By Jae-Ha Kim
Substack
March 5, 2023
☆☆☆☆
Nam Haeng-sun (played by Jeon Do-yeon)
Choi Chi-yeol (played by Jung Kyung-ho)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.
“Crash Course in Romance” is about an elite hagwon math tutor who is so popular that mothers lineup at all hours to get their children seats at his lectures. By chance, he encounters a former national handball player who gave up her dreams of competing on an international level to care for her niece, who was abandoned by her mother.
Raised by a loving mom (played by the cantankerously delightful Kim Mi-kyung) who ran a local restaurant, Haeng-sun opens up her own neighborhood banchan shop, selling delicious homemade side dishes for her busy customers. After tasting her food, Chi-yeol — who has digestion issues and can’t eat much of anything without getting sick — is surprised that not only does he love her banchan, but the flavors remind him of his simpler past.
You know where we’re going here, right? Of course you do. But this mathematics genius doesn’t put 2+2 together for a long time: Haeng-sun is the daughter of the woman who fed him when he didn’t have enough money to buy a meal.
This is where I believe I differ from many viewers, who found this burgeoning romance between this middle-aged couple cute. Their romance — which lacked any chemistry — was the least interesting part for me for a variety of reasons. But mainly, I don’t believe he would ever have fallen in love with her if not for her cooking, or that she would’ve been enamored with his cold personality. They didn’t like each other at all in the beginning and had nothing in common. And while that’s a common K-drama trope, it felt inauthentic.
If anything, the nuanced friendships between the students felt so much more real, because they relied less on tropes. Their story arcs evoked memories of how intense everything can be when you’re a teenager.
One of the things I dislike in K-dramas is when characters repeatedly tell the viewers how we should view someone’s appearance. For instance, we are told nonstop how handsome Chi-yeol is, as if we don’t have eyes of our own to make our own assessment. And I say this as someone who is old: We are continually told how Haeng-sun appears much too young to be the mother of a 17-year-old student. In real life, Jeon is 50 and older than the other actresses (like 39-year-old Hwang Bo-ra) playing moms of high school juniors. And in this role, where she isn’t made up to look glamorous, she looks about 45 or 50. An adorable, fit 50, for sure. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with not looking 30 when you’re no longer that age.
We have grown so accustomed to seeing very young women playing mothers that viewers forget what the mom of a 17 year old may actually look like. I remember an interview I did with Chris Isaak when he landed a starring role opposite Keanu Reeves and Bridget Fonda in the feature film “Little Buddha.” Then 37, he said he almost didn’t get cast because the filmmakers thought he looked too young to be the father of a 9-year-old boy. Meanwhile, Fonda — then 29 — was deemed the appropriate age to play the child’s mother. Make it make sense.
BTW, don’t take this as me saying, But…but…Jeon Do-yeon is ollllllddddd! She is a skilled queen, who won Best Actress at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival for her leading role in Lee Chang-dong’s “Secret Sunshine.” She is amazing and has so much range to tackle just about any role. I think the script did her a disservice by not allowing her to own an age closer to reality. And, yes, I know why they did this. She would’ve been 33 when her niece was born, and that’s not as dramatic as having a woman in her early 20s become the child’s de facto mother.
Which leads me to the next point. To spare Hae-yi (played by Roh Yoon-seo from “Our Blues“), who will be ostracized for not having a real mother, Haeng-sun pretends to be her birth mother rather than her aunt. And when Haeng-sun and Chi-yeol are faced with an adultery scandal (because everyone assumes Haeng-sun is married), Hae-yi reveals that her aunt became her parent after her mom abandoned her. This becomes fodder for the competitive bitchy mothers, who say that of course that’s why Hae-yi is having some issues. It’s because she wasn’t raised by her real mother.
And it’s an attitude that’s reflected in Haeng-sun’s own thought process.
There are other issues addressed here, some that work better than others. There is a murder mystery, with a false suspect set up early and a clever storyline that hides the real culprit’s identity for most of the series. The story arcs involving students who are pressured to excel in school are balanced by subplots showing that some of the teenagers are just fine knowing their grades aren’t good enough to get into one of the SKY schools. And as with “Green Mothers’ Club” — which I watched almost concurrently with this series — “Crash Course in Romance” reinforces that excelling in school isn’t necessarily what’s best for the child, especially when the mothers are using their kids’ top grades as bragging rights to bolster their own self esteem.
There’s also a character who has Asperger’s syndrome that I’m not quite sure how I feel about. Jae-woo is Haeng-sun’s younger brother. Played by Oh Eui-shik — who was very good in “Romance is a Bonus Book,” “While You Were Sleeping,” “The Hymn of Death” — Jae-woo doesn’t come across as believable to me. It felt like his character was added in after the success of “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” and “It’s Okay to Not Be Okay,” which featured autistic characters, and “Move to Heaven” — where the protagonist has Asperger’s syndrome. (People who are more informed about Aspergers, please share your opinions in the comments below!)
