TV reviews: The Inheritors and Marry Him If You Dare

Boy-sees-girl moments are monumental in South Korean star screenwriter Kim Eun Sook's romantic comedies.

Her 2010 hit Secret Garden is ignited by a look, by the moment Hyun Bin is wonderstruck seeing Ha Ji Won's stuntwoman in a swordfight.

In last year's Gentleman's Dignity, Kim Ha Neul's baseball enthusiast is glowing in the afternoon sun on a field as Jang Dong Gun looks at her with warm recognition: She is the one he has seen thrice now and feels an immediate attraction to each time.

The screenwriter's latest, The Inheritors, has Lee Min Ho sitting in a seaside cafe in Malibu when he catches a stricken look crossing Park Shin Hye's soft face.

He is a tycoon's love child in exile in the United States. She is the daughter of his mother's maid back in South Korea, who has just landed in Malibu and spotted her runaway sister serving coffee by the sea.

Lee gets to gaze at Park more intently in Californian sunshine, after her sister disappears again and the story gives Park no choice but to stay at Lee's beachfront mansion.

Two lookers (Lee is more of a looker but Park has amazing eyelids, which quiver with all kinds of feelings) peer and glance at each other. Yet, the show doesn't exactly catch fire.

The Inheritors has been hyped as Kim Eun Sook's answer to Boys Over Flowers, the 2009 high-school romantic comedy in which Lee rose to fame in the role of Goo Jun Pyo, a posh guy who pursues a girl with the alarming force and speed of a tornado.

But Lee's new character, Kim Tan, is more shower than tornado. A languorous chap, Tan is surfing when he isn't mooning about his house and biding his time to head back to Seoul, in defiance of his half-brother.

This show is as sleepy, taking five episodes to find a more pulse-racing scenario: On his return, Tan learns he is living under the same roof as his dream girl Cha Eun Sang (Park). Soon they are attending the same exclusive school and playing hide-and-seek with his peers, who don't know she is his family servant's child but don't quite believe she is, as he claims, from new money.

A sporadic courtship starts, with him advancing and her avoiding him.

It's so sporadic, I wonder if waiting for pandas to have sex might be more exciting.

However, Park does have some heat with Kim Woo Bin, who bristles with hurt feelings as a bully who falls for Eun Sang. And she and Lee are so cute, it is easy to keep looking at them.

Marry Him If You Dare, a Korean what-if romantic comedy, is more of a blast.

Improbable but enjoyable, the show dabbles in time travel and destiny, as a happy-go-lucky young woman (Yoon Eun Hye) meets her older self, who warns her not to drive in a certain lane along a certain expressway as she is leaving her office in her brother's car.

Sufficiently spooked, she takes a different lane and avoids an accident with an irascible newsreader (Lee Dong Gun). On the older woman's advice, she also takes a holiday to Jeju Island, where she catches the eye of a media mogul's affable heir (Jung Yong Hwa). She realises much later - and her unhappily married older self sure hopes it is much too late - she was meant to meet and marry Lee. When she does meet him despite the older woman's meddling, she is drawn to him and his unexpected humour, although she has been warned he will ruin her life.

Is hindsight really wisdom, and does the older self truly know better? Can mere mortals outrun fate, even in time machines?

Such are the questions the show ponders, even as it spins in loopy directions: Lee feels a strange sense of loss when he wakes up from mysterious dreams of visiting Yoon in hospital; the older woman makes a name for herself as a fortune-teller and hatches a plot with Jung to get her younger self together with him.

Yoon, however, is unconvinced her future has to revolve around a man: Why does a girl have to choose between two cute guys when she is enjoying her budding career as a TV writer?

In a romantic comedy, this is a small but significant flash of common sense.

woeiwan@sph.com.sg

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