Here are the premieres to pencil in for this week: Noh Hee-kyung’s new human drama Live is on its way this weekend to fill the slot that Hwayugi just vacated on tvN, and OCN has scheduled That Man Oh-soo in its newer Monday-Tuesday drama slot, which is becoming an unofficial fantasy romance time slot for them (Longing Heart and Meloholic came before it).
That Man Oh-soo
Time slot: Monday & Tuesday
Broadcaster: OCN
Genre: Fantasy romance
Episode count: 16
Reasons to watch: Kim So-eun is the only draw for me here, but she’s a pretty big one, because she’s so adorable and great in everything. She stars in this light fantasy romance as a police officer who stumbles through life and can’t make heads or tails of love, and meets her match in the completely opposite hero, played by CN Blue’s Lee Jong-hyun. He’s an IT expert and barista who happens to also have the magical ability to see people’s love energies, and a dash of mystical powder served in his coffee can change the course of someone’s romance. Despite being a Cupid of sorts, he’s hyper-rational and unable to understand love, though that changes when he meets Kim So-eun’s character and grows jealous when her childhood first love re-enters the picture. You had me at jealousy. Who doesn’t like a good love triangle with two cute boys and a little magic dust thrown in?
Live
Time slot: Saturday & Sunday
Broadcaster: tvN
Genre: Workplace human drama
Episode count: 16
Reasons to watch: Star writer Noh Hee-kyung is back together with PD Kim Kyu-tae for their fifth drama together after It’s Okay It’s Love, That Winter The Wind Blows, Padam Padam, and The World They Live In, and this time they’re going for a slightly lighter workplace drama set in a police station. I say slightly lighter because I’m expecting the comedy in this drama to be amusing foibles on the job at most, which will then somehow bring us to tears and wring our hearts out by each hour’s end. It is Noh Hee-kyung, after all. Live stars the delightful Jung Yumi and Lee Kwang-soo as ordinary police officers just struggling to do their best, and the drama aims to tell the human stories of cops as hardworking civil servants, rather than focus on crime-solving like most police procedurals do. It doesn’t have a catchy premise, but I’m pretty sure that with this cast and production crew, you don’t really need one.