Run On (2020)

It could've been better.

What was refreshing about this story is that the main couple communicated what made them worry and shared their struggles with each other, so a lot of misscommunication and missunderstanding tropes that you see used for cheap angs all the time were avoided. I really enjoyed them working on themselves as people and learning to put boundaries and the idea that for yourself to be on a relationship and for it to be healthy, you have to speak your mind and also think of yourself. And that there should be a balance in between loving yourself but not thinking only about yourself to the point you ignore or walk on other people's feelings.
I thought that was nice, but the story dragged at some points because some of the things did become repetitive, like the father trying to cause drama for his own benefit, the art student chasing after the CEO, the main couple being... really vainilla? Like I don't expect heavy stuff but the way they acted regarding intimacy was in a way something I wouldn't think people on their almost thirties would do. In the whole drama they've must kissed 3 times, and those were mostly pecks on the lips, and a lot of the times they acted as polite friends instead of a couple in love.
The romance between the art student and the CEO started cute but I feel there wasn't that much depth to it.
The only character I ended up actually bonding with and wanting to see more off was that secondary character who was male mc's friend. The one who always came first on track.
Overall, I don't think it was a bad drama, is just a drama to watch when you're tired and just want to lay on your bed or sofa and have a quiet momment for yourself.

Leggi di Più

I found this rather lacklustre, with some episodes really dragging. Seeing as it has such a good cast (whose acting I really enjoyed), this disappointed me.
Whilst the central theme was opposites attracting (twice), that wasn't enough to keep my interest piqued and the story lacked a central theme. There were too many issues around the main characters, with none becoming a central, in-depth story that would have given weight to the drama.
Instead, they were all quite superficial with very crude and simplified closures. The most disappointing being that of the overbearing, status mad father/husband, who was totally self obsessed and viewed everyone as his pawns and tickets to power. I literally slapped my head at the way that was brought to an end.
On the plus side, the female characters are all pretty independent and don't run after men who treat them like poop, or just aren't interested. They're all successful (to varying degrees) in theircown rights.
I liked the dynamic between the main 2 as well. Here is a man who is pretty open when he needs to be, even though he's far from a sweet talker.
Overall an ok watch, but did lack substance.

Leggi di Più

Hit or Miss (not for everyone).

After watching the first two episodes and maybe didn't like it then don't bother continuing because the pacing was pretty much the same and nothing major happened in the drama. This is a very well written drama that went in-depth about the characters and also delivered a lot of positive messages. The drama sets a realistic portrayal of love, relationships and everything a healthy relationship should be such as; enforcing boundaries, respect, not losing oneself and communication. The couple ACTUALLY COMMUNICATE!!!!!. The character development is immaculate and they came in so naturally so it may require paying attention to the characters's dialogue to notice their development. As a slice of life the drama really succeeded.

Leggi di Più

Slow, rambling story - and not in a good way

I don't mind a story that develops slowly, giving me time to get to the know the characters and their reasoning for doing the things they do. Unfortunately, for me, this show never lived up to its potential. Multiple boring storylines. Multiple unlikeable characters. The bullying storyline was disturbing, the nightmare father was too over-the-top bad, of course they felt like they needed to include a gay storyline and then did nothing with it. As for the two main couples: I could never understand why they would have fallen in love. The main characters were SO different and they never seemed to work to get to know and respect the other's differences. Plus, I found the main actor's acting, as well as his character, problematic. Was he supposed to be on the autism spectrum? Because that's the way he was played. The actor had absolutely no facial expression and his stares were so intense it just looked like he was waiting to say his next line. The second couple had a lot of cute bickering scenes, but really, that's all they ever did.
As I finished this show, I thought that the main goal of the show might have been "keep running forward, don't look back to where you've already been" but who knows, because at that point I just didn't care anymore.

Leggi di Più

I find this drama different from the other kdramas I've seen. It's refreshing and the characters are all straightforwrd without fillers. They speak their minds. This is the second time I've watched something that amazed me after It's Okay to Not Be Okay. ML and FL have a good chemistry. I love Im Siwan's acting as always.

I know that there are so many things to uncover for ML/FL/SML and SFL. Their acting surpassed what I expected. The story is not something that you can predict right away because it will always give you a second thought if what you're thinking will be the one that will happen.

