Except for My Demon, these dramas aren’t new, but they’ve become our go-to whenever we want a perk-me-up, a distraction from the day’s bad blips, or simply for kilig. These dramas are timeless kilig—thanks to good story, hot chemistry of the lead pair, an engaging mix of drama/mystery and hilarity, a support cast that’s in perfect jibe with the leads.
Some friends we know have watched some of the series as many as…. a quite embarrassingly incredible number.
My Demon official poster
My Demon
2023
16 episodes
Starring: Song Kang, Kim Yoo Jung
Netflix
Jeong Guwon (Song Kang) has been living for hundreds of years as a demon (not in the strict Catholic sense, take note), whose mission up to this modern day (he’s the incredibly wealthy and enigmatic head of an arts foundation—that’s his earthly cover) is to pop up during a mortal’s final moment of despair and helplessness, to corner the mortal into selling his/her soul to him (yes, think Faust) when the time comes. A heartless, impersonal Guwon holds contracts due to expire on hapless humans practically every day.
Do Do Hee (Kim Yoo Jung) is the very intelligent and high-achieving daughter of a chaebol family. She wasn’t born into it. After her own parents died in a car accident in her childhood, she was adopted by its matriarch (played by veteran actress Kim Hae Sook of Hospital Playlist fame), the reason for which will be one of the story’s twists. She and the matriarch form a bond so affectionate and strong that it becomes the envy of the matriarch’s own spoiled-rotten children who now resent the fact that Do Hee stands to be the heir apparent.
How the paths of Do Hee and the demon Guwon cross becomes the thrill and hilarity of the first episodes. The story is romance fantasy that could have taxed your credulity but doesn’t, simply because the interaction between the young handsome couple is so engaging, so spontaneous that it makes us viewers suspend our disbelief. The story could have been downright incredible and silly, but the chemistry of the lead pair heats up the screen; it’s that credible. They could switch from romantic to funny, silly to intense, glamorous to clumsy. Their sheer good acting made netizens believe that the two are dating in real life.
By the way, the fashion styling is obviously intended to be the eye candy, aside from the couple’s good looks. (Right, how can you lose?)
After their clumsy chance meeting, the paths of the two become intertwined when Do Hee almost dies—early episode— and she begins to fear for her life. She comes in dire need of—don’t laugh, a bodyguard. The bored demon, reminded by his assistant about the movie Bodyguard (as in…. Kevin Costner)—that funny—accepts the job, simply because in a twist of fate, his tattoo, which is the source of his superhuman and demonic powers, has been transferred to Do Hee. Now he must be with her 24/7 to “charge,” like one does with a power bank.
What happens when the two are forced to co-exist, co-habitate, in fact—in Do Hee’s ritzy apartment— becomes most entertaining. The laughs are almost worthy of a sitcom. But it becomes suspenseful when Do Hee is named the successor of the matriarch, in her last will, inherits the business, and becomes the target of the chaebol siblings.
This is when the skeletons come tumbling out of the closet, including the cause of death of Do Hee’s biological parents. This is also when Song Kang, playing a demon who is all machismo and charm (did we say good looks?), unwittingly remembers his ancient past that turned him away from the faith and god (shown here holding court in a club). How the demon/bodyguard and the heiress, in time, prove their readiness to make the ultimate sacrifice for each other builds up to the cliffhanger—who should die, he or she?— you can’t turn off the remote.
After My Demon, Song Kang (whose Navillera was, to us, one of the best of 2021) is moving on to mandatory military enlistment.
Yet netizens still can’t move on from the Jeong Guwon-Do Hee love pair.
1% of Something official poster
1% of Something (or Something About 1%)
2016
16 episodes
Starring: Ha Seok Jin, Jeon So Min
Rakuten Viki
No wonder, we tell ourselves after watching this, eight years after its release (2016), our friend/TheDiarist.ph K-drama reviewer Winnie Velasquez continues to recommend this to friends. This series has timeless charm and kilig.
It was in this series that we discovered Ha Seok Jin, arguably one of Korea’s most intelligent and dynamic actors. In 2023, he won in Netflix’s reality show The Devil’s Plan, where he pitted mind power against Korea’s cream of the crop; the series introduced the actor as part of the minute percentage of Korea’s student population that made it to Seoul’s top university (he didn’t continue his Engineering course and instead, was reportedly sent by his father to enlist in the military early in his youth). Ha Seok Jin has very interesting vlogs, and Filipino fans might remember his early travel series, informative and interesting, on Cebu—he and his friends explored the province, from its scenic waterfalls to its food (The Friends in Cebu in YouTube).
