Ooh, PD Kim Seok-yoon of the stylish, thoughtful dramas This Week My Wife Will Have an Affair and Awl is back with a new series for JTBC, a time-bending romance called Dazzling. The drama is courting Han Ji-min (Familiar Wife) and Nam Joo-hyuk (Bride of the Water God 2017) to headline, and both actors are considering favorably for now.
The drama is described as a fantasy romance, and it deals with age-swapping and time-bending—something Han Ji-min is intimately familiar with in her current drama, where she plays past and present versions of her character in multiple timelines. This new series will be about a 25-year-old woman who rapidly ages and ends up a 70-year-old on the outside, while remaining a young woman on the inside. It’s a little bit like Thirty But Seventeen the extreme version, or the bizarro-world version of Miss Granny.
Everyone’s favorite mom/grandma Kim Hye-ja (Dear My Friends) has been offered the role of the young heroine trapped in an aging woman’s body, which already has me excited for what’s to come. Can’t you just imagine her swooning like a schoolgirl over Nam Joo-hyuk? Her casting does make me wonder if the heroine will spend a good deal of time as her older self, which could be the case given the premise.
The story is about how people use the time allotted to them in life, illustrated in two extremes by a young woman who accidentally loses all of her time and a young man who wastes away his time and chooses to live apathetically. The heroine by chance gains the ability to manipulate time, though perhaps not very well, because she ends up mistakenly in her twilight years. The character is described as bright, bold, and immature, even for her original age. Comedic fodder for days, this setup. I love it. I’m pretty much good with anyone being cast as the youngs in this thing as long as they can get Kim Hye-ja onboard!
Dazzling is aiming for a January 2019 broadcast.