Before Forecasting Love And Weather with Song Kang, Park Min-young: The K-drama office romance genre is a welcome trap

Song Kang’s last outing was the intimate and mature drama Nevertheless, where he played the role of a commitment-phobic man in love with a woman who has raging trust issues. Besides Han So Hee, Song Kang traversed the complicated lines of desire, intimacy, lust and love. He made the difficult-to-root-for character his own despite its shades of grey. The actor is slowly rising in the ranks, especially after the success of the two seasons of Love Alarm and the horror series, Sweet Home. In Sweet Home, he played the role of a suicidal teen, locked up in his house as monsters raged outside.

Song Kang and Han So Hee in Nevertheless (Photo: Netflix)

On the other hand, perky Park Min-young returns to the office setting after What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim and Her Private Life, yet again, but she seems to have learnt the trick of not making it seem staid. Park Min-young manages to create effortless chemistry with any actor that she is paired with on screen. In Forecasting Love And Weather, Min-young plays the role of Jin-ha, a woman who has her boundaries set — unlike the cheery Kim Mi So from What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim — only to fall in love with Song Kang’s Lee Shi Woo, a free-spirited employee at the weather forecasting agency where they both work. Her pairing with Song Kang would be intriguing to watch, as both actors have shown a powerful range of emotions in their work of the past couple of years. The story might be another variation of a cheesy novel, but with actors like these, it could just be worth it. Sign us up, already.

Same old, but still new

The K Office romances, with a right amount of cheese, are a joy to watch. There are endless Korean romantic dramas in the office space, but to be fair, despite most of them following the same pattern and tropes, they’ve still been refreshing, which is strange—considering there are so many of them.

The endearing Touch Your Heart saw Lee Dong Wook as a stern lawyer and Yoon In-Na as an actor, pretending to be his assistant, just to nab an acting role. Mush, Roman Holiday references, a stuffed hedgehog and a resolved conflict later, the show felt like a slice of cheesecake, sweet and wholesome. There was gentleness in each dialogue, and even the brief break-up was hard to watch. There was no excessive and forced drama to keep the two apart, and the couple resolved their internal strife quickly, with much restraint.

Her Private Life saw Park Min Young, who is a curator by day and a secret K-Pop stan with her own fan site at night, falling in love with an artist, Kim Jae Wook. The story tropes were not entirely different –bubbly girl and serious man with a possibly dark past — and how they are intertwined by fate. Yet, blended in with a soothing soundtrack and shy confessions of love, one can possibly understand why the Hallyu wave is so consuming.  Give me these over a meaningless slew of Christmas films, any day.

Park Min Young played the perky secretary in What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim with Park Seo-joon. The story was thin — this is a show you can watch on fast-forward without missing much. None of these shows intended to be profound, and they didn’t pretend either. The cutesy tropes — boy and girl not on good terms at first, and then growing close in office, a minor conflict and resolution — were the same, and yet, there was just a quiet curiosity to continue watching to see when the lead couple would confess their feelings for each other. You know they’ll end up together, you just want to see how, and possibly shed a few tears during their brief break-up and cheer again at the wedding proposal.

(Photo: Netflix)

Perhaps, this is only for us die-hard romantics, others might not quite feel the same.

Korean office dramas usually choose a different setting, giving a deep dive into the actual profession, be it an art curation gallery or a lawyer’s office, without straying from the main storyline. As always with Korean dramas, there are several parallel storylines of warring, gossipy colleagues and their ensuing love stories, that adds to the quirkiness of the show. Lee Jong-suk’s Romance Is A Bonus Book took us into the heart of publishing, and etched out the emotions of writing a book, while juggling the love story of the leads. There was a thrill in seeing the whole process of book publishing, including editing and marketing chaos and interactions with difficult authors. In the middle of all this, two childhood friends find their love story, while unravelling another mystery from the past.

Let’s see whether Forecasting Love And Weather, with two promising stars, can be just as pleasant a watch.