Wild Romance, episodes 1 to 4
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write about this drama at length, but I did indeed start a TV journal (like actual pen and paper, y’all) and I surprisingly had a lot to write about Wild Romance, so why not do it on a nice and digital platform as well :D
But yeah, I do not like Wild Romance.
I didn’t have high expectations going into this drama because the trailers looked too goof-bally and ridiculous, like it was trying too hard to be slapstick. A lot of the times, K-drama teasers can be pretty misleading and uninformative, but in this case, the teasers to Wild Romance are exactly parallel to the contents of the show.
And man this show aggravates me unlike any other drama I’ve watched in a long, long time. It’s not about a stupid female lead or a douchey male lead, it’s that the writers think they’re so. fucking. hilarious. They’re so full of themselves for their perceived comedic ability that it spills over into the jokes and makes the jokes painful to sit through. The writers never seem to know when to reel in their punchlines. They write a joke and it starts out really well and it’s well-acted too, because Lee Dong-wook and Lee Shi-young have a really natural comedic beat to their acting, but then the joke just goes on. And on. And on. And on.
The biggest problem I have with the humor is that it feels arrogant. There are a lot of rom-coms in which the jokes are outlandish and silly (think: Spy Myung-wol) and most of that is due to the fact that the writers just aren’t that skilled with their humor. The writers on Wild Romance are pretty funny and witty, but their flaw is that they drag jokes on for forever, because the writers felt that they’re onto something and keep shoving their great humor onto the audience, like it’s not enough that you laughed once at a joke, you have to keep laughing at the same joke again and again. The jokes after a certain point feel like a parody of themselves.
That in itself might not be so much of a problem if the writers would flush out the characters a little more. But nope, the very existence of all the characters, of all the dialogue, of all the exchanges are to service the jokes. I don’t know anything about any of the characters minus all the shit they’re doing to draw some laughs and it’s irritating me beyond measure. There’s a little teensy weensy revelation of some of the troubles and concerns of our lead characters, but they are some of the most obnoxious characters I’ve watched in a while. There’s nothing about them that makes me root for them in any manner. They’re not relatable and both so arrogant in their own ways that I hate them together and I hate them apart. I care not about their eventual pairing.
