Bel Ami (2013)

If you go to a drinking establishment in Korea, the server will commonly put on your table a bowl of puffed-up rice snacks. The flavor of these snacks is not particularly good, but the taste doesn't turn you off entirely. In fact, you'll find yourself compulsively eating one after the other while waiting for your drinks and food to arrive, and before you know it, you're wondering how the hell the bowl is empty.

That pretty much sums up my viewing experience of Pretty Boy: not a particularly good drama, but one I found extremely watchable and that I anticipated each week.

The storyline is two-fold: one thread is Dokko Ma Te and the ten women he must "conquer"; the second being a drama-standard birth secret plot. I will admit that the birth secrets had me most invested and offered little surprising twists. The women storyline might seem off-putting at first, but in the end, it became less about Ma Te taking advantage of women and more about a mutual exchange and growth happening within those connections.

Where the drama started to corrode were the moments where I actually paid attention to what was going on. Those were the moments when the plotlines to nowhere, random character entrances and exits, moments of discontinuity within the story, and quick fix deus ex machinas that happen off screen and present a quick "WTF" fix to a problem became glaringly obvious.

OK, that's admittedly quite a lot wrong with the drama. However, if you're looking for a drama that will fly by quickly with light humor and mystery and a quirky comic book feel to it, Pretty Boy should hold you over until the main drama course arrives.

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I watched this drama for the cast involved and I realised after the first scene that this is gonna be a bit different, but of course the term Bel Ami in the title did suggest what kind of lead man to expect.

I enjoyed the acting, but what really made this drama special is that if I ever imagined a good harem story made into live action, where all the girls would get their moments to shine, and all their stories had a moral lesson - Bel Ami is just that. Saying so, I have to defend the main character by stating that he is NOT a pervert (like most guys in a harem-like story). In fact, he turns out to be a deep person and he evolves a lot as the story progresses like most characters do so in this drama.

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