jdrama: Boku to Star no 99 Nichi, Koshonin 2
Boku to Star no 99 Nichi is a romantic comedy about Kouhei, a part-time bodyguard who gets assigned to guard a Korean superstar, Han Yoo Na, for 99 days while she's shooting a drama in Japan. Except his job isn't so much to guard her from other people but to keep her from sneaking out and getting into trouble and hunt down mysterious men from her past.
It's pretty much adorable and a good example of why i tend to prefer the jdrama/kdrama fusion romances we sometimes get over the contemporary-set kdramas most of the time. (Sageuks and fusion sageuks are another matter.) It does the romantic drama well and mixes it up with Kouhei's kooky family and coworkers and Yoo Na's costar, who has A Secret Past with Kouhei and who I was pretty sure was secretly in love with Kouhei for the first 7 or so episodes until he was fighting with Kouhei over Yoo Na. (Then I decided he was in love with both of them.) There's also and evil reporter who's out to destroy Yoo Na (apparently he just threw a dart at the pictures of various stars to target to create a scandal about as we never really get an explanation there....) a quasi-romantic subplot with Yoo Na's brother and Kouhei's niece that's very cute cute until you start wondering exactly how old they are. (The age difference is actually probably a good bit smaller than that with Kouhei and Yoo Na, but an age difference pings differently when a woman is in her late 20s and when she's in her late teens.) BTW, the guy playing Yoo Na's brother is lucky that he's cute and has an endearing stage presence-at least when interacting with people who actually can act-because he cannot act at all. I'm not sure he actually tried most of the time. (I think he's actually primarily a kpop guy, but apparently he wants to be an actor too.)
(I actually watched this some time back-before RMPW and Naniwa started-but kept forgetting to comment on it despite meaning to at least once a week.)
I've also been watching the second season of Koshonin (aka The Negotiator). It's about like the first season, save that Usagi has been in the departmment for a while so her male coworkers aren't going out of their way to be sexist this time around, and Usagi is more at ease with her job. Err...as at ease as you can be when your job is to negotiate with killers, kidnappers and terrorists, that is. I will forever hate that commanding officer of hers, though. I'd say that, in general, if you watched the first season, you'd feel roughly the same about the second. Only the first 4 episodes have fansubs. After that it's the engrish subs that come with the Chinese DVD releases. Those are actually better than a lot of others but, well, still very much engrish.