Letter #160: Pump Up the Healthy Love

Good morning, Erin.

Y'know, all things being equal, I've had quite a productive summer, so far. 

I’ve gotten back into reading, taken a class (and a handful of self-study courses), started a couple of creative projects in earnest, replayed one of my favorite video games, watched anime for the first time in two years, and finally gotten my library card. 

I’ve even been lucky enough to find my song of the summer: “Like You Better” by fromis_9—because fromis_9 is back from the dead! As a five-member group, now, but...still! Maybe I’m not cursed! 

…which is to say, I’ve been quite busy. 

The one thing I have not been doing enough of, though, is working on my letters to you. And I apologize for that. I’m woefully behind, I know, and I promise I’m making a concerted effort to catch up, starting with this well-overdue letter. Which, true to my promise, is very much a part of the pop star bloc. 

In fact, it has TWO pop stars in it—for today we will talk about Pump Up the Healthy Love, a workout-centric romcom starring what turns out to be two of my favorite* Korean actors.

So, let’s do our squats and restrict our diets to liquified chicken breast and water, Erin, as we take a look at a lovely little show I’m sure very few people actually watched. 

1. While I’m sure you’re itching to get to the part of the letter where I dive deep into the color symbolism underlying the main cast and how it ties into the greater themes of the narrative (and the archetypal motifs of the metaphorical set pieces that dot the narrative), I think it’s probably best to start with the list of folks I recognized—mostly because it’s fairly short:

• #bestgirl from That Winter, the Wind Blows as Mi-ran, our unhealthy female lead

• the main guy from May I Help You? as Mr. Do, our gym-owning bodybuilder male lead

• the dopey assistant from My Demon as Mi-ran’s cheerful boss

• the YouTuber who is Cho Jung-seok’s publicist in A-List to Playlist as the blind date

1A. *So, I have two parallel lists of favorite K-dramas: one with shows like Vincenzo and Hotel Del Luna at the top, which I’d describe as my “best ones” list; and one with shows like The Matchmakers and Alchemy of Souls at the top, which I’d describe as my “I just like ‘em” list—that is, one list for those shows I love and are straight-up great, and another list for those that are more like personal favorites despite their objective quality. (Figure the latter is more like comfort shows or shows I can just throw on and watch whenever and at whatever part of the show, and the former requires that I dedicate time to really focus on all the way through.) Well, I have a similar list for favorite actors: one with (for example) Kim Go-eun and Jeon Yeo-been and Kim Seon-ho on it, and one with (for example) Lee Hye-ri and Jung Eun-ji and Lee Jun-young—that is, one list for those actors I love who are straight-up great, and another list for those whom I greatly enjoy regardless of their objective acting talent. (Jung Eun-ji in particular is pretty much an automatic watch, at this point. I apparently adore her.) So, when I say this show has two of my favorite actors in it, that’s what I mean.

2. I wouldn’t fault anyone for not giving this show a try, nor would I fault anyone for thinking it was a bit weak, as far as storytelling goes: too much gym focus yet not enough gym focus; too over-the-top yet not over-the-top enough; too ambitious for its size yet not ambitious often enough. It isn’t a glamorous production, but it’s very sincere—and really, really funny when it wants to be. (Like, performances aside, there are some stellar visual gags, some of which are down to brilliant editing choices.) There's a ton of cleverness and creativity to the storytelling choices, including a couple of legit musical numbers that take advantage of having cast singers, and it’s pretty darn charming, overall. I quite liked it—even aside from the fact that there’s A FAKE RELATIONSHIP SUBPLOT. So, just to warn you, we’re absolutely getting into spoilers, because I think it deserves some outright discussion. 

3. This is—by far—the raciest K-drama I’ve ever seen. Not because of anything we see, mind you, but because in the very first episode we get: a love hotel, explicit discussion of casual sex, condoms, a dude in a ball-gag and harness, references to getting waxed, and our female protagonist openly hoping to hire a prostitute so she can get off. I was shocked. And chuckling quite loudly, because all of it was hilarious. 

