Hello My Teacher. Or rather, helllooooooo, Gong Yoo!
After Coffee Prince, I kept having a yen for watching another Gong Yoo drama, especially that he is in the military now and thus no new entertainment from him will be forthcoming for a couple of years.
So I looked around at what Gong Yoo dramas I had, and the choice was between One Fine Day (they are stepsiblings! he is a gangster! she is a rich girl! he blackmails her for money only to realize that fact as they were separated in childhood! angst! eleventy! happy ending!) or Hello My Teacher (also known as Biscuit Teacher and Star Candy), a funny drama where Gong Yoo plays a delinquent who falls for his teacher. A stepsibling love drama and a teacher-student drama. Seeing that Coffee Prince was Gong Yoo falling for a cross-dresser, it is clear that he has acted in the three major drama genres. No wonder he enlisted after CP! He ran out of genres!
Wanting a bit of a break from the angst after QSS, I chose Hello My Teacher. Though who are we kidding? It's kdrama, I am sure there will be a small elephant's worth of angst in this one as well.
One ep in, and I totally adore it. It makes me think of kdrama version of Gokusen, only if Shin/Yankumi were canon. Eeeee!
The plot is as follows:
Na Bori (Gong Hyo Jin, of Sang-Doo and Thank You) is a 25 year old former juvenile delinquent, who was kicked out of high school after defending a female classmate from a gang of guys, and the whole thing escalating into a total wrecking of the teachers' room and breaking of a teacher's face.
In addition to her major kick-ass skills and sunny (if pushy) personality, she is also someone who did make good of herself, finished high school and university, and is now an aspiring teacher. Her school of choice? The old high school which expelled her. In part, to prove she 'made good,' but in larger part because she used to have a crush on her art teacher Ji Hyun-Woo (Kim Da Hyun) and hey, work and crush? Perfect combination.
However, the school, run by icy, composed Principal Lee, is understandably not keen to employ her. Bori's ticket in? Just might be Park Tae-In (Gong Yoo!!!!!), the troubled delinquent 19-year old stepson of the Principal.
Tae-In is a total troublemaker and a brat, and has the world's most charming smile, but he is also genuinely a messed-up guy who has taken teen rebellion up a notch or seven. Of course, seeing that his family has armed goons attempt to drag him around like a criminal, maybe that is not so inexcusable. Yeah, I am pleased to note that the great tradition of awful kdrama families continues with this one. Tae-In's stepmother is rather a ***** to him, seeing that she insults his (dead? absent?) mother to his face and just generally looks like a walking icicle, but she is still oodles better than his father, who is a man in a high-up position and is so embarassed by his 'liability' of a son, he wants/plans to have him committed to a mental institution so he would be out of the way (Tae-In is screwed-up but hardly insane).
Anyway, Principal Lee offers Bori a deal. In exchange for a year-long teaching contract, Bori has to special tutor/take care/babysit/whateveryoucall it Tae-In, for whom this is basically the last chance to avoid the loony bin. Neither Bori nor Tae-In are keen on the idea (their first meeting was only eclipsed by their second, in terms of mutual dislike) but hey, they are both stuck.
Things go from there. Does Bori get the attention of her long ago crush? Does she become a Yankumi-like figure, an untraditional teacher with great fighting skills and problem solving abilities? Does the delinquent leader with family issues fall for her? Does all of this have a happy ending? The answer is, of course, yes. (But never fear, it's not Forbidden Love typs stuff. From what I can tell, it takes those guys seven years to get together :P)
I loved the first ep and am in for the ride...
So I looked around at what Gong Yoo dramas I had, and the choice was between One Fine Day (they are stepsiblings! he is a gangster! she is a rich girl! he blackmails her for money only to realize that fact as they were separated in childhood! angst! eleventy! happy ending!) or Hello My Teacher (also known as Biscuit Teacher and Star Candy), a funny drama where Gong Yoo plays a delinquent who falls for his teacher. A stepsibling love drama and a teacher-student drama. Seeing that Coffee Prince was Gong Yoo falling for a cross-dresser, it is clear that he has acted in the three major drama genres. No wonder he enlisted after CP! He ran out of genres!
Wanting a bit of a break from the angst after QSS, I chose Hello My Teacher. Though who are we kidding? It's kdrama, I am sure there will be a small elephant's worth of angst in this one as well.
One ep in, and I totally adore it. It makes me think of kdrama version of Gokusen, only if Shin/Yankumi were canon. Eeeee!
The plot is as follows:
Na Bori (Gong Hyo Jin, of Sang-Doo and Thank You) is a 25 year old former juvenile delinquent, who was kicked out of high school after defending a female classmate from a gang of guys, and the whole thing escalating into a total wrecking of the teachers' room and breaking of a teacher's face.
In addition to her major kick-ass skills and sunny (if pushy) personality, she is also someone who did make good of herself, finished high school and university, and is now an aspiring teacher. Her school of choice? The old high school which expelled her. In part, to prove she 'made good,' but in larger part because she used to have a crush on her art teacher Ji Hyun-Woo (Kim Da Hyun) and hey, work and crush? Perfect combination.
However, the school, run by icy, composed Principal Lee, is understandably not keen to employ her. Bori's ticket in? Just might be Park Tae-In (Gong Yoo!!!!!), the troubled delinquent 19-year old stepson of the Principal.
Tae-In is a total troublemaker and a brat, and has the world's most charming smile, but he is also genuinely a messed-up guy who has taken teen rebellion up a notch or seven. Of course, seeing that his family has armed goons attempt to drag him around like a criminal, maybe that is not so inexcusable. Yeah, I am pleased to note that the great tradition of awful kdrama families continues with this one. Tae-In's stepmother is rather a ***** to him, seeing that she insults his (dead? absent?) mother to his face and just generally looks like a walking icicle, but she is still oodles better than his father, who is a man in a high-up position and is so embarassed by his 'liability' of a son, he wants/plans to have him committed to a mental institution so he would be out of the way (Tae-In is screwed-up but hardly insane).
Anyway, Principal Lee offers Bori a deal. In exchange for a year-long teaching contract, Bori has to special tutor/take care/babysit/whateveryoucall it Tae-In, for whom this is basically the last chance to avoid the loony bin. Neither Bori nor Tae-In are keen on the idea (their first meeting was only eclipsed by their second, in terms of mutual dislike) but hey, they are both stuck.
Things go from there. Does Bori get the attention of her long ago crush? Does she become a Yankumi-like figure, an untraditional teacher with great fighting skills and problem solving abilities? Does the delinquent leader with family issues fall for her? Does all of this have a happy ending? The answer is, of course, yes. (But never fear, it's not Forbidden Love typs stuff. From what I can tell, it takes those guys seven years to get together :P)
I loved the first ep and am in for the ride...