re probably supposed to watch Ji-eun sigh to herself in her seat, but I saw it and loved how natural, casual, and specific the move was—as though the two girls in the background were actual friends. 


17. At the end, Ji-eun has the male lead’s number saved on her phone under his first name with a little heart emoji next to it. Which I mention only because they do not start dating until the next scene. He literally calls her (which is how we see the way his name is stored in her phone) to ask to meet up, and he only then asks her out when they meet up. So…a little presumptuous, Ji-eun. Just sayin’. 


18. Because of the lower-budget quality of the series, I spent the whole time feeling like Yoojung from Weki Meki should have been cast as Ji-eun rather than Kang na-eon. It would have fit in nicely with the rest of her filmography. (Plus, it would have been even funnier to watch Yoojung try to make the “Flower” dance look awkward.)


And that’s all we’ll say about that. 


So, yeah, Social Savvy is ultimately serviceable but disposable, something to pass the time, but that’s about as much praise as it earns. To scale it against other shows: it isn’t anywhere near as good as Be My Boyfriend, and its interesting-to-empty ratio is probably on par with Sound Candy. Which means, barring an intense crush on Kang Na-eon, give it a pass. 


Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to watch a clip of Yoojung dancing to “Like Jennie” for the 300th time. 


More soon.


—Daryl

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