There’s a kind of ‘franchise’ of flower boy shows, but they really don’t have that much in common other than the name, the fact that the actors are fresh faced and good looking and mostly young. Flower Boy Band, or Shut Up and Run remains in my top ten list- I really love that one, not least because the main dude is actually not that pretty. I couldn’t finish Flower Boy Ramen Shop at all. I think I watched 3 episodes.
Flower Boy Next Door This was mostly super cute with a few darker elements, but mostly just ADORABLE. I have no warnings to give to viewers with kids or more conservative viewers other than the usual generic – there may be some ‘language,’ but I don’t think there was much, there will be some imbibing of alcoholic beverages because there will never be a K-drama where there isn’t because that would hardly occur in real life, either. There are one or two nightclub scenes. For a while you assume one character is up to no good with girls, and once a girl calls to ask him where some of her clothes are (and not clothes she should be confused about, either, but it was totally innocent). That’s about it, really. Oh- if you can’t abide shirtless males there’s at least one scene like that, but I thought it was hilarious.
Some of the middle episodes step up on the darkness or grew tedious. But the zany, hilarious cuteness from Enrique is what I enjoy most:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4deHxIvXOgY?rel=0]
I also love almost all of the secondary characters (not so much the mean girls)-
heroine: GO DOK-MI (Park Shin-hye)= she was also in You’re Beautiful. Here she plays the emotionally scarred recluse/editor who has been quietly hiding in her apartment for three years. Jin Rak has been in love with her and quietly watching over her all this time. Enrique Geum shows up and blasts through her world, urging her to come out, come out, come out and PLAY.
ENRIQUE GEUM (Yoon Shi-yoon)- He is a Korean brought up in Spain since he was around 8-10 years old. He is a genius and creates lots of internet games and other amazing projects. But he has had no childhood, really. Now he’ back in Korea for a short visit where he wants to do all the things he might have done if he had been able to have a childhood in Korea, hence a lot of the crazy stuff he does, even though he’s supposed to be in his late 20s. Yoon Shi-yoon is 26 years old but manages to look 14 a lot of the time. I am amazed at his versatility. He played a darker, more brooding but just as endearing character in Me Too, Flower!.
OH JIN-RAK (Kim Ji-hoon)- I love this actor. He was the main male lead in Wish Upon a Star, the Joseon X-Files, and Love and Marriage where he played the deeply wounded divorced divorce attorney. I like his character here, too- gruff, brusque, with a heart of gold and uncertainty about relationships, hiding hurts of his own. He’s a web toon creator.
and YOO DONG-HOON (Go Kyung-pyo)= he’s Jin-Rak’s room-mate and c0-creator (he mainly does the drawings to Jin-Rak’s stories), and I enjoy him here. I love his dongsaeng/hyung connection with Jin-Rak oh, so, much.
But I really, really am loving – the nutty, wild eyed, sleepless web-toons editor, whose name I had to work really hard to find. I think she’s:
Kim Seul-gie, and she is an utter delight and I hope to see a lot more of her in the final episodes. She’s their web-toon editor and she’s decided not to sleep more than a couple hours a night until she’s 30- hence the bags under her eyes and the over the top reactions to everything. Kim Seul-gie is the actress’s name, I don’t know if she has 
a name in the show other than that crazy editor. She is a riot- about 4 feet of dynamite, and cuter than a bug’s ear.
There are some other characters as well, but I didn’t care a thing about any of them, really, although the security guard was nice, and I loved his advice in the final show.
That’s what I wrote when Flower Boy was about half way through.
As of 2/27: Flower Boy ended, and while I found the last three or four episodes tedious and tiresome, I found the ending satisfactory. Kim Seul-gie remained totally delicious all the way through, my only complaint is that there wasn’t more of her. I loved Oh Jin-Rak’s character’s resolution as well, and Enrique and Dok Mi remained cute. In fact, that’s mostly all I can really say for the show- there was a whole lot of cute and sweet, and while it danced around questions about gossip, friends, what is love all about, anyway, and isolation- that’s really all it did. It danced lightly as thistledown, and I think maybe cotton candy has more substance.
If you want something basically clean, light, and frothy, this would do it.
You might also enjoy:
Dramas I’ve completed, recommend, and reviewed: see here.
