Let Me Introduce Her is one of the most melodramatic Kdramas I’ve seen in a very long time. Spousal abuse, amnesia, attempted murder, blackmail, dysfunctional families, filthy rich folks, lying/deceit, interfering ex-girlfriend, surprise parenthood, and a humongous mystery (what’s on the phone!?!) that lasts almost the entire show! Twenty hours of this stuff! But it was interesting enough for me to stay up until 2:00 in the morning, clicking episode after episode, to find out what would happen next.
I honestly wasn’t able to figure out things very far in advance, and there are lots of things to figure out, starting with the first few minutes. The whole reason I was kept captivated was because of all the questions in this story so I’m not about to ruin it for you by revealing too much. Seriously, if I had known all the answers in advance I probably wouldn’t have even started watching this show. So here’s a very vague plot synopsis…
Someone wants Ji Eun-Han dead. As the woman is running for her life she meets a stranger, Han Kang-Woo, who helps her get away from the men chasing her. Then, one night, he sees her again and this time she is not fighting for her life but just about ready to end it herself. As he approaches her to save her once again, he keels over from a heart attack and she comes to his rescue, providing him with CPR until an emergency crew arrives. Once he has fully recovered he looks for his savior via the news and when she discovers the man she saved is a plastic surgeon she goes to him with an idea – as a thank you for saving his life, she asks him to perform surgery on her to make her look like an entirely different person. As a morally upstanding doctor he is against the idea until he realizes the operation could save her from the ones trying to kill her. The operation is a success except the patient awakens from the surgery with no memory of who she is or what was happening in her life. In order to protect herself, she gave Doctor Han a false name so he cant even help her discover who she is. Kind Kang-Woo agrees to let her stay with him until she heals, hoping her memory will return by then, but neither one of them is prepared to find out the truth about her former life.
This is the part of my review where I usually tell you a few things about each main character. However, there’s nothing I can say about Ji Eun-Han because the entire story is based on the mystery of the audience not knowing anything about her. All I can say is that she is fearful and desperate when she first meets Kang-Woo but happy and optimistic after she looses her memory.
Doctor Han Kang-Woo is a plastic surgeon who has his own small practice. His mother passed away six years earlier owing a tremendous amount of money and he has voluntarily taken over paying off her debt. Because his parents had a rocky marriage he now has an estranged relationship with his father. Kang-Woo is quite close to his cousin whom he employs at his plastic surgery office. Because he willing agreed to pay off his mother’s debt, his girlfriend, Song Chae-Young, left him, married a Frenchman, and moved to France. Now that she is a divorced, single mother she is back looking for Kang-Woo, hoping he’ll give her another chance.
One of South Korea’s most beloved anchormen is Kang Chan-Ki. He’s handsome, successful, and ambitious, doing everything he can to switch from being the anchor of the morning news to that of the coveted evening news spot. His wife has been in America for quite some time but is expected to be back home fairly soon. They live with his mother in a tremendously huge mansion.
The very successful CEO of a large make-up company is Min Ja-Young, Anchorman Kong’s mother. She is powerful, rich, sure of herself, and desperate to have her son divorce his wife.
Jung Soo-Jin is CEO Min’s right hand woman. She lives in the mansion and is head of the house staff. She is a cold, cruel woman, greedy to be a real part of the family. She would love nothing more than to see Anchorman Kang divorce so she could take his wife’s place.
You can read a bit about the actress who plays Ji Eun-Han, Nam Sang-Mi, in my Chief Kim review. I’ll add to it by letting you know that she is married to a businessman and together they are the parents of a little girl.
For information on Kim Jae-Won, the actor who plays Doctor Han Kang-Woo, you can go to my review of My Love Patzzi.
The man who plays the part of Anchorman Kang Chan-Ki is Jo Hyun-Jae. His entertainment career began as a member of the boy band Guardian. Unfortunately, the group wasn’t together long, disbanding after they released their album Guardian in 1998. Hyun-Jo then began to get attention when he appeared in a sport drink commercial and from there he began acting. His popularity rose after he played the leading man in the Kdrama 49 Days. (I wept at the end of that show!) Congratulations are in order – Hyun-Jo married his retired professional golfer girlfriend of five years last March. (I wonder what his new wife thought of him playing this role.)
