Unusually, I didn’t just stumble across my most recent K-drama, it was recommended by a friend. Marry My Husband (tvN 2024) is brand new to Amazon Prime and it’s a typical K-drama blend of genres. In this case, it’s a mix of saccharine romance, light sci-fi, crime thriller and workplace drama.
As is often the case, it’s impossible to explain the overall premise of this series without completely spoiling the plot of the first episode, so I will do my best and then give a big fat spoiler warning before I get into it.
When we meet Kang Ji-won (Park Min-young) she is an ordinary woman in her early 40s with gastric cancer and a mid-level corporate job at U&K Food. After almost 10 years of financially supporting her useless husband Park Min-hwan (Lee Yi-kyung from Descendants of the Sun) Ji-won has just discovered he is having an affair with her best friend Jeong Su-min (Song Ha-yoon). It is peak sad melodrama.
Then there is a major plot flip and it all lightens up. There’s a comically terrible boss, multiple love triangles, a very bitchy high school reunion and a lot of lies are told – some more transparent than others. Marry My Husband goes through a few stages, ramping up gradually from office politics to action thriller.
The second lead of this show is Yoo Ji-hyuk (Na In-woo) – a senior manager at U&K, grandson and heir of the CEO. He steps in to help Ji-won reset her life and quickly proves himself a better match for her than the terrible Min-hwan. I found In-woo a little wooden but he does have a good line in adoring gazes.
There are some great supporting characters in this. They include Yang Ju-ran (Gong Min-jeung), Ji-won’s colleague who has an eerily parallel life to her and who gets a nice development from quiet and mousy to…I guess slightly less so? Baek Eun-ho (Lee Gi-kwang from K-pop group Beast) is a handsome, sweet high school classmate of Ji-won’s who is now a successful chef and of course has secretly pined for her since school. And my favourite is Yoo Hui-yeon (Choi Gyu-ri), a junior colleague of Ji-won who is always cheerful and bubbly but in an adorable, non-annoying, way.
I’d like to dig into some specific behaviours but that means it’s spoiler time. I will only spoil the first two episodes (there are 16 in total).
*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***
So the big twist in episode one is that Ji-won is murdered by Min-hwan and Su-min in 2023…then she wakes up and it’s 10 years earlier and she’s reliving her own life from 2013. Of course, now she knows all about Min-hwan and Su-min’s lies and doesn’t want to repeat the life that ended miserably. But a few small incidents suggest that her fate has to still happen…to someone. And so begins her campaign to get Su-min to marry her husband.
There are some uncomfortable moments in the early episodes. Min-hwan is not just a cheat and a sponge, he is also abusive. For reasons I couldn’t quite follow, Ji-won decides to stay with him until she is certain he and Su-min are involved, which means letting him shout at her and even hit her. And her intent to get revenge on Su-min initially seems almost cruel – after all, in this timeline Su-min hasn’t yet committed murder and appears to be an eagerly attentive friend.
Su-min’s reinvention of herself is pretty great. She takes charge of her life, making sure she gets recognition when she deserves it. And she makes much better friends second time around. Her going from frumpy to glamorous was a little unnecessary but does help delineate the two timelines. There are of course lots of flashbacks – this is a K-drama – but in this case, they are to Su-min’s original timeline, not to previous episodes (or 10 minutes earlier in the same episode), for the most part.
*** END SPOILERS ***
Overall I enjoyed this show. It’s not my favourite K-drama but it definitely delivered on the compulsive viewing and sweet romance stakes.
The post K-drama review: Marry My Husband first appeared on Nose in a book.