Leggi di Più

A Relaxing, fresh and pleasant story

Run on has everything, a good story, great acting and cast, good fashion, great osts and most importantly wonderful writing.
The writing should be mentioned in a whole another paragraph because its one of the most wonderful writings i have ever seen in a drama or a movie. the lines will leave you smiling and in awe.
Watching run on on a stressful Wednesday and Thursday literally washed all my worries away. I fell in love with all the main leads .The second couple was equally as interesting as the main couple as well as the supporting characters were also pleasant to watch. This show kind of became like my comfort show and I'm going to miss it so much,
I would definitely recommend this drama to anyone in a heart beat, so if you haven't watched it yet definitely do
"you have your world i have mine, but we could align our worlds next to each other, couldn't we ? "
-oh mi joo

Leggi di Più

A celebration of subtlitled subtlety

This Drama was a bit of a flashback for me, to the days when JTBC was consistently my favourite go-to network for reliably good quality Dramas. Those days are long past, but this Drama was as good as almost any of those faves from 5-7 years ao.

What I loved about this Drama was its embrace of subtlety. Subtlety in story, subtlety in acting, and subtlety in dialogue. In a Drama all about subtitling, it seems especially apt that I had to rely on subs to follow the story - albeit enhanced by what Korean I've picked up from 8 years and 300+ K Dramas. So many times I smiled, snickered or even laughed out loud at the low key humour and the deliberately off-kilter words and actions of all the main characters.

I was VERY impressed by SSK's English, I had no idea she was THAT fluent, but I think perhaps the most interesting character of them all was CSY's. She really was borderline sociopathic to start with, and that was brilliantly counterpointed by her foil, the dryly irrepressible PA played so well by Yeon Je Wook, for whom I will defintely be keeping an eye out in future.

The Drama kept overused tropes to a minimum, avoided schmalzy sentimentality, and even kept its PPL to manageable levels with evidence of thought and care in its insertion. I've now completed 390 East Asian Drama series, and this is only the 45th to score at least 9/10. It scores that highly for reminding me of the joy that GOOD K Dramas can still deliver, when they get nearly everything right.

Leggi di Più

I regret everything

I was enjoying this drama so much when I first started watching because I loved Ki Seong Gyeom’s eccentric personality and Oh Mi Joo’s strange love for fake guns. Sadly, I quickly realized that the drama had very little to offer in terms of plot or interesting characters. Ki Seong Gyeom’s personality soon became quite stale, I found myself getting more and more frustrated with the characters, and I couldn’t see a way that the writers could turn the drama around even at the very end. I pretty much had to watch this drama at 1.5 times speed for the last few episodes so I could just get it over with and move on to something more interesting. If you’re considering watching this drama, keep in mind these few points: The plot is stale as hell. I tried to figure out what the heck happened during this entire drama, and I couldn’t really come up with anything at all. The plot just doesn’t move. Nothing… happens? Like, at all? Don’t get me wrong, I love a drama where character personalities are explored in-depth and relationships blossom very slowly over the course of several episodes, but in order for that to happen, the characters have to actually be interesting. The impact of side characters was essentially nonexistent, and I was very bored with the rest of the characters super quickly. Oh Mi Joo, especially, started driving me crazy after a while. I couldn’t figure out why until I realized that she talks to everyone like they are a child. It’s almost like she wants to be the “mom friend” and always likes to lecture others. The only character I found even remotely interesting was Seo Dan Ah, and that’s probably because she’s a rude, cynical bitch just like me. I could really relate to her, and, although she mostly stayed the same throughout the entire drama, I could feel a small change in the way she treats others. The next part that drove me up the wall is the dialogue. I am by no means a poetic person - quite the opposite actually. I am about as to-the-point as they come, and hearing these characters (I’m looking at you, Oh Mi Joo!) talk about for AGES how their translations carry some sort of deep, hidden meaning, or about how they have a spiritual connection to a painting or a hobby that they pursue is just the most cringe thing in the entire world. I didn’t notice this until later, but once it was brought to my attention, I couldn’t stop noticing it everywhere. All in all, unless you don’t mind a plotless snoozefest with the most flat characters in the history of Korean dramas, maybe just skip this drama despite the ridiculously high ratings it has.

Leggi di Più

I enjoyed every episode!

I enjoyed this drama. It was different - slow, yet captivating. I found myself looking forward to the next episode, just to see how it will play out. It spoke a lot to me, portraying what happens in our societies nowadays. Love does not have to follow the usual norm, where the man has to be older or with a better job, love after-all conquers all.

I loved the chemistry between Seo Dan Ah and Lee Young Hwa. I felt their chemistry and I'm happy they had a happy ending. Oh Mi Joo never disappoints and it's my first time watching Ki Seon Gyeom acting (well, my first time seeing him actually ;) and I loved how he was able to play his role. It looked really hard and he pulled it off really well. Oh, and I loved Kwon Young Il.

I never knew I was a sucker for slow moving dramas with no second lead syndrome or jealous ladies. I enjoyed this one people and I would recommend it to everyone who needs a break from the usual.

