Beautiful Gong Shim started off as a delightfully quirky rom-com, with a winning main character in Gong Shim, who was not afraid to speak her mind, but also had dreams and aspirations for her life, wanting to learn Italian and become an artist and was working towards making those dreams a reality, her unsupportive family be damned.
She dealt with the stress-induced hairloss by wearing her signature wig, conjoured up hilarious scenarios in her head, but never seemed to lose sight of what made her great.
Add to that a truly oddball main character in Ahn Dan Tae, who looked like a sort of hobo, but was actually a human rights lawyer after a stint in prison, wonderfully played by Namgoong Min whose facial gymnastics are a true highlight and a second lead in Sook Jun Soo whose bromance with ADT was a sight to behold as they never really fought over Gong Shim but both were enchanted by her character and wanted to help her because of it, plus some great humour and fluffy chemistry and you have a winning combination of characters and a good set up for a drama.
Gong Shim's family played the necessary foil to Gong Shim, especially her odious sister Gong Mi, and Jun Soo's family had a missing heir-secret that could be used to fill out the plot.
So where did it go wrong? How come my rating for this is so low?
Well, sadly as the story progressed Gong Shim and her dreams and aspirations fell further and further into the background. Ahn Dan Tae seemingly completely took over and missing heir storyline derailed the quirky, funny rom-com into another chaebol-inheritance-family-drama. Plot threads were pretty unceremoniously dropped and a drama where the name of the main character is in the title was no longer about the main character at all, suddenly she was the third lead instead of the first.
This is not due to Minah's acting, she was perfectly fine and her Gong Shim is a character I will continue to like, but it seems decisions were made to make the chaebol-inheritance plot the most important.
Plus the drama broke up the bromance for too long, the humour faded away and Gong Shim made some really weird choices that put her in danger and turned her into another brainless heroine. I want characters to make at least somewhat logical choices, so I can understand if not empathise.
EDIT: ADT also makes some questionable choices later on that I don't understand which soured me on the pairing as well.
Ah well, put BGS into the 'Meh'-bin for me.
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