Fluffy House or Full House Take 2
(I'm kind of mystified by Tae Ik played by No Min Woo and how he is so tall, lean, and incredibly graceful.)
It's no secret that I love a good fluff drama and so it shouldn't be a surprise that I'm watching Full House Take 2. Which is a nice fluffy rom com drama about the entertainment world that is just terribly unlucky to be relegated to the dark recesses of a cable rerun channel for SBS. Last year was the year of fame and stories of the stars and after so much over saturation, this year is well...not. But for what it is, I think Full House v2 (as I call it on twitter) does a lot of things right.
While the set up was mundane (essentially crippling our protag with so much debt that she pretty much has to work for the pop idol group), I loved the way it established our main trio. Tae Ik and Kang Hwi form a duo pop group known as Take One. Kang Hwi is enormously popular because of his likable personality and style, while Tae Ik is a cold defunct chaebol with a huge chip on his shoulder. If this drama were only about these two learning to get along despite their differences I would probably love this drama just as much. Here you have two characters who are wholly dependent on each other yet are constantly at each others throats. It's a kind of environment ripe for a female lead to enter the dynamic and make things even more hectic with misunderstanding.
We get that with Michelle or Man Ok as she's dubbed by her grandfather. I like Man Ok, she has a lot of the personality I saw in Protect the Boss's Eun Seol. She's tough, yet incredibly kind, but not unforgivably naive. When her friend's scheme puts her in debt for millions, she does what any smart person does and puts a bit of distance between herself and her crazy fangirl of a friend.
One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to dramas about the entertainment world is the sinister paparazzi fellow. He (cause rarely is it a woman) constantly has his camera and lurks around corners and gets way too much air time. He has absolutely no development because his only motivation is to get the scoop, but he poses almost a superhuman threat to our characters. Rarely do our characters think of things like lawsuits and violations of privacy when it comes to paps. Full House Take 2 takes a different approach, an approach that I find somewhat refreshing in that our fangirl friend, spurred by her love for the group, lack of money, and the fact that her friend didn't tell her about her new job soon turns into villainess paparazzo.
Even though Full House Take 2 is last in line of what feels like hundreds of other dramas like it before, it's still a smartly played, well executed drama that takes the best elements (my favorite elements I should say) from dramas like You're Beautiful, Best Love, Dream High, Protect the Boss and even it's predecessor Full House. If this drama were called Take Me (I suck at titling stuff) instead trying to create some kind of flimsy link to the mega popular Full House it could easily be a mildly popular drama on the big three networks. But instead it suffers from the burden of what came before.