Editor’s Note: After a lot of Beanie interest in space to chat about KBS’s family weekender dramas, we are trying out a new thing: Drama Highlights. Each week we will post a thread for the new episodes, and mention a few plot points — be it high points, low points, or terribly mediocre points. Please join us in the comments! If interest remains high, we will continue through the drama’s 50-episode run.
Welcome to Live Your Own Life — a veritable makjang explosion where we get kidnapping, murderous threats, a fight involving veggie and mackerel slapping, one arrest, a hospitalization, debt collecting, and more all in the first week. If it’s this wild already, I can’t wait to see where we’re headed. This will either be a makjang delight or a trainwreck.
We’ve got our titular heroine LEE HYO-SHIM (UEE), the kind of woman who willingly rises before dawn and runs to her job as a gym trainer with a smile on her face. Her favorite thing? Exercising. Her least favorite thing? Being her messy, self-absorbed, ungrateful family’s fixer and bank. But her luck might be about to turn around. She gets her very own meet-cute with chaebol orphan KANG TAE-HO (Ha Joon) who has recently returned to Korea. They literally run into each other while, well, running since he is also a huge fan of running in the dark. He acts like an entitled jerk and she’s a spitfire, so this doesn’t go well. But surprise, surprise, she ends up being his new trainer when he becomes a member of her gym. Looks like we’re on the enemies-to-lovers train.
Hyo-shim’s family is your typical weekender fare with everyone being selfish and taking advantage of her, but Tae-ho’s family is WILD. His aunt JANG SOOK-HYANG (Lee Whee-hyang) is a cartoonish villain who stops at nothing to make her husband the chairman of Taesan Group. The woman has kept her mother-in-law locked up and drugged for three years, threatening to have her favorite grandson Tae-ho shot if she doesn’t comply. Besides being willing to murder her nephew, it also seems like Sook-hyang had her own son KANG TAE-MIN (Ko Joo-won) take the rap and serve prison time for his father so it wouldn’t impede his ascension to chairman. At this rate, I’m guessing she’s the one who took out Tae-ho’s parents. Is this woman a mob boss in hiding? At least halmeoni slipped drugs into her guards’ drinks and escaped… for now.