"Imitation", to its credit, has some intriguing pieces which push it towards being an entertaining vehicle for a good portion of its run. Unfortunately, after starting to fit nicely together, things break apart again and it never recovers.

The cast is a bit uneven. Park Ji Yeon and Kim Min Seo are the highlights, but Danny Ahn and Im Na Young pull their weight too. Lee Jun Young has a promising comedic touch as Kwon Ryok but the character spends almost the entire show either cranky or depressed so those lighter moments are easily forgotten. Jeong Ji So ends up as the centerpiece of the show and, unfortunately, this is not the best fit for her. She's very nice and she's capable, but she tends to repeat a limited repertoire of notes. The HMU team didn't help her either.

As far as stories go, the underdog story of Ma Ha moves a bit too quickly early on and the redemption story that picks up after it only starts to gain momentum and make sense at the very end. Although it closes strong, there's a good stretch of the show that can only be charitably described as filler material.

The whole production was built around two primary columns, Ma Ha and Kwon Ryok. That's what the industry tends to do and the team here got stuck following the typical structure. The result is that there's two characters that are asked to carry far too much of the narrative and several dozen side characters that have painfully little space to contribute. Had the show been structured as more of an ensemble with six to ten characters all sharing time more equally, this could have been a compelling gem. As made here though, it's just a few moments of charm that's not worth sifting through the long intervals of unremarkable storytelling.