Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha begins with lightning. Somehow, the creators were able to align everything just right for a simple story about a woman dentist hitting a wall in her life. The premise isn't new, and well, one could honestly call it a mid-life crisis series, except they purposely make sure to let us now the characters are just at true adult age (their early to mid 30's) and not yet on that particular journey.

Yoon Hye Jin (Played by the absolutely stunning Shin Min Ah) is a morally steadfast dentist who can no longer take the greedy pressures of the Seoul clinic she works. After a final run-in with the owning dentist, she quits, with enough money to keep herself fed, but not enough to open her own clinic in the expensive city. With her name in the mud with other dentists and unable to find a new position, Hye Jin runs off to a small coastal town she visited as a child that holds the last great memory of her mother. Meant to be only a day trip to celebrate her long deceased mother's birthday, fate intervenes trapping her there money-less, shoe-less, and roofless.

Enter our male lead, Hong Doo Shik known as Chief Hong, a dashing townie (Played winningly with just the right touch of sex appeal by Kim Seon Ho) who does basically every job the town has to offer, and shows up everywhere our female lead is too. As he hands her a single found shoe, Cinderella and her prince end up in tongue sparring match, as Chief Hong finds our destitute Hye Jin snobbish and entitled.

Just suffice it to say, that in this single day and night in the fictitious seaside town of Gongjin, Hye Jin meets every power player the series will deliver, and has a whirlwind of experiences that ultimately make her decide to open up a dental clinic here, where she can actually afford too.

Thus, the fish-out-of-water big city girl in small town life begins, and how enjoyable it is to watch.

Every single side character has a story to tell, and those stories, unlike other series such as Racket Boys, actually intertwine and affect our main journey and main characters. Everyone is, for the most part, believable as real people living their lives in this small town. You learn to love, be annoyed at, or mostly not like everyone in play. This is an utter triumph compared to what is many times delivered by such stories.

The first ten episodes of the series are some of the most heartwarming, funny, romantic, believable, and, I dare say, honest storytelling hours I have seen in a while. The director, and writers, always went right up to the line of over-the-top without actually crossing over into it. The restraint was admirable, and it makes one want to lay back smile, giggle, and press play in the most refreshing sense of enjoyment.

However, episode eleven is where this praise abruptly stops. When the series shifts gears with its main leads, in what should be a great payoff, the audience instead ends up with a saccharin, ridiculous, and trite hour plus episode that could cause whiplash. Whatever restraint the makers had shown instantly dissolves into a story that goes full force into territory seemingly written and executed for teenage schoolgirls.

It takes a few episodes for the series to stabilize, but at this point what existed between our main leads seems to have become a thin anorexic version of what it was previously. The story begins working overtime to create teachable, emotional, and sentimental moments. The natural honest feel good storytelling that earmarked the first ten episodes being replaced with cloying, fake, and melodramatic plot lines.

When the penultimate episode fifteen begins, you find yourself embroiled in an almost entirely different show. We get a long hinted at and hidden backstory that rolls out in the most unbelievable fashion. The events are over-the -top worst case scenarios that string together in a waterfall of tragedy. That our Chief Hong even remotely blames himself for a laundry list of events that are completely and utterly outside of his control is aggravating. Even worse, the self medication, nightmare having, therapy going lead never addressing the elephant in the room brought up episodes ago, in that he feels he causes the deaths of everyone he has ever come to love. This is left unresolved, or in truth most things end up being resolved by just a good long cry. Which is especially frustrating considering after all this exposition and chaos the episode ends with the death of one of the most beloved townspeople. Just to top of more tragedy, not that you won't see this plot point coming.

I will admit, I am short changing this a bit, but not by much. It becomes so heavy-handed at this point, I actually found myself yawning and reaching for my phone. Yes, I can tell you the current CNN headlines. And considering that this show previously had me losing sleep for just one more episode, is a very very mighty fall.

In the end, everything becomes about marriage. Marriage for everyone. Everyone in love. Even children. And to push this moral further you will be subjected to one of the worst and most manipulative scenes I've ever watched on shaming people were get divorced. It even involves a child crying. But, all is good because the townsfolk you have spent any time with at all are making a ridiculous parade down to the beach to take pictures all together in joy!

What started out amazing, ends in a bumbled, frustrating, trite, and unrealistic mess. But the beginning episodes can be watched over and over again until the end of time. And they alone keep this at an 8, B+/A- , 4 stars. If only the ending had stayed as strong.