So far every shot of this drama looks like a postcard for a romantic getaway. Posters are out for the realistic romance melodrama Should We Kiss First, the new SBS series starring Kam Woo-sung (My Spring Days) and Kim Sun-ah (Woman of Dignity) as a man and woman who have hit middle age and think that every romantic cell in their bodies has disappeared. Obviously they’re in for a rude awakening when a kiss reignites that spark they’d thought was long dead.
The new drama from writer Bae Yoo-mi of I Have a Lover is about an average ajusshi and ajumma who have given up on the idea of passionate romance, only to end up finding true love in each other. The tagline on all the posters reads, “The story of a clumsy love between people who have lived a little.” I like the sentiment—been there, done that, still awkward at love. Aren’t we all?
Kam Woo-sung stars as a producer at an advertising agency who’s considered a dinosaur not even worth listening to. He’s been a failure at love his entire life, but his one fear is dying alone. Kim Sun-ah plays a flight attendant who gave up on love and happiness after she lost her daughter. It seems like a typical setup for a healing drama, but here the strength lies in two veteran actors who can carry all those emotional layers.
In the newest teaser, the leads take turns asking over and over if they don’t remember each other, and Kim Sun-ah decides that Kam Woo-sung is some kind of pervert. She confesses drunkenly that she hasn’t smiled in ten years, and he says in turn that they’re headed for the same destination. She asks, “Am I a good memory to you, or a bad one?”
The first teaser below was released a few weeks ago and has the leads narrating how they feared thirty at twenty, and forty at thirty, fifty at forty, and will probably continue to do so until they die. They start out walking through the same spaces separately, but meet in the woods where it ends, appropriately, with a kiss. Kim Sun-ah says in voiceover, “The love that I thought was over has begun again. The words that gave me breath: ‘Should we kiss first?’”
Should We Kiss First airs on Mondays and Tuesdays following Mysterious Il-seung, and premieres February 20 on SBS.