4. Because of their roles in the story, both our lead actors have to dress in “costume,” essentially, to hide that their physiques do not match those of their characters: Jung Eun-ji has to seem chubby as Mi-ran, so they dress her in baggy clothes and and often have her walk with a bulky back in front of her (a la trying to make the lead look fuller in Weightlifting Fairy); and Lee Jun-young has to seem jacked as hell, so he’s always in layers of sweatshirts with an obvious muscle suit straight out of a superhero movie underneath. 

4A. At the start of the series, though, they need Mr. Do to be seen at a bodybuilding competition, so they superimpose Lee Jun-young’s head on an actual bodybuilder’s body. Which is done very seriously. And is very funny. 

4B. The show also has Mi-ran dressed in lots of rugby shirts, hoping the horizontal stripes will fool us into thinking Jung Eun-ji is wider than she obviously is. Which is not to say that this is a bad instinct on the part of the production, but when…well, just look:

I mean, come on. She looks like she fell in a puddle of Dear Evan Hansen. 

5. Speaking of characters being designed to look a certain way: the impetus for the series is that Mi-ran’s boyfriend dumps her outside a love hotel because he can’t bring himself to have sex with her—because, it is implied, she’s too chubby for him to get turned on by her. Which…like, the deepfake bodybuilder version of Mr. Do at the start of Ep 1 is easier to believe than this guy not wanting to f*** Mi-ran. I get that this is what sends her spiraling into wanting to exercise and stuff, but it’s just so…clumsy, in a lot of ways, if only because a plump Jung Eun-ji would not be less attractive than regular Jung Eun-ji. Though I guess the gall of it is actually part of why the whole thing stings as much as it does, so…I guess it’s fine. 

6. Of course, we later find out that the ex-boyfriend feels awful for dumping her because of this. He’s ashamed of himself for not being able to reconcile his feelings for her and his lack of attraction to her. And, for a totally jerkface move, it’s actually pretty understandable. It sucks, and he handled it about as badly as you can imagine. But feelings are complicated, and I appreciate the show not just making the ex-boyfriend a one-dimensional jackass for the sake of plot.

7. …which is a compliment that extends beyond just the ex-boyfriend. There’s the rival gym owner who is desperate to outdo Mr. Do because he’s desperate to reclaim his friendship with Mr. Do; the cheery, almost sycophantic guy who works for Mr. Do who, it turns out, is almost sycophantic because Mr. Do stopped him from killing himself—like, literally prevented him from hanging himself (which, credit to the show, we fully watch him attempt to do—three separate times); and, biggest of all shocks, the annoying lady who leads a gaggle of middle-aged women who basically use the gym as a hangout spot more than a gym, who has one of the most emotionally effective subplots of the series, where we find out how mistreated she is by her absolute ***hole husband. (Really solid acting by the annoying lady in that scene, by the way.)

8. But then there’s the final twist with the ex-boyfriend: turns out he wasn’t turned off by Mi-ran’s weight—he was just afraid that his toupee would come off during sex and was too ashamed of being bald. Which…was an interesting choice. I guess.

9. The joke that Mr. Do and his almost sycophantic assistant handing out flyers for their gym look like gigolos handing out invites to their host club is slightly undercut by the intro to the show being a musical number detailing Mr. Do’s backstory as a bodybuilder and trainer (...and the opening title sequence showing him, y’know, running a gym), but I still chuckled. Plus, it’s what leads Mi-ran to visit the gym, operating under the belief that she’s now got somewhere to let loose and pay to, y’know, get some, which also made me chuckle. 

10. Mr. Do makes a point of saying that Mi-ran is the most unhealthy person he’s ever seen…but he’d also lived in America for years, so I’m going to call bull**** on that. 

