Cringiest Moments of 2021

For the entirety of season one and a good chunk of season two, it seemed that the lesson for Jo Jo to learn was to realize that the Love Alarm app didn't control you and you could simply decide to ignore it, declare who you are and who you like and that what some programmer could code couldn't tell you what you truly felt. But no, let's chuck all that and give her some hokey workaround in the app as a spear to overcome the shield given only to her. Super dumb.

That there were insurmountable logical issues with "The Devil Judge" wasn't apparent immediately (see my full review on how the Ga On character ruins any hope for this show), but episode one did indicate that the production team was willing to throw sound judgment out the window when a crazed school bus driver was driven off a collision course with the courthouse by a machine gun wielding Judge Kang Yo Han. 

Despite the long list of missteps by Lee Min Ki in one of the year's most ineptly directed and acted productions, one of the big setups was the triangle where Kang Min Hyuk's Yu Jin has returned from abroad as a serious artist to win back Nana's Oh Joo In. That he has feelings for her is understandable. The "art", however, that is revealed as his is incomprehensibly bad though. That it's derivative of "My Little Pony" isn't fatal and while art is in the eye of the beholder, what is displayed here would be poor quality in a middle school art fair. 

In terms of pre-release anticipation, "Jirisan" had to be a top five show in 2021. A star-studded cast. A hit writer. An incredible location. And then right off the bat, it went badly. Joo Ji Hoon's Hyun Jo shows up at his first day and is immediately swept up in a cliffside rescue. Cue the hyperdramatic score, Peter Jackson-style camera sweeps and quick cuts and the big action set piece. All of these could not, unfortunately, cover up some hideously bad cgi of falling rocks. So the first impression was not the big budget slick production expected (and which the rest of the show did often exhibit), but more like something thrown together in a garage.

Lee Je Hoon's best work in 2021 was not in "Taxi Driver" but he was really, really solid in a role that demanded he take on a different persona each time he went undercover. One of the more memorable ones was the gravel-voiced cell phone trafficker that romanced the phishing criminal queen. In the final episodes, however, for no apparent reason, this "I'm Batman" impression was put back in use and it was sorely out of place.