[HanCinema's Drama Review] "She Was Pretty" Episode 13

The first half of this episode is mostly just standard romantic comedy escapism fluff. Hye-jin and Seong-joon are cute together- full stop. There's all sorts of fun stuff here, but my favorite touch is how Hye-jin's upbeat attitude is mostly unchanged. It's just slightly more upbeat, so of course everyone notices the change. Seong-joon, as usual, does not give away anything with his stupidly stone cold face.

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The second half trends a little weaker, though, as "She Was Pretty" gets into actual plot. And now that the success or failure of the magazine is the closest the drama has to a conflict, the flaws are fairly obvious. Fashion magazines are, for all practical intents and purposes, giant advertising booklets for high-end products aimed at a semi-wealthy target audience. It is really hard for a fashion magazine, especially one with a brand name, to do so badly as to warrant complete cancellation. Logically speaking the threats against Seong-joon only make sense if the foreign corporate overlords are looking for a pretext to cancel Most for some ulterior motive.

Alas, "She Was Pretty" is not "Awl", so I very seriously doubt the drama is going to go into much exposition on this point. Not that it really matters, because the cute scenes remain very cute. Jung Da-bin, for example, has done very good work both as Hye-jin in flashback as well as Hye-jin's annoying present day sister. I almost didn't notice that both roles are being done by the same actress.

The rest of the supporting cast falls by the wayside. Now that there's no more romantic tension Ha-ri and Hyeok don't really have all that much more to do, which is disappointing. Ha-ri's role here just ends up being a summation of her character arc so far. And Hyeok's jokes, while stupid and funny, are now practically placeholders. There just doesn't seem to be much more forward movement anymore.

"She Was Pretty" is mostly coasting by on inertia at this point. The drama is just warm and fuzzy enough to not be disappointing, but writer Jo Seong-hee seems to be running out of ideas for interesting stuff that the characters can actually do. I'm more invested in the gold digger subplot than I probably should be simply because I'm curious to see how that's going to resolve. If Hye-jin and Seong-joon are going to stick together, they really need some kind of mutual goal to work forward to.

Review by William Schwartz

"She Was Pretty" is directed by Jeong Dae-yoon, written by Jo Seong-hee and features Hwang Jung-eum, Park Seo-joon, Go Joon-hee, Choi Si-won, Yoon Yoo-sun, Seo Jung-yeon and more.

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