I had a good run, thank you!

Leggi di Più

Slice of life type of drama, no major conflicts, less frustrating, but lacking & average story

I wouldn't say this drama has anything major to spoil since there really isn't much to this story to begin with. It’s only a watch for people who can tolerate slow-paced dramas with a story line about people's daily lives and their journey. For me, I was hooked in the first four episodes. Then, it started to slow down and get boring for me. Then, the drama started to pick up near the end and get interesting.

The story has no major conflicts either. There's minor conflicts such as relationship issues for the couples in the drama and that doesn't take long to solve for them. That's one of the good parts of the drama. You don't have to watch a couple in despair because of major misunderstandings between them. Although I do feel that some of the minor conflicts they showed for the main couple was quite childish sometimes for their age depicted.

Like most dramas, this one is also full of cliches such as:
- Poor person/rich person pair up for both main couple and secondary couple. One of the hardships that one of the couples faced, (as usual) came from the rich person’s family being opposed to the relationship.
- Parents trying to control their children’s lives, thinking of their kids as tools.
There’s more clichés, but these two were the most prominent.
I don’t mind clichés as much but here it bothered me because I was hoping to see the “Strong Female Lead” to make up for it.
The FL Oh Mijoo was developed poorly to be considered a strong female lead. We’re shown how she can be bold and say what is on her mind with no fear, but then the next second she backs down and starts apologizing when she should’ve handle it differently to not look so pathetic. I think her character would’ve had more impact if they showed her background earlier in the drama. We were just told her background without any impactful clips of her rough childhood/background that would help us with her character. If they had included the clips of her past that they showed in the last 2-3 episodes, I would’ve probably understood her character better instead of judging it based off my own assumptions with the little information we were given about her background as development for her character.
There is still a promising strong female lead which is Dan ah’s character. Some didn’t like her character, but I liked it.
For main characters, I would say I liked Seongyeom and Dan Ah’s characters the most. They were intriguing characters and their personalities were not so simple.

What I didn't like was how they tried to throw in random conflicts in the story and not properly flesh out some characters.
Main example:
They randomly throw in LGBTQ as an issue for side characters but don’t focus on them because they aren’t the main characters nor do they tackle the issue properly either. It takes near the last few episodes for them to give subtle hints about one of the characters being a part of the LGBTQ community. What that character was experiencing (and what hardships they had in society) was never went into depth with/ wasn't shown. I rather them not even include this issue since they didn’t want to address it in depth or properly tackle it. It almost seems like they’re using LGBTQ just to look good.

Romance aspect of drama- I'm probably part of the minority who thinks the secondary couple was better than the main couple. I felt the chemistry was lacking for the main couple. It didn’t even look like they had feelings for each other till near the end. The development of the secondary couple kept my interest and I wished they had more scenes.

Acting- I think they all did a decent job. I wasn't a fan of SSK's acting in her previous dramas. This role does suit her a bit better.

With most of these negative points, why rate it 7.5? There were still good scenes in the drama that I liked. Some of them were quite inspirational. And as I stated before I liked some characters.

Leggi di Più

A realistic, heartwarming story with SO MUCH LGBTQ+ REPRESENTATION

This drama is a very fulfilling drama to watch. It keeps realism at its heart but doesn't forget the aspects of escape which people turn to TV for. I found that because of this, sometimes the show lacked plot and felt a bit slow at times, but for the most part, it keeps to a steady pace. Nothing moves too quickly or too slowly, everything feels very natural.

My favourite part of the show is the characters and their relationships. Every character is fleshed out, with their own motifs and goals. The relationships also felt very real, especially the relationship between Seon-gyeom and Mi-joo.
As for the secondary couple, I loved them. I think they contain more of the 'TV coincidental magic' that brings them together, but they're still realistic and fun to watch.

One of the main reasons I enjoyed this show so much is the LGBTQ+ representation and the fact that it's not a huge deal. No-one's entire personality is based on their gayness, they're treated like human beings.

I highly recommend this show to someone who wants a slow but steady drama to watch. However, I will warn you, this is not a binge-worthy show.

Leggi di Più

My issue with the drama was that I could not at all, connect with the heroine. I don’t know if it was the way she was written or the way the character was acted out, but she felt very emotionless and stiff. Am I going to piss off anyone by saying I kind of hated the heroines acting?)
I did not understand the heroines motivations most of the times.

The plot tried to be central to the storyline but more often then not it was pushed to the side making this an unfortunately average watch. There are some series for which 16/32 episodes is just too much, and this was one of them. Things were too stretched out, and there was not a whole lot happening because it was just too long. 10 or 12 episodes would have been better for Run On.

Leggi di Più