It’s here! It’s fun, it’s mysterious, it’s oh so pretty — My Lovely Liar is off to a strong start with instantly likeable characters and an intriguing story about a human lie detector and a man harboring a dark secret. Deftly balancing humor and heart, these first couple of hours just seem to fly by.
EPISODES 1-2
When we first meet our heroine, MOK SOL-HEE (Kim So-hyun), she’s in the early days of her career as the “Liar Hunter”: a human lie detector for hire. As such, she sniffs out the traitor among a gang boss’s henchmen — and it’s not one of the guys he’s got dangling over the side of an abandoned building. Sol-hee convinces the boss to at least spare the traitor’s life, so naturally said traitor comes after her for revenge.
Sol-hee flees and hops on the next bus to Seoul, which is inconveniently delayed by a disruption involving another passenger who’s accused of cheating on his ex-girlfriend who has gone missing. He insists he didn’t, and Sol-hee stands up for him — she knows he’s telling the truth, and anyway she needs the bus to move now so she can escape.
Then we jump ahead five years to the present day. Sol-hee has expanded her practice and her wealth. She now runs a “Tarot Café” with a couple of employees. It’s the same kind of lie-hunting work, but involves an even bigger paycheck and often a bit of acting. Like posing as a wealthy woman’s cousin to ascertain whether her young lover is honest or a gold digger (he’s cheating with the maid, and it’s a fabulously entertaining cameo by Kim Sun-young and Lee Tae-sun that also demonstrates how people can confuse Sol-hee’s powers by lying through omission).
Officially, Sol-hee claims she got her powers via a shamanistic ritual. In actuality, her mother prayed to every deity she could think of while pregnant, and presumably at least one of them answered. But whatever the source, hearing someone lie sets off literal alarm bells in Sol-hee’s eardrums. Small wonder she avoids having much of a social life.
As for the guy from the bus, he’s now known as award-winning composer KIM DO-HA (Hwang Min-hyun), but his name and music are pretty much all people know about him. He never leaves the house without a mask, never makes public appearances, and only communicates with a select few individuals. As a result, there are wild speculations about a double life (and now I’m going to need a show with Min-hyun as an actual secret agent, please and thank you).
Do-ha’s only friends are singer SHA-ON (Lee Si-woo), who’d like to be much more than friends, and JO DEUK-CHAN (Yoon Ji-on), CEO of the entertainment company Sha-on is signed to. Troubles arise for the trio when Sha-on is photographed outside Do-ha’s apartment complex. She was there to drop off his Best Composer trophy, but it’s instantly spun into a dating scandal. Deuk-chan provides Do-ha with an out of the way vacation home to crash in for a while, not-so-secretly hoping the fresh air and privacy will coax Do-ha out of his shell.
The thing is, Do-ha has good reason for his reclusive habits. The ex-girlfriend who disappeared has never been found, and Do-ha was arrested on murder charges, which ultimately fell through for lack of evidence — but not before Do-ha was thoroughly traumatized by the experience and stabbed in the back by the missing girl’s brother. We don’t know exactly what happened that fateful day on the beach, but Do-ha still suffers blood-soaked nightmares about it, and even his mother seems to harbor doubts about his innocence.
The missing girl’s brother, on the other hand, has zero doubts. He’s spent the past five years impersonating police officers to get his hands on the case files, determined to hunt Do-ha down. His arrest finally gives us one tiny glimpse of Seo Ji-hoon as police officer LEE KANG-MIN, who’s sympathetic toward the brother’s grief, but firm about the limits of the law.
Do-ha’s new neighborhood comes with pros and cons. On the first night, Do-ha is mistaken for a local rapist because of his all-black outfit and late-night walks. Fortunately for him, though, this is Sol-hee’s neighborhood, and she quickly identifies the actual offender. Recognizing her catchphrase (“If I say it’s so, it is”), Do-ha realizes she’s the same girl who defended him on the bus.
Even better, it turns out they’re next-door neighbors here. They also happen to be superfans of rival soccer teams, leading to an adorable sequence where they’re both up at 3 a.m. alternating cheering and groaning on opposite sides of the wall, occasionally directing their voices at each other rather than their respective screens.
Not long after Do-ha moves, another composer uses Sha-on’s scandal to blackmail Deuk-chan into arranging a meeting between him and Do-ha. He’s convinced Do-ha plagiarized his song, so he hires Sol-hee to hide in an adjoining room and signal whether Do-ha tells the truth. To his fury, Do-ha doesn’t lie even once, and hasn’t even heard the song in question.
Sol-hee’s disgust with the composer skyrockets as he pressures Do-ha into drinking and it becomes clear that he’s the actual plagiarizer. The final straw is when he sprays Do-ha with soda as an excuse to sneak a photo of Do-ha’s face. Sol-hee quickly snaps a photo with her own phone so the sound will warn Do-ha of the composer’s true intentions.
Since she’s only ever seen him masked and casually dressed, Sol-hee doesn’t realize who Do-ha is until she comes home to find him drunk out of his wits outside their apartment building. Even though she’s just angrily watched someone else repeatedly violate Do-ha’s boundaries — not to mention kicked her own bodyguard out of the car for trying to follow Do-ha and lying about it — she can’t resist unmasking him, and he wakes up just as she does.
I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed with Sol-hee for removing Do-ha’s mask without his consent, but I loved pretty much everything else about this premiere. We’ve had lots of K-dramas about people with special abilities working as con artists to various degrees of moral grayness, and in some ways that’s what Sol-hee’s job feels like. But she’s actually more of an anti-con-artist, catching people in their lies and stopping them from taking advantage of others.
And then there’s Do-ha, who gives off “way too innocent for his own good” vibes, but has a lot more to him than meets the eye. I died laughing when the girl at the jazz bar took off his sunglasses and he immediately whipped out a backup pair. I don’t believe he murdered his ex, though I like that there’s just enough room for a smidgen of doubt. And while something awful definitely happened on that beach, I just want him to always be surrounded by good, caring people like Deuk-chan, that jazz bar drummer, and Sol-hee, who stands up for him when no one else will listen.
But if I weren’t already in love with the characters and the way their stories are becoming intertwined, I might just be hooked on this show for the visuals alone. And I don’t only mean the cast — the contrast of warm and cool colors is just gorgeous. If the rest of the show follows this week’s lead, I think we’re in for an enthralling good time.