Lee Jae In (Ha Seok Jin) is the apple of the eye of his grandfather, the patriarch of a conglomerate—but he prefers to keep his grandfather at arm’s length and to run his own hotel business instead. His grandfather wants a stable personal life for his temperamental grandson—so K-drama—but, and this is not-so-K-drama, instead of pairing him off with an heiress, he chooses a kind-hearted woman for him, who can mellow him down and point him to good values. Now where to find this woman?
By accident. Kim Da Hyun (Jeon So Min) is a preschool teacher who, one morning, is out gardening with her pupils when she hears a loud thump coming nearby. She rushes to the source and finds an old man unconscious, he must have slid down. She brings him to the hospital, and without knowing who he is (curiously, he has no ID card with him), watches over him, pays for his ER bills, and sends him off on the taxi. In gratitude he could only give her an apple—turns out, his memorial offering on the grave of his wife he was visiting when he accidentally fell down the slope. The old man—you guess it—is the patriarch (played with such wicked wisdom by veteran actor Joo Jin Mo of Now We Are Breaking Up, among other series), who lost no time in tracing the identity of the pretty, young good samaritan.
The grandfather then changes his will which he shoves down the throat of his grandson, the only bloodline heir. To an incredulous and rebelling grandson, he announces the strict condition of the will—he will inherit the conglomerate only if he is engaged to this young schoolteacher, whom he never even met. At least date her for three months, six months—the negotiation between the imperious grandfather and the shocked grandson goes.
The chaebol heir Lee Jae In visits the school to meet the teacher—a hilariously disastrous first meeting.
After a series of rejections—by both parties—the heir and the teacher decide to enter into a dating contract, mainly because teacher Kim Da Hyun, given her magnanimous heart, wants her preschool to have better facilities, which of course, the heir is just too glad to give. The teacher still has no idea who the grandfather is or why she deserves such ambiguous luck, while the chaebol heir hangs on to his suspicion that this pretty young thing must have seduced or tricked his grandfather into such an absurd decision. You stay to the end if only to find out how she’ll react once she finds out the old man’s identity.
The heir Lee Jae In has no choice but to do as the will dictates simply because there’s a threat—a cousin waiting in the wings to be a successor.
How the arrogant chaebol heir and the winsome teacher perform their “dating” duties, following a strict calendar—until they realize they can no longer live without each other—is the romantic comedy. It’s a romcom that could have fizzled out halfway into the series, but didn’t, mainly because Ha Seok Jin gives the role such machismo, sex appeal, and naughtiness. Their chemistry builds up because it’s obvious, each one knows how to play off the nuances of the other’s character: the heir’s mercurial temper to the teacher’s mature graciousness, his cunning to her naivete. It’s hilarious when, in a face-to-face meeting, he forces her to search him on the internet if only to validate who he is (names of his actress ex-es come out, of course). He and a winsome but naïve Jeon So Min are romantic, credibly romantic, and the good story (find out the meaning of 1% in a relationship) and script don’t hurt. This is kilig with big-letter K.
High Society (Undercover Chaebols)
2015
15 episodes
Starring: Sung Joon, Uee, Park Hyung Sik, Lim Ji Yeon
Rakuten Viki
Like I always tell friends, don’t confuse this with the Korean movie High Society on Netflix (which borders on soft porn), and certainly not with Grace Kelly’s High Society (1956). This is the 2015 K-drama series, not the movie.
It’s the very popular Park Hyung Sik (PHS) who initially leads fans to it, even if he is only the support lead. In our case, we end up being a fan not only of PHS, but also of the veteran actor Sung Joon (Call It Love, Lie To Me, and more recently, in the Cha Eun Woo starrer, Island), who’s so low-key he hardly updates his IG. Sung Joon is the male lead opposite another accomplished actress Uee (Marriage Contract, Ghost Doctor).
It is a chaebol-commoner story but with ingenious difference: it goes deeper into the social-class divide of Korean society (any contemporary society, for that matter), how one’s need to go up the economic ladder can blur one’s principles, and even love. It’s no simplistic love story of a chaebol daughter falling in love with a high-achieving and driven young executive, who wants to use his management skills and connection to lift his family from its poor circumstances. Instead, the viewer is drawn not only to the romance between the heiress and the executive, but more to the nuances of the class divide. This series’ come-on is not only the good story, but also its highly believable characterization. In this character drama, each person, even the imperious mothers and mistress, draws empathy, no matter his/her flaws.
