Yongpalyi

I'll admit that I only started watching Yong Pal for two reasons – I quite like Won Joo, and it had pretty high ratings in Korea and I wanted to find out why. In the end, the viewership was probably mostly due to Tae-hee Kim, since she's their beautiful Madonna. The beginning moved along, it had momentum, there was always something happening, and honestly I could imagine the show without the character of the hospital heiress trapped in her own mind. But then it became a crazy revenge pathos with a weird romance on top. It alternated in an unpleasant way between scenes of amorous chirping and plotting assassinations, revenge, usurpation, and God knows what else. Not to mention that most of the characters were horribly unappealing (Won Joo really turned me off when he started looking at Tae-hee as an idol and forgave her for basically everything because she's a lonely wretch), and ultimately what I enjoyed was the evil brother who suffered from a lack of love and Won Joo's work colleagues who pulled together with him. With almost the majority of Korean series, I want to know what's going to happen next right away, I play the next episode right away; but here I didn't want to. It didn't excite me, I found it lacking in spark, pizzazz, and scripted in a rather oddly assembled way. Eventually, I finished it with all my might, realized that I would have missed nothing if I hadn't finished it, and sighed to myself that this Won Joo guy really can't pick a decent series at all these days. Seoul is so small it's unbelievable – everyone needs surgery on the same day, everyone has a problem with the same organ... The series as a whole is worthless. Certain parts of it are good, though. But I'm not sure if they’re so good that you should watch the whole series... I'm sure you can get it better elsewhere (revenge – e.g. Bad Guy, romance between different classes – e.g. High Society, hospital setting – e.g. Code Blue, etc.), this mishmash... pfft. A very weak 2 stars. (03/10/2015)