Opening Shot: At recess, a girl is standing alone watching everyone else play dodgeball, until she impresses them with her quick reflexes. She questions why the girls have to play dodgeball while the boys get to play soccer, effectively setting up our main character as someone who will always question authority.
The Gist: Soon after Son Hae-yeong (Shin Min-a) breaks up with her boyfriend, she attends his wedding — it turns out that he had been cheating on her and looking for a way to end the relationship himself. Later, she befriends his new wife and when he threatens to withhold money from her if she doesn’t marry someone else, she proposes to Kim Ji-wook (Kim Young-dae), a convenience store worker.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Sham marriages are a romance staple, and this one kind of reminds me of the Netflix film Wedding Season , in which the two leads get together for non-romantic reasons but wind up falling in love.
Our Take: For a love story, No Gain No Pain sure takes its sweet time setting up the stakes, and that’s to its detriment. The story begins at childhood, in a scene meant to establish the main character’s demeanor. But the scene at recess isn’t a core memory for the character, nor do we ever revisit her childhood, and it winds up feeling like an extraneous set-up when her true colors could have been depicted in a variety of different scenes in adulthood.
Similarly, there is a lot of mention of Hae-yeong’s duty to support her mother, but it’s unclear what that entails and how it will affect her future relationships. When it’s cited by her ex-boyfriend and utilized as the key moment of humanization for her husband-to-be, the moment falls flat as we don’t know anything beyond the general sense of duty she feels for her mother.
In fleshing out the love triangle, the stakes fall flat when her ex-boyfriend says he’ll only pay her back for the money she’s owed when she marries someone else. It’s unclear why this is his line in the sand and could have used some more dialogue to fully set up the parameters. Likewise, the series could have used more set-up and intrigue in setting up the dynamic for the business decision-turned-love story arc that will unfold over the course of the season.
Sex and Skin: This one is pretty tame.
Parting Shot: A memory presented as flashback to Ji-wook, Hae-yeong’s new groom, overhearing a conversation with her and her ex-boyfriend about taking care of her mom helps push him to agree to marry her.
Sleeper Star: Kim Young-dae as Kim Ji-wook, Hae-yeong’s future husband, is quirky and esoteric in an endearing way.
Most Pilot-y Line: : “I was wondering how I was going to ditch her… but she did the work for me,” Hae-yeong’s ex says after she dumps him in a parking lot, not realizing that he had been dating someone else for the previous six months.
Our Call: SKIP IT. The stakes of the series feel fabricated, and there’s no real reason to root for the central couple yet.
Radhika Menon ( @menonrad ) is a TV-obsessed writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on Paste Magazine, Teen Vogue, Vulture and more. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.
For more entertainment news and streaming recommendations, visit decider.com
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