Loving You a Thousand Times is the worst Kdrama, wait, why limit it to Kdramas, it’s the worst show in general that I’ve ever had the displeasure to sit through. Fifty-five hours of yuck. Fifty-five hours of my life, that I’ll never get back, wasted on yuck. Fifty-five hours of, did I say “yuck?” Looking on the bright side, you could say I’m wiser for having watched it because it did teach me about what a rotten Kdrama is like.
The one and only reason I endured the show was to see Kim Heechul. He’s a singer in the Korean boy pop group Super Junior, and I love Super Junior! I had been browsing through YouTube and came across him singing a solo with clips of him obviously in a movie of some kind. So I set out to find it. I wanted to see him act. Unfortunately, I found it and thus began the torture of Loving You a Thousand Times. I’m glad I got to see Kim Heechul act but looking back, it definitely was not worth it. He just wasn’t in it enough to have subjected myself to such a rotten drama. You can find him in other things. He’s a very funny guy. The man’s a master at comedy.
The ridiculous story goes like this – a poor girl secretly agrees to become a surrogate mother in order to pay her father’s hospital bills. An evil woman plans the whole thing, threatening her daughter-in-law to go along with the scheme and act like she’s pregnant or she would force her son to get a divorce since she was unable to give him a child. That woman is such a witch. I was waiting for a tornado to drop a farm house from Kansas on her. Since the daughter-in-law has had artificial insemination several times before and lost the babies each time, she is able to lie to her husband, tell him she’s pregnant once again, and have him believe her. He’s thrilled at the news but how long will the woman be able to keep up the lie? She works her way around it by getting a fake belly and telling her husband the doctor said he can’t touch her for fear of her loosing the baby again. Yeah, right. A man’s not going to touch his wife, or even see her without clothes on for nine whole months? That’s totally believable -NOT. Well, the whole lie comes to light when he accidentally steps into her bedroom as she’s getting out of the bath. Busted! No baby bulge! Of course he’s hurt and angry so he does what anyone in that situation would do… he gets stinkin’ drunk and goes to a woman he has liked from afar and has an affair. Ah, geeze! Yep, everybody would do that. Funny, but as time went on the writer actually got me to believe they really loved each other. I kept thinking, “Once the baby is born I hope he dumps that wife of his, takes his kid, and goes off to live with his mistress.” I was honestly rooting for her since the wife is an easily manipulated, lying, deceitful %#@&$ of a woman with obviously no conscience at all. Let’s go back to the surrogate mother now – she grows attached to her unborn baby and wants to keep it but, of course, he’s taken from her. A little later on, after trying to get her life back on track, the surrogate mother and a nice young man meet and fall in love. She has no idea that the man she now loves is the younger brother of the man who is the father of her baby and he doesn’t know she is the mother of his nephew. Oh, dear. Now what happens? Has you on the edge of you seat, huh?
I’m offended that the writers actually think we’d fall for any of this nonsense. I’ve seen a number of Kdramas whose plots were pretty unbelievable. For some reason, even though I thought they were way too exaggerated, they didn’t bother me like this one did. So even though I’ve booed the storyline as being ridiculous there’s much more than just the plot that I disliked. The story was bad, in and of itself, but then the writer made up awful characters to go with it. Once you have annoying characters in a hard to believe plot there’s nothing you can do to fix it. The entire thing bothered me.
Sadly, there are pretty good actors involved in this bad drama. Lee Soo-Kyung is the lead actress and plays the part of wimpy Ko Eun-Nim, the surrogate mother. This show is a complete waste of her talents. I’ve seen her in a few other things and enjoyed them a lot. If you want to see her act, PLEASE watch the Kdrama Soulmate or the movies Triangle or Romantic Island instead.
The same goes for the leading man, Jeong Kyeo-Woon who plays Baek Kang-Ho. He’s a good actor in a bad show. If the reason you want to watch this is to see him, and you’re curious to see what he’s really capable of when given a decent acting opportunity, you’re much better off watching the Kdramas Romance Town or Dr. Champ.
Ryu Jin plays Baek Se-Hun, the man who is the father of the surrogate mother’s baby. If you want to see what kind of actor he really is watch Baby Faced Beauty, Summer Scent, or The Prime Minister And I. They are three of many Kdramas he’s been in. All three are worth watching so see him in those and not this.
Lee Si-Young is Hong Yeon-Hee, Baek Se-Hun’s mistress. She is a very talented young actress who has been in many entertaining Kdramas. She was an endearing, funny, rich girl in Becoming A Billionaire, an undercover Maritime police woman in Poseidon, and a no-nonsense prosecutor in Golden Cross, to name a few. And as a side note; in real life she’s a champion level female amateur boxer and has won the amateur champion title three times! Go, Si-Young!
Kim Heechul is darling as Lee Chul but his character lives with his mother who happens to be the most irritating character on the show. Every time it showed him I was happy but then prayed his mother wouldn’t be there. She whined constantly! I wanted to throw a bucket of cold water on her every time she showed up on screen.
Other than Kim Hechul’s solo song, the music is okay but nothing special. And the scenery isn’t all that wonderful, either. This drama is more like a soap opera. You can tell most of it was shot on a sound stage.
There’s just nothing positive to say about this particular Kdrama, other than the fact that the actors are in other dramas that are actually good. Do yourself a favor and run far, far, far away from Loving You a Thousand Times!
Score: 2
The Good:
Kim Heechul
Lee Si-Young
Jeong Kyeo-Woon
Lee Soo-Kyung
Ryu Jin
The Bad:
EVERYTHING (other than 5 of the actors) especially the plot
Heart and Seoul 