It's alright, but there are annoyances.

The Good
⌲ There are some extremely touching emotional moments.
⌲ The main characters were excellent. (ML, FL + 3 ghosts)
⌲ Jin Ki Joo is really awesome in this, what's up with all the hate???
⌲ Park Hae Jin was quite alright too, he has improved A LOT since My Lover From the Star.
⌲ The romance is pretty good, albeit way too slow.
⌲ The ghost related side stories, crime solving (not quite as good as in Goblin, but far above average)
⌲ The comedy
⌲ The second couple was quite fun, though they had very little screen time, or plot significance.

The Average
⌲ The love triangle (considering all the sageuk vibes, this was quite tolerable)
⌲ The show has many extremely silly moments. (some of them were quite out of place)
⌲ The plot
⌲ The ending (the five minute long happy ending does not completely justify the entire final episode and it's just too fantastical, even for a kdrama)
⌲ The "general"

The Bad
⌲ The directing is strange in many ways. (Mystic Pop Up Bar is from the same writer & has a similar plot, but the contrast is quite large in this regard)
⌲ The drama is too sageuk-like for contemporary fantasy. (and I'm not talking about the S. flashbacks)
⌲ The 90 minute long sageuk flashback
⌲ The Saesang fandom in the three kingdom era
⌲ The mandatory noble idiocy breakup x2 (once in the long flashback, once in the final episode that lasted for 5 minutes)
⌲ The 2d villains are less than whelming & super stereotypical

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The Good:
⌲ The documentary concept
⌲ The sequencing of the major plot points (first half is more melo, the second half more romcom)
⌲ The docu flashback scenes are the best.
⌲ The romance, mostly (It's way more magical in Hogu's Love)
⌲ The chemistry between the two leads
⌲ The brilliant acting (If ML did variety, he could dethrone YJS in a few weeks & the FL is also incredible)
⌲ FL's cute chubby face
⌲ The bickering
⌲ The weak love triangles
⌲ The last 5 minutes of the drama (Had they spent 1-2 episodes on that 3rd documentary, I would have given the drama a 10/10 rating for sure, flaws be damned.)
⌲ The mild melancholia
⌲ The visuals
⌲ Despite all the stupid foreshadowing the leads stay together after they start dating again.
⌲ The rewatch value should be excellent with some FW buttoning.
⌲ The low key good OST

The Neutral:
⌲ NJ (I'm suspecting the actress was portraying Sulli & that made me quite sad)
⌲ Let's be friends! (Horrible plot device, but the ensuing romcom moments were good)
⌲ There were some well acted, but underutilized supporting characters.

The Bad:
⌲ The writing is not coherent, this is especially obvious if binge watching. (yay live filming)
⌲ The reasons for the initial breakup (I would have accepted "pride", but they just had to put a noble reason spin on it)
⌲ The second ML's character feels misplaced & pointless. (Could have FW buttoned all his scenes for more enjoyment)
⌲ The last 3-4 episodes were sullied by the entire "French Architect School" plot. (Woong of all people is such a genius that he has become an architect/engineer in 2-3 years and then he went back to Korea to continue drawing for galleries and whatnot)
⌲ The story drags in the middle. (The writer pulled the breaks on romantic progress in jarring ways, because 16 episodes..)
⌲ The final episode is weak, sans the last 5 minutes. (It's not ruining anything, it's just whelming)
⌲ The audio quality is trash, don't bother with those planar headphones! (were all microphones bought at the 1$ store, then again even some of the songs sound horrifyingly low-fi, while some others are excellent)



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I strongly recommend watching https://youtu.be/yxGomiIUN8s AFTER you are done with the drama. (it's only 2 minutes long)

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I enjoyed the comedy and some of the fluffier scenes and the leads formed a reasonably good pairing, but I found the drama quite frustrating. Usually if the romance is on point & I get enough sugar I can be quite forgiving when it comes to bad writing, however the annoyances should be at least below a certain level! Tiger and Rose is unfortunately full of majorly annoying plotlines, situations and events and the writing is just extremely juvenile. None of the major characters have a consistent personality, there were way too many arbitrary happenings & actions without an acceptable motive. Perhaps binge watching made it worse, because I'm sure I would have largely forgotten about much of the conflicting dialog, had I only watched 1-2 episodes a week, but still I felt quite a few things were just intelligence insulting.