Things to know when watching a K-drama
What is it I like about K-Dramas?
You might be watching a K-Drama if….
Where to get your fix: Sites where you can find subtitled K-dramas (and dramas from other countries, as well. I’ve watched a handful of J-dramas (Japanese) and TW (Taiwanese) dramas, but I vastly prefer the K-dramas, even though I know more Japanese – I got an A in my Japanese 101 class back in the day, when we actually lived in Japan and once I even knew both hiragana and katakana- but still K-dramas interest me vastly more).
8 Comments
Since you’re always talking about these, I thought I’d try one out and started with Flower Boy Ramen Shop. I had no frame of reference, so I watched the whole thing. It had me wanting to give up on trying to watch at the beginning, but the last half of the series seemed much better. I sort of grew to love some of the characters. I’ve started Boys Over Flowers and so far it seems a little less quirky than Ramen Shop, but I still don’t know if it is typical of what you watch/review. I have become fascinated with the language. I kind of want to learn Korean now, but when on earth would I ‘need’ it?
I watched Boys Over Flowers- which I think propelled Lee Min Ho (the leader of F-4) into stardom. I enjoyed it, but I have no clue how to review it. It’s not exactly typical of what I usually watch, I think it’s too sprawling, too long, more juvenile, and the boys were mostly chosen more for the pretty than for their acting skills (Lee Min Ho being an exception). It was hugely popular in Korea.
I think the other shows I review have a tighter plot.
I know what you mean about wanting to learn Korean after watching. I feel that way, too. Those shows even make me want to eat Kimchi, in spite of the fact that I have actually eaten Kimchi IN KOREA and didn’t like it at all (just the spicy red, cabbage version).
I first stumbled on K-dramas by accident- A Man Called God and Athena were my first two, I think, and Harmony (who comments here from time to time) asked if I’d ever heard of K-dramas, she thought I might like them. She informed me about the next few K-Dramas I watched. She’s married to an American man whose parents are Korean immigrants who kept their culture- so their home is duel cultured. She learned Korean in college and they now use it with their children as well as English. She tells me that Korean is the hardest language to learn, so hard that Korean children learn their own language later than other kids typically do.
I’m going to follow some of your recommendations and watch some if the less juvenile shows. My husband thinks I’m nuts for watching, but I like not being bombarded with all the political garbage snuck into american TV and seeing the same celebrities over and over. I know Korean drama isn’t somehow ‘cleaner’ just because I don’t understand it all, but it seems cleaner. And I like the peeks into another culture, and as I mentioned, the language. I think my 2.5 yo son speaks it.
I don’t so much mind the sprawling, juvenile focus of Boys Over Flowers, I just didn’t know how to review it. My reviews also are kind of sprawling themselves, and mainly focused on ‘why I like this show,’ and I don’t know why I liked BOF that much. I just found it fun to watch even when it was making no sense to me and the second male lead’s acting was so very wooden.
The K-Dramas we watch really are cleaner than American ones, though, because Korea still has censorship over the network shows. It’s not just about the clean, either- it’s about cultural standards. I read that a while back one show was fined because the daughter-in-law slapped the mother-in-law, and this was deemed bad for society’s morals.
Cable shows standards are a little looser, and movies looser still, which I learned to my shock the first time I watched a Korean movie (they aren’t all problematic, I just made an uninformed assumption to watch one without knowing any better).
I think that is how everyone feels about BOF. You look at all the pieces, the plot, the actors, the soundtrack(!) and think to yourself – What? What? What was that? And yet, somehow it is enjoyable.
I couldn’t watch the second episode of Flower Boy Ramen Shop but I read a recap and picked it up again after that and liked it then loved it by the end. I like the quirky characters and the heart behind both FBRM and Flower Boy Next Door.
That is a great description of BOF. =)
Saw this and thought it looked quirky, but haven’t watched it yet. Probably will after I finish Heartstrings. Sorry to hear that you couldn’t get past the first few episodes of Flower Boy Ramen Shop, and I can understand why. However, it gets a whole lot better after they, finally, get the shop open again. Funny that the language is so hard to learn, isn’t their alphabet considered one of the easiest?
I think (but could easily be wrong), that some of the complexity comes from the complicated rules about banmal vs more formal speech