I know that what I’ve written so far doesn’t indicate why I am giving this K-drama such a strong rating. It’s because despite some of the tropes that didn’t work for me, I looked forward to new episodes every week to see what would happen next. I liked that the series focused on older actors, rather than a pair of 20somethings. And when they did focus on the children, I appreciated that the series made a statement about what real-life Korean children go through to compete not only with each other, but with their mothers’ expectations.
And while I could go into the sexism of this series making the moms out to be the villains, there is some truth to this not only in South Korea, but in countries like the United States, where the mothers are expected to take a more active role in their children’s education than the fathers.
Airdates: Sixteen 70-minute episodes aired from January 14 to March 5, 2023 on tvN.
Spoiler Alert: The murderer is Chi-yeol’s trusted right-hand man, Dong-hee (Shin Jae-ha). After his sister died by suicide and their abusive mother punished and pushed him to excel, Dong-hee pushed her off their balcony. After Chi-yeol showed him kindness at his sister’s funeral, Dong-hee transferred all of his grief and admiration to Chi-yeol — who he felt was the only adult he could trust. He kills off anyone he believes is threatening Chi-yeol. And when he sees how important Haeng-sun has become to Chi-yeol, she becomes Dong-hee’s next target. Once he’s confronted by Chi-yeol, he says he has nothing to live for and jumps off the hospital rooftop to his death.
Shin Jae-ha is soooooooooooooo good at portraying this serial killer that as I watch him in the second season of “Taxi Driver” — where I think his kind character is not deceptive — I keep wondering if he will show a duplicitous side later that hasn’t been previously hinted at.
In the final episode, Hae-yi announces that she will move to Japan with her birth mother (played by Bae Hae-sun). It’s clear she is only doing this so that her aunt and Chi-yeol can have an uncomplicated life together. Her selfish mother finally does a selfless act and leaves for Japan without her, knowing that Hae-yi’s home is with Haeng-sun. While this was meant to be a beautiful moment, the plot didn’t reflect on the emotional damage this can cause Hae-yi at now having been abandoned twice by her mother. Yes, this is what was best for Hae-yi, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t issues to be addressed.
There is a happy ending. Haeng-sun and Chi-yeol propose to each other, she passes her exams to become a sports teacher, Jae-woo finds love with Haeng-sun’s best friend Young-joo (Lee Bong-ryun), and Hae-yi and her best friend Seon-jae (Lee Chae-min) finally begin to date.
© 2023 JAE-HA KIM | All Rights Reserved
Not great chemistry between the leads or was it that the romance bit was played with no passion at all really? In A Man and A Woman the chemistry between her and Gong Yu was intense.
Agreed. Jeon Do-yeon and Jung Kyung-ho have had amazing chemistry with different co-stars in the past. But here, it felt so forced. I enjoyed the teen crushes so much more, because they felt authentic.
I liked this series even though like you I found their relationship to be boring, but I was really offended by the the Aspergers syndrome character who was horrible in his role.
The storyline about the pushy parents driving their kids to the brink of insanity really resonated for me. Although I live in the US, I know parents and kids like that. I was disappointed to see that Su-Ah’s mom seemed to learn nothing. I do think the commentary about the lead actress is ageist. I find extreme plastic surgery much more distracting than a few laugh lines.
I’m a big fan of this writer. This wasn’t my favorite of her dramas, but she always excels at portraying human relationships and those little moments of joy and connection.
This series was not a favorite and I was bored for most of it so we disagree about how interesting this was. But I don’t understand how you read what she wrote and concluded that the commentary was ageist. She even spelled out that the casting of young women to play moms doesn’t make sense. The actress is beautiful but looks older than even 50. That is not an issue. The issue as pointed out is that she does not look too young to have a 16 or 17 year old child, which was the point of the commentary. The reviewer’s issue was with the writers who kept having other characters talk about how she was too young to be a mom when she looked more than old enough to be a mom.
But no one said the lead actress should get plastic surgery. Jae just pointed out that it’s ridiculous to keep harping on how she looks too young to be a mother and I agree. In general the FL/ML characters were miscast with absolutely no chemistry regardless of their ages. He also had no chemistry with the young pianist.
What I found truly problematic was the Jae-woo /Young-joo romance. He had no interest in romance until she put it into his head, and she only went for him because she wasn’t having success on her own. They had 0 chemistry and we had no indication that Jae-woo had ever wanted a girlfriend, let alone a wife or to be a father. On the one hand I like how he was part of the family and was treated like a person rather than as something else, but at the same time it felt both inauthentic and almost cruel to use him in a forced ‘romance’. In reality, Young-joo’s family would have had a difficult time accepting him as their son-in-law and the drama made it seem like a simple done-deal that had no issues. Jae-woo is entitled to as much happiness and love as anyone, but it would have been better to pair him in a realistic romance where he would have fallen in love with a woman who loved him for himself and not because he was her last ‘option’. To me, it felt as though Young-joo was taking advantage of Jae-woo and I didn’t like that.
Yes, this was completely unrealistic and their was problematic as hell.