Even if I begrudgingly accept, that due to the "drama within a drama" setting, the regular cast were just sillier than normal, at least the FL should have been somewhat sane, right? Chen Qian Qian however is perhaps the dumbest, most unreasonable FL character that I have seen in a cdrama thus far.

I cannot help but compare this show to Mr. Queen. That show also had quite a few annoyances if I want to be entirely honest, but it was not nearly as infuriating as this one and also Mr. Queen is just HUGELY funnier and everything is just massively better, from the production quality to acting performances, the OST etc.. Oh wait, never mind, the ending is perhaps even worse in Mr. Queen, I forgot about that for a second!

I sense that censorship made a significant impact in this drama. That's probably the main cause behind the horrid ending, which follows the same template as in The Day of Becoming You.

Lusi seems like a very talented actress, she's totally romcom queen material. This drama and Dating in the Kitchen were just a waste of her talent in my opinion.

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I had a pretty good time up until around episode 12. I mean sure the writing is pretty sloppy throughout, but the variety show concept and the fluff were nice. The leads had reasonable chemistry and quite a few cute scenes.
The second lead stories were annoying, but luckily I found them easily skippable.

Chan Sung as a cartoon villain did not work, then again can I really blame him under performing, when it was such a badly written character?

Ultimately why I decided to rate this show at 6/10 is due to the last two episodes. This is supposed to be a preproduced show, but the writing resembled live writing during the last 2 hours, you know when the writers keep stumbling trying to save the bad ratings or at least make a token effort.. People in the comment section here praised the drama for not breaking up the main couple, well I'm not sure if I can agree with them. Episode 15's script at times made me feel like they were separated for like 2 years, then after a short reunion they went into another 3 months of pseudo separation in the final episode. Perhaps it's just kdrama fatigue, but the separation(s) made unusually little sense to me, even if I compare this drama to something like This is My First Life. So yeah, the 10 minutes of happy ending before the rolling credits did not alleviate the bad taste in my mouth.

I cannot stress enough how good the variety show with the antifan idea is, unfortunately they did not expand on that enough. It could have been something really great, oh well..

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Put Your Head on My Shoulder 2, the slightly inferior sequel!

I did not think that a Xing Fei + Tang Xiao Tian pairing could work, but this drama proves my preconceptions wrong. Daddi's (Chinese actors and their self chosen English? names, gawd) visuals have been significantly upgraded, perhaps he has gotten a bit more mature too in the past 2 years. Anyway the leads had great chemistry and their romance really delivered.
I always liked fluffy romcoms with weak love triangles and this one is right up my alley. I've been more than sufficiently entertained really.

Comparing this drama with Put Your Head on My Shoulder makes a lot of sense. Not only because of the lead actors' reunion, but also because the plot structure of the two dramas is strikingly similar, or at the very least the way the love triangle situation is handled is almost the same. (One weak triangle in the early episodes and another in the second half, both easily resolved) MLH has two big shortcomings in this comparison. Firstly the setting is much worse, the whole hospital and law firm environment leads to a few minor annoyances, annoyances the other drama did not have. Secondly MLH is 6 episodes longer & in my opinion it's just about 6 episodes too long. There is quite a bit of repetition & artificially stalled progress between episodes 16 & 26. Also the ending episodes were not nearly as good, they weren't bad or anything, but drama faded into boredom a little bit.

The second leads had decent chemistry too, but I found their story somewhat unnatural. Also their conclusion is lacking. So much effort has been spent to explain their backstory in the early episodes, how they wanted to stand on their own feet etc, but ultimately besides them ending up together their story feels somewhat unfinished. What did they end up doing with their lives? Sure they did the store renovation, but then fastforward a few scenes and they are traveling around the world spending the money of their parents!? *shrugs*

I think this drama is the second one I've seen just THIS MONTH, that featured volunteer doctors visiting the site of a major earthquake, the surgery during an aftershock scene is also something both dramas had in common...

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Overall this is still an above average cdrama in the fluffy romcom category. There are no breakups, no forced separation and all conflicts and the complications are easily resolved, the OTP romance is great too.. 8/10 seems fair, I might even do a rewatch someday.
With that said, if you have not yet seen Put Your Head on My Shoulder, you should start with that drama first.


edit: I did a rewatch. I still enjoyed the first half a lot, but the second half was even more of a letdown than I remembered. (Way too dragged out, annoying second couple relationship and quite a bit of boredom) Adjusting the score to 7,5.