From the get-go, High Society works because of its top-notch casting: Sung Joon the hotshot but poor executive Choi Joon Ki; PHS as Yoo Chang Soo, the retail chaebol son who treats Joon Ki like a brother, not as a corporate hired gun, yet who also knows how to pull social rank over him; Uee as Jang Yoon Ha, the alienated daughter of a chaebol family who seeks affection anywhere but in her own home; Lim Ji Yeon as Lee Ji Yi, Yoon Ha’s co-part timer in the supermarket whom PHS’ character falls in love with against all odds. Lim Ji Yeon became an awarded star herself—Best Supporting Actress in the 59th Baeksang Arts Awards for her role in the acclaimed The Glory.
Yoon Ha works incognito as part-timer in a high-end supermarket owned by PHS’ Chang Soo’s family, where Sung Joon’s character is a fast-rising executive. Ji Yeon’s Ji Yi is her best friend, who has no clue that Yoon Ha is the daughter of a conglomerate. Both endure the hard, humbling job of part timers, attending to stuffy matrons, because Ji Yi needs a job, and Yoon Ha just wants to earn her own keep, away from the family big business—and she wants to be out of the house where she does not feel loved.
The heiress’ cover is intact—until she is set up by her mother on a blind date with PHS’ Chang Soo. On this fateful date in a hotel, Yoon Ha, who purposely dressed herself as a slutty, gum-chewing, spoiled heiress, succeeds in turning off Chang Soo—then feeling smug and triumphant after her rejection, lands in the same hotel lift as Soon Joon’s Joon Ki who tagged along with Chang Soo (as Chang Soo’s corporate side kick, he drives the chaebol son around). Unknown to her, she caught Joon Ki’s eye, right there and then. From that moment on, Joon Ki knows already how the heiress looks, mainly because Chang Soo has asked Joon Ki to do a background check on this blind date, down to her childhood and family photos.
Back in the supermarket, Joon Ki is surprised to spot her as a part-timer. She and friend Ji Yi swoon over this hotshot executive. It is Yoon Ha the heiress who musters the guts to ask Joon Ki out on a date, an escape from a love-less palatial home, where her mother is left embittered by her husband’s open affair, and worse, by his mistress who remorselessly encroaches on the legal wife’s social turf; where her oldest sister is on the point of divorce; and where her young sister is a self-absorbed influencer. It is her only brother, the successor chosen by the father, who’s genuinely looking out for her and with whom she has a strong bond.
Meantime, Chang Soo is getting drawn to Ji Yi, the feisty and independent-minded sales part-timer character of Lim Je Yeon. She doesn’t believe in a Cinderella but only in how a contemporary girl must strive on her own to define her fate. Their love is so strong—and so wily— not even Chang Soo’s control-freak mother could stop it. But coming from opposite ends of the social spectrum, she and Chang Soo know that society can allow them only to date, never to marry.
The OTP Park Hyung Sik-Lim Je Yeon helped spark the netizens’ buzz about the series. Theirs is a love story on its own, a young couple trying to break out of their social class through sheer grit and love. Their break-up scene and Lim Je Yeon’s handling of the chaebol matriarch are one for the books.
As the foursome gets entrenched in their own romantic world, news breaks that the plane bearing Yoon Ha’s brother, the successor in the conglomerate, goes missing on its route to the US. That’s the brother so loved by Yoon Ha, and who was about to ask Yoon Ha to join him on the flight until he realized that Yoon Ha was happy in her newfound love. Devastated, Yoon Ha has no choice but to blow her cover—to confess to Joon Ki that she is really the daughter of the conglomerate, clueless that all this time, Joong Ki already knows.
Having seen how his dad, a security guard, suffered humiliation right before his child, Joong Ki grows up with the hard pragmatism convinced that “you can never be happy when you’re poor,” in contrast to what his parents always tell him, “do good things.” “I won’t be deceived by that,” he tells himself.
Now that he’s dating Yoon Na, he tells himself, “My dream is Yoon Na’s reality.”
What happens when Yoon Na finds out that Joong Ki has known of her identity all along? Yoon Na transforms into a hard-driving, shrewd heiress herself, who can’t seem to forgive Joong Ki, the subordinate now in her employ. Both wonder if it was really love they had for each other, to begin with.
How the story unfolds here on is what makes this drama a triumph of both realism and romance. How can the two genres possibly co-exist? You binge-watch, then as heiress and the upstart executive deconstruct their relationship, you rewatch again and again—what protracted kilig.
Park Hyung Sik sure knows how to choose his material. And you feel like asking Sung Joon, married in real life now and with a kid—can you give another romance drama the time of day in 2024?
