Korean romantic comedies are a lot of fun. Please Teach Me English, My Sassy Girl, My Tutor Friend: these are all very clever, heartfelt movies, and though inevitably predictable (the question of whether or not the two leads will finally get together in the end is virtually never answered in the negative) they're still highly entertaining films. It's pretty darn hard not to like them.

The most often-employed romantic comedy formula -- guy and girl meet cute, start off hating each other, and eventually realize that they're in love -- isn't restricted to Korean movies, however: the Korean dramatic TV shows use it all the time, too. Shows of this sort don't really exist in the U.S.; audiences here are, I fear, a bit too cynical for them. An innocent young couple discovering that they love each other over the course of twenty episodes, and consumating their relationship at the end with usually nothing more than a chaste little kiss? This probably doesn't strike many Americans as incredibly thrilling television in this day and age (it's worth mentioning that this sort of boy-meets-girl plot was a staple of soap operas in the 50's, though). Still, there's something to be said for the kind of old-fashioned (in the sense that the topic of sex rarely comes up, except occasionally in jest), earnest romances on display in these Korean shows: primetime American TV shows are, of course, often drenched in crass, frank sex-talk, which can be tiresome to say the least. Heck, I take it back: a series with a classy, old-fashioned romance as its central focus, bereft of frank sex-talk, with a good cast and with a clear beginning, middle, and end would probably do pretty well here; I can't be the only one who would see a show like that as a breath of fresh air. To hell with the cynics!





Anyway, Bright Girl's Success (sometimes translated as Joyful Girl's Success Story) is a Korean romantic comedy of the type described above, with an emphasis, at least in this first episode, on the comedy. Our two leads are Cha Yang-soon (Jang Na Ra), a pretty country girl who dreams of one day rescuing a prince, and Han Gi-tae (Jang Hyuk; Elvis in Please Teach Me English), a young but serious businessman with a bit of a surly streak. They cross paths several times in this first episode and instantly declare their dislike for one another, so, obviously, it's only a matter of time before the romantic sparks begin to fly.

The episode starts off strong, with one of Yang-soon's dreams about rescuing a prince. A guy gallops up to her high school, clad in some silly outfit, and tells her that he needs her help. She proceeds to mop the floor with a bunch of hoodlums in a funny but plainly amateurish martial arts sequence, to the delight of the prince, who leans in to give her her reward: a kiss. She closes her eyes and scrunches up her face in a cute I'm-not-sure-I'm-ready-for-this way, which is standard procedure for a Korean girl about to be kissed in these shows, but before her prince can plant one on her she's rudely awakened by a pair of school administrators. Seems she's dozed off in class, and the administrators aren't happy about it. They're even less happy about her failure to pay her tuition lately, though: Yang-soon's parents are swindlers who pretty much left her alone with her grandmother, and who cheated the administrators out of some dough. They want their money back, and decide that the best way to get it is to send Yang-soon to Seoul to be a maid for some rich family until she's earned enough to pay off her debt. Yang-soon, without a won to her name, is forced to cooperate.





Pretty strange, I know. What right do these belligerent old ladies have to send a student off into indentured servitude? It's almost like the plot of that dumb sitcom on Seinfeld, about how a judge decrees that a guy without car insurance has to become the other driver's butler after an accident: it's a totally preposterous and transparent plot mechanism.

After meeting Yang-soon, we move on to the male lead, Han Gi-tae. He's the corporate mastermind behind Snowy Cosmetics, and he's just made himself GM of the company. His friends and his girlfriend -- the spoiled rich girl Yin Luxoi -- show up to congratulate him, but he could really care less: he's totally indifferent, and even out-and-out rude to them. (He's especially rude to his girlfriend, although she's admittedly an annoyance. Later, he even slugs a lackey who said something bad about his deceased parents). We also meet some schemers after the boardroom meeting, hatching sinister plots against Han Gi-tae, but they're only given one scene in this first episode, so they don't amount to much here.

Some scenes of Yang-soon's home life follow. She lives in a rustic shack with her grandmother, with whom she bickers about whether or not to butcher a chicken for supper. Salt of the earth, these folks. The series' meet cute between the two leads hits a few minutes later, as Han Gi-tae, parasailing for a photo-op, gets off course and lands directly in Yang-soon's outdoor bathtub...while she's bathing in it. Startled and angry, Yang-soon screams at him, while the icy Han Gi-tae, undoubtedly feeling foolish at having screwed up his photo-op so badly, glares at her and wanders off. It's an improbable meeting, to say the least, but hey: comedic melodrama is what we're here for.

After everything gets sorted out and Han Gi-tae has left the scene, Yang-soon discovers a necklace in her bathtub. "That man is a nuisance," she fumes, realizing that it must have been accidentally left behind by Han Gi-tae. Han Gi-tae himself realizes that he's lost the necklace a bit later, and searches frantically for it -- the two rings on the chain were his parents' wedding rings. It occurs to him that he probably dropped it at Yang-soon's place after the parasailing accident, so he rushes off back to the country to find her.





Yang-soon's swindling parents enter the picture here -- they notice Yang-soon saying goodbye to her friends at school the next day (cause she's leaving for Seoul to do maid-work) and decide, after seeing Han Gi-tae chasing crazily after her looking for his necklace, that the school administrators have sold her into some kind of human smuggling ring, and that the pratfalling Han Gi-tae is her new slavemaster. Deductive reasoning at its finest! So, Yang-soon's parents use their swindler skills to thwart Han Gi-tae's efforts to catch up with her, giving rise to numerous amusing scenes. In the end, Yang-soon ends up in Seoul, working for a rich family, and coincidentally ends up finally running into Han Gi-tae again. She gives him the necklace back, but he's a real dick about it, so she tosses a bucket of water on him. Then, he does the same to her, and that's end: Yang-soon's now in Seoul, in close proximity to Han Gi-tae, and they both hate each other. Cue the romance.

Jang Hyuk and Jang Na Ra are both very likable leads (Han Gi-tae is a jerk, but he's still likable, probably because he's so good at being a jerk), and the show's comedy is pretty enjoyable. The fact that it's an hour-long show hurts it a little, though, I think: this first episode in particular isn't really very tightly-knit, and when it ends, it does so in something of an arbitrary spot. Still, if you can get over the overly-coincidental plot, it's quite a bit of fun, and very easy to get into. Recommended!

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