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This drama is pretty difficult to grade. On one hand it's very unique, with a heartwarming story, there is no love triangle and there are quite a few brilliant moments in the drama. On the other hand the chain of misunderstandings is just too much, borderline makjang-ish. Decided to give it an 8, because it's just too awesome and memorable for anything less.

UEE was incredible as Do Hee, I don't understand what all the hate is about, I could not imagine anyone doing a better job in this role. Choi Woo Shik was surprisingly great as well, though I only knew him from Fight for My Way. They had great chemistry too. The rest of the cast were also decent, the casting director did a great job.

The OTP's romance is really on point, I just wish they would have foregone the mandatory breakup in ep14, at least the ending was great, a really satisfying happy ending. (I don't care much about the result of that trial)

As for the second leads I'm on the fence about their relationship. For starters I did not like the second ML's character and it took 16 episodes to resolve their principal misunderstanding. At least the confusion about his sexual identity was kind of amusing.

One thing I noticed is that in the early episodes Hogoo's shenanigans caused me a lot of secondary embarrassment, I felt like he is mentally challenged. However in the second half his character was adjusted to become much more capable and attractive. Natural character development cannot possibly be held accountable for this upgrade.

The semi animated opening credits were awesome.

edit:
I've increased the score to 9, because I keep thinking about the drama & feel a strong urge to start a rewatch session already only after a few days..

edit2 (1 year later):
Changed it again to 10, the reason being that the romance is just so incredible, that the flaws are easy to ignore. There are very few dramas out there that give me the same feels.

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I've read the manwha "Shall We Have Dinner Tonight?" even before my kdrama addiction has started. So I was kind of hyped about this drama. Also Before Sunset is like one of my favorite movies of all time & I'm bringing this up, because the manwha reminded me of that quite a bit. I'm saying it confidently that the writers have butchered the magic of the original. The witty dialog & the bonding over food is almost completely missing from the drama. What's funny though that I did not even mind while watching the first half. Episodes 1-9~ were very entertaining for me with a lot of charm, it felt like I was watching a light hearted romcom, where even the exes were interesting in their own way. I hate love triangles, but while watching those early episodes I thought that with a story sequenced like this having more aggressive secondary love interests was perfectly fine.
Unfortunately the ratings were low & as customary with live filming, major changes were made. There are about 3 episodes where the focus is completely on Jung Jae Hyuk's (second ML)'s mental illness & not only that but our FL is also doing some incredibly stupid and frustrating things. Honestly at times I felt that the writer was just cruel to the audience.

The entire cast was great, perhaps the ML's performance is the weakest link. The OST is extremely repetitive, there was an episode where the the "Mokja nyan nyan" song was played like 6-7 times. The visuals were great, but nowadays that's true for all kdramas..

My suggestion is to keep watching until episode 11 & then just skip to episode 14 for the best experience.

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This is obviously very good, so the 8.5 rating is definitely justified, having seen the other reviews here all the good points were already mentioned, so I'll just focus on what I did not like.

The OST is just as repetitive as in Pretty Noona, yes it's very good, but there are only like 5 songs & there are episodes where the "seasons change" song plays more than 4 times.
Pretty Noona has become terrible after the midpoint, here the start is not quite as explosive, but still very good and the show never becomes terrible, but there is a lot of forced drama in the second half that I did not like. Especially episodes 14-15(28-30 in the stupid numbering system) were quite eyebrow raising at times. Having a second male lead like this is fine for maybe 2-3 episodes, but for 16 it's just ridiculous, at least this was handled better in Pretty Noona. People talk about how real this show feels, but this character is completely immersion breaking & the same is also true for how Jeong-in interacts with him.
From a Korean viewer's standpoint this show is probably quite progressive, but frankly I don't like it when the dark side of Confucianism is showcased this much. (parents forcing their will upon their grownup kids , the barbaric Korean divorce law and Korean social stigmas) Also there were some acting hiccups here and there, overall the acting performances were incredibly good for the most part, but I felt that nearing the end the actors have ng-ed scenes at times, but the director just let it go for ehm reasons, but I realize that this could be considered nitpicking. The flow of the story & character progression have some inconsistencies , I sense that there were some script rewrites & character micro adjustments, I feel that I would not have noticed much, have I not been watching all episodes over the course of 3 days.


edit: I was bored and rewatched the show.
I was impressed by the early episodes a lot more than the first time around. They way how fate and extreme attraction is brought to life in this show is just beautiful and there were just so many great conversations & touching scenes all the way to the end.