11. Great lines #1: “Why bring up kissing when I’m eating a bagel?!”

12. There are a handful of gags that wait a little too long to reveal their punchlines, if only because their setups are a little too noticeable and, as such, leave even a modestly observant viewer raising an eyebrow about what seems like either a mistake or a bad writing choice—until the punchline hits, and then it’s very funny. Two of note:

• Mi-ran’s dress for her coworker’s wedding. After a lengthy segment about buying a stylish dress that she will need to lose a significant amount of weight to fit into and then, the night before the wedding, finding that she can in fact fit into the dress…we see Mi-ran at the wedding in (confusingly) a totally different dress. It takes way too long to get to the point where we are told that Ji-ran, her little sister, stole the original dress for herself, leaving Mi-ran to rummage through the sister’s closet for what looked like her most expensive dress. Which is a very strange explanation—until several minutes later when we find out this has all been in service of a gag—that the sister’s dress Mi-ran has chosen to swipe is, in fact, a part of her sister’s, um, intimate collection…because, as everyone at the wedding soon discovers, it says “I LOVE SEX” in bold, glow-in-the-dark letters right across her bosom. Which is just…so good. Like, shockingly, needlessly good. When we eventually get to it. 

• Mi-ran being good at various sporty activities. After Mi-ran chooses to quit going to Mr. Do’s gym, Mr. Do challenges her to a series of activities, saying that she’ll have to come back if he beats her. And, from basketball to shooting, she kicks his butt. It’s too long, and it’s silly, falling back on a stale “lol girls can do stuff too y’know” punchline that isn’t particularly appropriate for the situation (because Mr. Do is picking random things he doubts Mi-ran would have tried, not specifically because Mi-ran is a girl). But then we get the actual punchline: that Mi-ran forced herself to become expert in these things because of past attempts to impress boys who were into basketball and shooting. Which is very funny. When we get to that reveal, finally. 

12A. Just to say: I especially like that the gag with the dress is set up wonderfully by the joke in the previous episode involving Mi-ran stumbling across Ji-ran’s boyfriend in their apartment as he waited for Ji-ran in a ball-gag and sex harness. That couple is into some kinky costume play. Of course Ji-ran has a dress like that. 

12B. Why the E is “SEX” is backwards, I dunno. The E in “LOVE” is correct. So…?

13. Jung Eun-ji and Lee Jun-young have to do so much exercising for this show. Like, on-camera exercising. You can fake pull-ups and some of the weights stuff with camera trickery and acting like something is causing more strain than it actually is. But there are so many squats. And so many pushups. And I don’t think there’s an easy way to fake that. 

14. That said, we do eventually get a shot of Mi-ran in yoga pants, and…damn. Good for her. 

15. Similarly, there are a couple of instances of Lee Jun-young’s actual real-life torso that make their way on screen, and I think it’s fair to say good for him, too. 

15A. Relatedly: we do get our obligatory male lead shower scene, but they also have to do their best to not give away the game that his actual muscular physique does not match up with the way he looks with his clothes on. So, I don’t know if it would hit the ladies in quite the same way. You’d have to let me know. 

16. There’s brilliant product placement with some tteokbokki-flavored chicken breast that comes up twice, I think, in the course of the show. And I say “brilliant” because I didn’t even realize the darn thing even was product placement until the second, much more obviously unnatural time it made an appearance. The first time so seamlessly matched up with what Mi-ran was dealing with at that point in the story that I just assumed she was desperate to find a replacement for the tteokbokki that Mr. Do would not let her have. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing for product placement, I dunno. 

17. Mi-ran and Ji-ran have one of the best and most realistic sibling relationships I’ve seen in a K-drama, albeit slightly exaggerated for comedic effect. Their fighting and affection not just come from the same place but both swing back and forth from moment to moment and frequently exist simultaneously. It starts from the moment Ji-ran enters the story, and it never lets up. I totally bought them as sisters. (Whether you would feel similarly as a sister with a sister, I could not say. But as a brother who has sisters, it seemed pretty solid.)

18. The time dilation in this story is nuts. I have absolutely no idea where in time almost anything happens in relation to anything else. 

18A. Except, of course, for the MOTHERF***ING TIME JUMP at the end. 