Multi-award winning veteran actress Lee Mi-Sook, whose character is CEO Min Ja-Young, began her acting career in 1979 and became one of the most famous Korean actresses of the 1980s. She gave up acting after she married but re-launched her career ten years later. She is also the author of the book Lee Mi-Sook’s DIARY: Dreaming of Deviation which was published in 2003. Interestingly enough, she has been involved in two scandals – one was when her former agency sued her for breach of contract (after she moved to a different agency) and had to pay 120 million won in damages. The second was in 2006 when it was alleged she had been romantically involved with a man 17 years her junior. She is a mother of two and was married to a plastic surgeon for 20 years (is that how the 58 year old actress has stayed so beautiful?) before divorcing in 2007.
The difficulty I faced in watching Let Me Introduce Her was embracing its far fetched parts. However, I know someone who, at the age of 18, found out she had a twin brother she never knew existed so I guess if things like that happen in real life, maybe the outlandish stuff written into Let Me Introduce Her’s storyline could happen as well.
There’s one part of the show that was hard for me to believe. Because of her past, Eun-Han studiously develops a certain skill (I can’t say what it is) but when the time comes for her to use what she’s actually learned the writer has her act as if she has no idea what to do. For example – (this isn’t really it) let’s pretend she doesn’t know how to shoot a gun. She learns how to be a decent marksman and then when a killer confronts her and she has a gun in her hand she just freezes, like she’s never held a gun before. That specific part in the show just didn’t make sense to me.
There has been some controversy surrounding this drama. In September of last year, the production company DK E&M announced they believed Let Me Introduce Her had been plagiarized and they intended to file a lawsuit against SBS. The claim was that Let Me Introduced Her was a rip off of the 1999 Japanese drama entitled Beautiful Person. Apparently, since November of 2017 DK E&M had been talking to the original network of Beautiful Person in hopes of producing a Korean adaptation of the show with plans to broadcast it in 2019 but that had been affected when Let Me Introduce Her aired first. SBS denied the allegation and plans to file a defamation lawsuit against DK E&M because of their “baseless” claims. Since I have never seen Beautiful Person I can’t speak to whether or not I agree with the plagiarism accusations so if any of you have seen both dramas please comment and let other Heart & Seoul readers know your opinion on the matter.
I only caught one insignificant “oops”. When Eun-Han is in an elevator she is looking at her phone, holding it with both hands. However, a wider shot one second later shows she was holding it with just one hand. No big deal but a mistake none the less.
I’m not a fan of Let Me Introduce Her’s soundtrack. The songs aren’t awful, they’re just not very good. The only one I actually liked is Even if You Hate It, performed by Navi. It’s a decent ballad sung with feeling. The song that is played most frequently throughout the show, Save Me, is sung by leeSA. It sounds like what we might hear in a dream and her voice almost seems as if she’s intoxicated. Sorry, but that’s how it sounds to me. I might have liked This Love if Lee Jin-Sol had controlled her volume better. There’s a difference in strong singing and singing loudly. The verses are soft but the chorus is much too loud. Snowball is my least favorite of all the songs. Sung by Kim Dong-Wook, Snowball just doesn’t fit well with the show. It would sound more in place on an American country album. But that’s just my opinion.
There are a few places that are featured most often in the story – the elaborate mansion where CEO Min and Anchorman Kang and his wife live, the news station, Doctor Han’s rooftop house and his plastic surgery office. But there’s also a visit to a breathtaking aquarium and a beautiful Buddhist temple.
If you are the type of person that really enjoys melodramatic shows you’re going to love Let Me Introduced Her. This 40 (a half-hour a piece) episodes show will keep you guessing from start to finish (what’s on the phone!?!). The twists and turns are excellent and keep you hooked from one episode to another.
Score: 8
The Good:
Writing
Acting
Constant twists and turns
Difficult to foresee answers to the mysteries
Great backgrounds
The Bad:
Seemed longer than it needed to be
Not a great soundtrack
Heart and Seoul 