[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Tomorrow Boy"

Tae-pyeong (played by Cha Hak-yeon) is a high school student who is poor in possessions yet rich in spirit. The first couple of episodes chronically repeat this point, showing Tae-pyeong engaged in a variety of odd jobs while still taking time out of his day to do typically heroic stuff whenever the opportunity arises. It is through such noble virtue that Tae-pyeong meets Ah-ra (played by Kang Min-ah), a bored, lonely girl who ineffectually tries to get Tae-pyeong to pay attention to her.

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The most interesting part of "Tomorrow Boy" is how it blends various tropes around. Here the handsome kind-hearted young man is poor rather than rich, and it's the female love interest who has to take all of the initiative. That's really about the full extent of it though- as a five episode web drama "Tomorrow Boy" is about the same length as a drama special, or a rather short movie, and there's not much more to the project than what we see at first glance.

The bare bones simplicity of the story is most obvious in the previews, which tend to spoil everything that happens in the next episode. This gets to be quite silly by the end. The final preview simply lays out every single plot point in the final episode, such that all we're really seeing is an extended version of the preview. Even the ending is pretty comically chaste, with a punchline that went over my head as well as Ah-ra's.

For all this lack of ambition, "Tomorrow Boy" does have its positive points- mainly just that the story as a whole is so condensed. With something like "The Heirs", it's easy to get overly invested and angry about failed potential. But being so short and to the point "Tomorrow Boy" never gets that far. Jokes about Tae-pyeong's resume never really get old because the drama's too short to overstay its welcome. While Nam-soo (played by Yeo Woon) barely gets any character development at all, we know the type, so why belabor the point?

Besides all that "Tomorrow Boy" also has that most important of factors when it comes to a high school romantic comedy- chemistry. Cha Hak-yeon does his very best to effectively impersonate a boy who's intentionally coquettishly ignoring Ah-ra unless he can get her to help him work, and Kang Min-ah is very good at being annoyed at his behavior without explaining why. Of course none of that really happens until the third episode but hey, the set-up is cute enough too.

Review by William Schwartz

"Tomorrow Boy" is directed by Jang Eui-soon and Park Seon-jae-I, written by Park Seon-jae-I and features Cha Hak-yeon, Kang Min-ah, Yeo Woon, Moon Ji-in, Jeon In-taek and Kim Jin-geun