19. Great lines #2: “You can’t take a break with love. If you do, all your romance cells will die.”

20. When Mi-ran recognizes she’s fallen in love with Mr. Do, we see her romantic feelings expressed as a handful of female emergency personnel overseeing Mi-ran’s heart from their Inside Out-style monitoring station. I bring this up because, to adjust their viewscreen, they use an LG Voice Magic remote control. Which I recognize because I have that exact remote control for my TV. Which, I don’t know how, also controls my Blu-Ray player. Just, like, on its own. I didn’t program it or anything. 

21. Ji-ran’s boyfriend is named Dan, and I don’t think we knew that until halfway through the show. 

22. Just to say: Lee Jun-young is almost unrecognizable in this series. Between the bulky “costume” and the ridiculous voice he has to put on, his performance is just totally unlike anything I’ve ever seen from him. 

22A. Also, he’s basically all hyper-intensity all the time. Which must have been exhausting. And, given the muscle suit, very warm. 

23. Relatedly, while Lee Jun-young has to be this ridiculous character even during very sincere moments, Jung Eun-ji gets to be fairly normal, despite Mi-ran’s often comedic hangups—which means she’s allowed to be genuinely ADORABLE during their romantic moments. And, for her part, she seems incredibly authentic in how she reacts to him, particularly with how she smiles and giggles when she’s with him. How much of that is genuine because he’s actually making her laugh and how much is just fantastic chemistry between the two actors, I could not say. But it sure does work. 

24. One of the best running gags in the series is the trio of gangsters who come to beat up Mr. Do for operating on their turf (when he’s handing out flyers in the guise of being a gigolo). He overpowers them easily and forces them to exercise because they’re so physically un-fit. And they spend the rest of the series periodically working out at the gym. Which was just really funny. 

25. The actress playing Rosa, the woman who runs the zumba class at the gym, is clearly not a bodybuilder, but she has to get up on stage in her little one-piece thong swimsuit and flex like she is a bodybuilder while standing next to real bodybuilders. And y’know what? She didn’t look totally outmatched. Which…hey, that ain’t bad, right?

26. I really appreciate that Mi-ran’s first reaction to seeing a baby toddle up to Mr. Do and call him “Daddy” is to gasp that she didn’t know he was married. 

27. At one point, Mi-ran and her boss meet with a woman to go over a presentation, and the woman brought her breakfast, a fresh bagel, with her. The bagel (and its various spreads) is in a plastic bag. Which…is not what you do with a fresh baked good! It’s too warm to be in plastic! Do you want the bagel to get wet?! Are you some kind of monster?!?!?!

28. I was almost torn over whether I liked Mi-ran or Ji-ran more—and I say “almost” because, really, I’m too smitten with Jung Eun-ji to ever side against her. HOWEVER…that doesn’t diminish how much I enjoyed Ji-ran, who had some of the best moments in the series:

• When she finds out what Mi-ran’s ex-boyfriend said to her when he dumped her, Ji-ran dolls up like a badass rocker girl and brings her leather jacket-wearing boyfriend to shred his electric guitar menacingly outside the ex-boyfriend’s office until he comes outside—and she threatens to manually pop his testicles if he ever says anything mean to Mi-ran ever again. And then she laughs menacingly as he skulks away. 

• Not satisfied with her sister’s disinterest in going on a blind date, Ji-ran takes it upon herself to Mi-ran’s makeup for her—resulting in a particularly heavy dose of eyeshadow that leads Mi-ran to recoil in horror. Ji-ran then keeps trying to amp her up by insisting that she looks captivating and pretty, excitedly declaring that Mi-ran looks “like a flirty cat!” Which is maybe my favorite line of the series. 

29. I immediately clocked that the woman whose advertisement for her new book inspires Mi-ran to go buy herself a, um, gentleman caller was going to turn out to be Mr. Do’s ex-girlfriend. And I don’t think it was supposed to be some kind of twist that this was the case. Which is why I was absolutely dumbfounded that it took until Episode 8 (of 12) for her to enter the story proper. 