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It's difficult to review this drama, because the story/writing is just abysmal, but despite that there are some amazing things in it too. Many comments talk about Hwang JungEum being terrible in this, personally I think that this is the role that fit her the most out of all the roles that she had, her acting was phenomenal, it's not her fault that she had to portray a superstitious nutjob idiot of a woman. Ryu Junyol himself is also a nice surprise, he was so much more interesting in this one than in R1988. (I never understood why everyone wanted him to be main character in 88) Their chemistry was amazing. I liked pretty much all the side characters too, the exception being Gary Choi. What a super annoying male second lead he was..

To elaborate more on the bad writing. After enjoying the first 5-6 episodes the drama really started to drag & the stupid triangle started to annoy me quite a bit and then finally when all that was resolved following just one fuzzy episode everything went to shit as usual in many kdramas. I mean good God, that fortune teller just had to ruin everything. The ending is a cliche fest, forced separation into time skip into a rushed reconciliation.

I could nitpick about inconsequential things too such as how Tennis players don't have agencies, but rather they employ a crew, or an agent if they have to. Tennis is not the SK entertainment industry. Then there is the blonde Novak Djokovic...
There is also the recurring theme of stealing games/code pre-release. There are very good reasons why this doesn't happen, especially how it went down the second time around. Then again these I could easily forgive..

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Top tier tomance, but the rest is increasingly not great nearing the finale.

The romance in this one is about as good as it can get within the constraints of Chinese TV. The leads not only have great chemistry with each other, but the romantic plot flows very nicely and realistically throughout the entire show. There are no love triangles or needless complications either & yet they have so many touching and emotional scenes, it's just insane!

The drama is not just romance though, there is plenty of billiards related content. In the early episodes I was amazed by the camerawork & by all the effort taking & recording these shots must've taken. Though the games themselves were really really strange to my non-expert eyes. (but I have seen snooker played at the highest level & Ronnie O'Sullivan would be jealous of what's happening on screen in this show)

The first thing I disliked in this drama is fake Finland. Even if we ignore the strategically inserted homeless guys the whole environment is incredibly weird. To me it feels like the the studio shipped all the blonde white actors -based in China- to Finland (assuming they filmed there, I think so~) to act in this show. To add insult to injury the dubbed English is weird too, not because it's bad like in Kdramas, but rather educated Chinese dubbing actors just cannot sell this, every time a white guy opens their mouth on this show it sounds incredibly fake. (Though maybe I'm overreacting. It's just a Finland like imaginary country, not Finland after all.)

The bigger problem I had with this is that the final 7 or so episodes are incredibly boring. The romance in them is still fun, but the focus shifts to various educational topics involving sports, patriotism & self improvement. The sports drama parts, games played were all extremely skippable in this period as well. Having only this much in a 30 episode cdrama would be quite normal in the current era, but pushing most of it into the final episodes made it very difficult for me to finish the drama.
Despite how much I enjoyed at least 2/3rds of this, it's difficult for me to rate this very highly, since it was really and I mean REALLY difficult to reach the finale.

If you are reading this review before watching the show, my suggestion for you would be that after ep20 as soon as you start feeling bored, just straight up jump to the final episode.



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Now that I think about it, I also find it odd that the Cousin had a distinct second couple plot, but the creators forgot to wrap that up.

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Typically I don't like watching high school cdramas, because censorship makes it near impossible to portray a reasonable romantic story in them and also they often have content involving parents & teachers that I abhor.
This drama is a standout in in this genre in the sense, that they've shown innocent but very sweet high school dating. At times I was wondering how this passed censorship. Then later on ML's momster came and forced a 1 year separation, so everyone could focus on their studies & then I thought "okay, so that's how". There were also various moments in the drama, when the leads were vehemently denying their romantic involvement with each other, but it was never in doubt. It was very strongly implied that they knew each other's feelings and they did everything dating teens would do, other than skinship that is.
(This is the second crama I've seen that is like this, the other one was 'Meeting You')

