“Romantic Doctor, Teacher Kim” (Korean Drama) Review
‘Romantic Doctor Teacher Kim’ stars Han Suk-Kyu as Teacher Kim, Yoo Yeon-Seok as Kang Dong-Joo and Seo Hyun-Jin as Yoon Seo-Jung in the main roles.
The supporting cast consists of many well known faces/names within the Korean drama sphere as well as some talented newcomers.
Well…I’ve done it once again!
I jumped on the wagon that is current K-dramas and started watching ‘Romantic Doctor Teacher Kim’. After weeks of seeing snippets and stills on my twitter feed I could fight the temptation no more.
Spoiled due to watching my recent dramas in marathon mode, I am proud to have held out until the last episode aired. Specially since there was so much buzz about this drama, making it extremely tempting to watch it weekly as it aired.
I’m only about 3 episodes in but can already say that the aforementioned buzz about the drama appears to be completely warranted.
So much happened already during the first 2 episodes alone. I caught myself checking about halfway through each episode, thinking I reached the end of it because of an apparent cliffhanger.
Both Kang Dong-Joo and Yoon Seo-Jung have already undergone so many changes as characters, evolving in perfect sync with the ever forwards moving story line.
Once again we find ourselves with main characters that are far from perfect. Each character experiences failure through mistakes made and works hard to improve at their chosen profession (like people in real life).
A few months later…
It’s been a few months now since I finished watching ‘Romantic Doctor Teacher Kim’. However, I faced difficulty writing the second part of my review on it.
Why? Because I ended up being very disappointed with the drama in its later half. It did not live up to my expectations.
This especially pains me since I was so inclined to mark this as one of my favourites. Based on the cast and its first few episodes it had all the potential to be just that.
All seemed to have been set in place for a great drama. The characters felt real and believable.
It also had a strong story line in the beginning that seemed to just be waiting to be explored further. And I loved how the great cast brought the drama’s characters to life.
So where did it all go wrong?
I’m still not sure myself. But here is what I do know. About halfway through the drama it started to seem as if the people in charge had forgotten where the drama was going.
Characters stopped evolving, story lines kind of trickled away without being fully explored or explained. And things started to get repetitive.
Every episode there seemed to be a new case of a rare or formerly incurable disease that the doctors had to deal with. And no one seemed to be questioning the likelihood of a patient with this disease showing up at this small hospital located in a rural area.
And sometimes the person with the disease was at first not even a patient themselves. They were just there as a guardian or to accompany someone sick.
I kept thinking that if I was a resident in the area, I would avoid this hospital at all cost. Because the doctors may take one look at you and off to the surgery room you go.
This was the other thing bothering me more and more. Every patient needed surgery. It was a constant repeat of surgery scenes.
-“You’re going to die unless we cut you open and find out how to cure you.”
“Wait!! What??”
This would have been acceptable, if these had been used in some way to further develop the characters. Sadly however, that was not the case. There was useless and unprofessional bickering going on between the doctors that led nowhere.
Conclusion
I was left with so many questions about certain characters. Taking advantage of the great initial character set up, there would have been opportunity and time to answer these.
I realize the above sounds more like a rant than a review. But as I mentioned before, I had a hard time with this one.
Did I miss something important that made me misunderstand where the writers/directors were going with this drama? I wrote and rewrote this but it kept on coming out about the same.
So I finally decided to post it this way as I want it to represent my honest feeling/opinion about the drama and to move on.
-Cee
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