Premiere Watch: Life, Thirty But Seventeen, Risky Romance, Your Honor, Time, Gangnam Beauty

by girlfriday

I hope you’re in the mood to be buried under a mountain of dramas, because ready or not, here they come—medical, romance, legal, comedy, melodrama—and all at once, naturally. It’s fine. It’s not like I had plans to live or anything.

Life

Time slot: Monday & Tuesday
Broadcaster: JTBC
Genre: Medical
Episode count: 16

Reasons to watch: Life is one of those dramas where suppressing your expectations for the premiere is impossible, because it’s the project that’s bringing together writer Lee Soo-yeon of last year’s critically-acclaimed success Forest of Secrets, PD Hong Jong-chan of Dear My Friends , PD Im Hyun-wook who’s worked on Awl and This Week My Wife Will Have an Affair, and a cast led by Jo Seung-woo and Lee Dong-wook. On paper it sounds dull—a medical drama about the ethical clash between chaebol administrators and doctors who want to save lives—but I expect this writer to weave an intricate, tense story out of an obvious setup, and for the two lead actors to send antagonistic sparks flying with every interaction. Crackling tension between Lee Dong-wook and Jo Seung-woo sounds like a pretty good reason to do anything, if you ask me.

Thirty But Seventeen

Time slot: Monday & Tuesday
Broadcaster: SBS
Genre: Romantic comedy
Episode count: 32 (half-hour episodes, 16 hours total)

Reasons to watch: I feel like someone watched Reunited Worlds and thought, I can make this better, with the same exact motifs but none of the romantic squickiness! And voila, Thirty But Seventeen was born. With a premise like this, you can’t expect me not to watch this rom-com: Shin Hye-sun wakes up from a thirteen-year coma, and has to come to terms with having fallen asleep a seventeen-year-old teen and waking up a thirty-year-old woman. Uh, I think this drama just summed up how I feel about adulthood every day of my life. It comes from PD Jo Soo-won of Pinocchio and I Hear Your Voice, and writer Jo Sung-hee of She Was Pretty and High School King of Savvy, so I have faith it’ll deliver on the cute romantic scenarios and age-reversal laughs.

Risky Romance

Time slot: Monday & Tuesday
Broadcaster: MBC
Genre: Rom-com, medical
Episode count: 32 (half-hour episodes, 16 hours total)

Reasons to watch: If you can’t decide between Life and Thirty But Seventeen, you could mash the two genres with medical rom-com Risky Romance, which stars Ji Hyun-woo and Lee Shi-young as two doctors who butt heads and fall in love. I think it’s safe to call this drama a romantic comedy that happens to be set in a hospital—you know, the kind where the doctoring is incidental to the flirting. The production crew is an interesting mix—PD Lee Chang-han of I Need Romance Season 1, which was stylish and sexy, and writer Kim Nam-hee of Cheese in the Trap, which was excellent… until it wasn’t. There’s definitely potential here, but I think I need to be wowed by the premiere to sway my vote.

Your Honor

Time slot: Wednesday & Thursday
Broadcaster: SBS
Genre: Legal
Episode count: 32 (half-hour episodes, 16 hours total)

Reasons to watch: Yoon Shi-yoon is pretty much reason enough for me to tune into anything, though I will admit that I skipped his last drama, Grand Prince. That just means I’ve waited longer for his comeback, so hopefully Your Honor makes it worth the wait. He’ll be playing a dual role as twins in a mistaken-identity setup—one brother is the golden child judge, and the other brother is the black sheep career criminal, and when the judge goes missing one day, the criminal takes his place. I much prefer the twin brother angle as opposed to the random (and unexplained!) doppelgangers we so often get in dramaland, because then we get to explore why the brothers’ paths diverged so sharply. (If you’re into this, the drama short Sirius is a great watch.) Directing is PD Bu Sung-chul of melodramas Mask and Jang Ok-jung, Live By Love, and writing is Chun Sung-il of The Package, Level 7 Civil Servant, Runaway Plan B, and Chuno.

Time

Time slot: Wednesday & Thursday
Broadcaster: MBC
Genre: Melodrama
Episode count: 32 (half-hour episodes, 16 hours total)

Reasons to watch: I watched the trailer for this drama and my mind immediately compared it to the melodrama Mask, and then I looked up the writer and whadduya know… it’s from the same writer, Choi Ho-chul, of Mask and Secret. Maybe because both dramas start out with a dead woman in a pool, and focuses on a poor woman entering a world full of chaebols with deep dark skeletons in deep dark closets? Seohyun stars as a woman who seeks to know how her sister died, and in the process she befriends Kim Jung-hyun, the chaebol bad boy who may or may not be directly responsible for her death. Hey, compared to Mask, which had arranged marriages and doppelgangers, this plot sounds downright tame. Expect high drama, a dash of murder mystery, and some questionable life choices that lead to love.

My ID Is Gangnam Beauty

Time slot: Friday & Saturday
Broadcaster: JTBC
Genre: Coming-of-age, romance
Episode count: 16

Reasons to watch: This looks fluffier than cotton candy, but really cute. My ID Is Gangnam Beauty is a webtoon adaptation about an ugly duckling heroine who undergoes plastic surgery between high school and college, and the drastically different life she experiences as a campus beauty. It focuses on her personal coming-of-age and self-acceptance, and her growth from a bullied wallflower into a confident young woman. It’s a familiar setup (200 Pound Beauty, Birth of a Beauty—are you sensing a theme here?) with no notable stars on the cast or crew, but I’m rooting for it to be heartfelt and relatable.

 
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• Shin Hye-sun and Yang Se-jong meet as Thirty But Seventeen in new rom-com
• Yoon Shi-yoon holds the scales of justice in SBS’s Your Honor
• Jeon So-min, Kim Jung-hyun courted for new MBC drama Time
• Yang Se-jong, Shin Hye-sun offered new drama Thirty But Seventeen
• Forest of Secrets writer nabs Jo Seung-woo, Lee Dong-wook for medical drama
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