Basically the show can be split into three parts.
1) The kids getting to know each other. (first 5-9 ep)
2) The friend group of 5 enjoying their best life. (this is very close to 10/10 amazing)
3) College, young adult life (last 6-7 ep)

I would say 1) is not great, initially I found the show to be the most typical Chinese high school drama I have ever seen. I was fully prepared to drop it, but I did not really have anything else better lined up & I needed something to watch during my late night workout sessions.. Upon reaching 2) I was very surprised, suddenly everything started working for me and it felt like I'm watching a different show, where EVERYTHING is better, including the acting, the editing and even the background music inserts. In fact episode 10 is one of the best cdrama episodes I have ever seen, it was absolutely magical.
After the forced separation we quickly transitioned to college life & adult dating. While I tend to enjoy a simple, fluffy and complication-free happy ending, I felt 3) to be lackluster in many ways. I really liked the second couple & they barely had scenes there. Much of the non romantic plot earlier was involving ML's brother & momster. FL did not meet ML's mom during the adult part of the show, at least other than us seeing the mom sitting there at their wedding there has not been anything else. The brother also only had like one line during the wedding, would have been nice to see what happened to the genius. Also there were at least two occasions when I felt the writer set up some big cathartic faceslap moments and the then things just fizzled out, not cool! Give me my loud slap! To sum it up, in 3) we just went through the motions without enough emotional impact. (well there was a little of that in the finale, maybe)

Anyway despite the negative points this one is absolutely worth watching, perhaps even just for the bromances, but to me 'A Love So Beautiful' -despite that annoying Wu Busong and the breakup- is a much better cdrama that is largely similar to this one, but feels far better overall. It's better acted, has several really epic moments, the final episodes are very satisfying and it's amazing from episode 1 onward etc etc.
Of course if I started to compare it to the best university/young adult cdramas then it would just fall short.

TLDR: It's the second best high school cdrama I've seen, but usually high school cdramas suck, so 8/10.

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I was a bit disappointed at first, I found the first 5 episodes a bit boring . However by the time we reached episode 10 I was over that and I started to dread the moment of the inevitable reveal, but I was pleasantly surprised when that moment came (very late in the series), because the revelation drama/conflict had gotten resolved swiftly and the resolution was very beautiful and unexpected. Throughout the entire show I was waiting for various terrible things to happen, but they were only teased, none of them came to be. (such as extreme love triangle plots, forced separation, or strong rivalry induced melodrama) This is one of those shows that's about enjoying the journey, rather than anticipating the end. I really liked the character interactions, the comedy and the main leads had great chemistry, the entire cast was amazing really. Having watched Legend of the Blue Sea I kept thinking how much better Shin Hyesun could have been at being a hapless mermaid, I like Jun Jihyun as an actress, but that mermaid character was nearly identical to this 30 years old teen character, but it's blatantly obvious whom this role fit better.

The OST was awesome, not at Goblin levels, but not much worse really.

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While I somewhat enjoyed watching this, I don't think this is a good office drama. The show is presented in a sitcom format, but it lacks the intensity that a sitcom would need to keep the audience interested. There were many really boring episodes, the comedy is just not that great. While I liked the acting ensemble & also the couple, but outside of a few episodes there is really not all that much worth seeing. The romance between the leads is good, but just so little of it is shown.. I watched about 2-3 episodes of this every day after work & I fell asleep multiple times, if I'm watching something worthwhile that rarely if ever happens.

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A truly well executed time travel kdrama, way way above Twinkling Watermelon.

This is the best kdrama I've seen since a very long time. (probably since It's Okay to Not Be Okay)
The only serious problem I have with it is the villain's lack of personality/backstory and how they just dealt with him under 3 minutes in the finale. I could nitpick If I really wanted to, but I fail to see the point.
I always say that explaining the inner workings of time travel always ruins immersion in time travel shows, luckily in this one they have not even tried. (it's better to keep the unexplainable unexplained)

Everything else is pretty good, the cast is great, the chemistries are great. The romance is up there with the best, there are countless very fluffy and or very touching moments. Love triangle haters are safe to enjoy this as well, because the secondary love interest is weak like a straw. The ending is a banger too.

Anyway 9/10 seems fair to me. It's not perfect or anything, for example Someday or One Day is better in this genre, but I'm very happy that Korea can still deliver something of this caliber, since it's been so long..

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