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Crash Course in Romance korean drama review
Completed
Crash Course in Romance
0 people found this review helpful
by catherine
Jan 30, 2024
16 of 16 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 6.5
Story 6.5
Acting/Cast 6.5
Music 6.0
Rewatch Value 6.5
This review may contain spoilers

Hilarious main romance, with some other blah stuff

As a rom-com, this is awesome; I love how chaotic both the characters are at the start and seeing how they went from that to gradually enjoying each other’s company.

As a more slice-of-life drama, this show hits the spot as well. The theme of motherhood is really powerful, especially seeing the “found family” aspect between the main female lead and Hae-e. I also loved seeing the different types of families and seeing how academic pressure played into familial expectations in different ways.

And then we get to the other genre: the mystery or thriller or whatever. This part of the show didn’t work for me at all. I don’t think the show was very good at switching between tones, so it was jarring to go from a rom-com scene to seeing a random murder, especially because it felt like show often forgot about its murder subplot; there would be few consequences for things that happened so the tone of the show never balanced itself out.

Other than that, I think there were almost too many threadlines sometimes, and the show sometimes dropped the ball on them, or there were smarter ways to tie storylines together that the drama didn’t think of. For example:
- When Hae-e wakes up, the entire murder plot is already over. It just makes everything feel pretty anticlimactic.
- Su-a, whose arc is about academic competition, should’ve played a much bigger role in the Sun-jae/Hae-e accidental cheating arc. Instead, she just disappeared during these episodes.
- Su-a, who started getting hallucinations about hurting Hae-e, could’ve also played a role after Hae-e’s accident, like not being sure if she’d been involved or not. Instead, her hallucinations just randomly stopped in the penultimate episode.
- Hae-e’s mom comes and causes a rift between Haeng-seon and Hae-e, which they never resolve through communication. Instead, Hae-e’s mom leaves of her own accord and the problem just goes away. I felt like this could've been a really good opportunity to highlight the motherhood theme again.

The second couple romance also feels really out-of-the-blue — it comes in halfway and by then ’d really much rather have the show focus on the familial relationship between him and Haeng-seon and Hae-e, because most of the time he seems to just be…there. There’s no chemistry or depth between him and his love interest, so I think the show should’ve either built up the plot more from the start, or not have done it at all.

Overall, I still had a fun time watching this. Even with the murder aspect, it feels generally low-stakes, and is a light-hearted watch.
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