30. Great lines #3: Mi-ran apparently has an issue where most of the men she dates are really only taking her out to woo her into purchasing an insurance policy that they’re selling, leading her to lament, “Why do men want to provide me with insurance more than love?”

31. In Episode 9, Ji-ran’s boyfriend quotes the British rock band Keane at her, which I took as a personal attack. Not because I dislike Keane but because Keane is a band whose music specifically reminds me of the girl from my past who utterly shattered my heart—and I think he knew that.

32. To demonstrate that he’s taking a K-pop dance class with his daughter, Mi-ran’s boss does a quick bit of the choreography they’re studying—which I immediately figured was something from Apink. (Because Eunji.) And, after much research, I discovered that…I could look up the Pump Up the Healthy Love subreddit and have people there tell me it was for a song called “Hush.” (Which, a quick YouTube search later, I can confirm.)

33. Whoever subbed Episode 9 gets the Daryl Seal of Approval: “unnie” is not translated, and “fighting” is translated into actual words of encouragement (in this case, “Stay cheery!” which…makes more sense as the translation in context, I promise). Which is just…so obviously the right way to do it. 

34. In a much stranger translation decision, Episode 10 has Mr. Do become the target of an internet hate campaign, and our protagonists refer to the loudest proponents of this harassment as “cyberbullies.” Which, of course, seems appropriate. It seems slightly less appropriate when the folks perpetuating the harassment refer to themselves as “cyberbullies.” Then again, maybe I just don’t know proper angry mob etiquette. 

35. I want it known that I was ALL-IN on Rosa x Roy (the rival gym owner) from the very first moment there was even the vaguest whiff of a potential hinted maybe-romance subplot around them. They’re just adorable.

36. I think my favorite moment of the series comes when Mi-ran realizes she’s in love with Mr. Do, absolutely lighting up when—as if by hands of fate—she sees him in the lobby of the hotel where she’s having lunch. She runs to talk to him, beaming adorably as she rushes to the escalator to go down to meet him—only to then see that he is with his Instagram model ex-girlfriend, leaving Mi-ran to immediately turn fully around and start trying to walk up the down-escalator in embarrassment. Which was just…perfect. 

37. I literally ate a half-gallon of ice cream while watching an episode of this series. Just to give you an idea of how seriously I took the message about taking care of yourself. 

37A. Though, in fairness to me, a half-gallon of ice cream hasn’t been an actual half-gallon in, like, 20 years. Still, it was the whole carton.

37B. And it was real ice cream, too. Because apparently there’s a legal distinction between things we typically think of as ice cream: depending on the ingredients used (and their amounts, I think), the container will either refer to its contents as “ice cream” or merely “frozen dessert.” So…check that out, next time you find yourself in the frozen foods aisle at the supermarket. Wild stuff, I tell ya.

And that’s all I have on that. I had a lot of fun, even as I acknowledge it’s occasionally slow and can stumble into pockets of filler, especially towards the end. But entertaining is entertaining, and I definitely think you should give it a shot, if you’re interested. 

I mean, yes, I’ve absolutely just spoiled a lot of it, but…y’know…

Look, it’s an imperfect system, whatta ya want. 

You probably won’t guess where we head next, but I’m sure it will seem obvious once you see what it is. And what comes after that is going to be…well. That one will certainly be unexpected, I can assure you of that. 

And, no, it’s not Better Late Than Single. I know everyone is watching Better Late Than Single. All my dating show girls are doing reactions to Better Late Than Single. Netflix is actively asking me why I haven’t clicked on it yet, because, algorithmically, it could mean I’ve collapsed in the bathroom and need them to call 911. 

I know. And I promise it’s on the list. Which I hope eases your mind.

What—that isn’t what you were wondering about? That’s weird. Are people talking about something else?

Cough.

As ever, I hope you’re doing spectacularly well. And…can you believe it’s already August? Crazy, right? You’re running out of time to get my half-birthday present!

…

More soon.

—Daryl