Marry My Husband (review)
(내 남편과 결혼해줘, aired from Jan 1 to Feb 20, 2024 on tvN; available internationally on Amazon Prime Video)
Marry My Husband is the latest romantic comedy featuring Park Min-young in a leading role. While it follows a typical K-Dramas trope of time travel, the show found its own footing, gracefully executing on the concept, gaining significant popularity, and dominating in the recent ratings.
Park Min-young is Kang Ji-won, a marketing employee at large chaebol. She is married to her coworker (Lee Yi-kyung as Park Min-hwan), who turns out to be a toxic and abusive husband. When Ji-won is diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, Min-hwan engages in an extramarital affair with Ji-won’s best friend (Song Ha-yoon as Jung Soo-min). When Ji-won catches them red-handed, in an ensuing chaos she is accidentally murdered by her husband. But then, Ji-won finds herself 10 years earlier with a second chance for her life and finding happiness. It turns out, though, that her fate has to fall on someone, so she is determined to give her fate to her unfaithful husband, Min-hwan, and her lover, Soo-min. In her revenge plot she finds an unlikely and loyal ally in Yoo Ji-hyuk (Na In-woo), a manager from her work, and secretly an heir in chaebol she works for, U&K Food.
From the start, the romcom has a difficult task to achieve. While we don’t sympathize with Ji-won adversaries, Min-hwan and Soo-min, she is planning a revenge for a crime they haven’t yet committed in a sort of Minority Report way. Ji-won is not yet married to Min-hwan, and Soo-min is still her best friend (who, as happens often in K-Dramas, hides her own secrets though). To make up for that, the drama sets up an unlikely sequence of events in which it establishes that Min-hwan and Soo-min time are the real “scum bugs,” so the audience has no doubts they deserve retribution. Still, inadvertently the show becomes a crime drama where Ji-won is setting an entrapment for her adversaries with a goal of killing at least one of them, which might be a bit jarring for a romcom.
The most interesting is the developing romance between Ji-won and Ji-hyuk. In her previous life they never knew each other well, and while they met in a distant past (again, typical K-Drama trope), they never acted on their fate. Therefore, the series is slowly developing a budding relationship between them, which in the end transforms them both. Ji-won gains confidence and strength to overcome her circumstances, and Ji-hyuk changes from an emotionless executive to a sensitive partner for Ji-won. Both actors fit their roles perfectly and make the whole experience very convincing. Na In-woo oozes confidence as Yoo Ji-hyuk, a powerful and competent ally for whom Min-hwan is no match. Yet obviously Park Min-young is the main star of the show and steals every scene she is in, immediately gaining sympathy from the audience.
Song Ha-yoon gained a lot of acclaim for her role of Jung Soo-min, an unsettling and obsessed friend of Ji-won. In the end, she turns out to be the biggest obstacle for Ji-won, and Song Ha-yoon executes her role perfectly, weaving a web of lies and deception around Ji-won as Soo-min. In a surprising appearance, the show gives us another female antagonist in the second part of the show, BoA as Oh Yu-ra, a somewhat deranged and also obsessed ex-fiancé of Ji-hyuk, bent on getting him back. While BoA’s portrayal is compelling, her character is also written as a very stereotypical evil chaebol heiress, too often found in K-Dramas.
In addition, Ji-won future life is surprisingly mirrored by the predicaments her another coworker and friend faces, Yang Joo-ran (Gong Min-jeung). She also has a toxic and abusive husband, and she also faces health problems. Yang Joo-ran is essentially everything Ji-won frees herself from: Joo-ran is browbeaten, has no confidence, and without outside help cannot find her way out from her abusive relationship.
While it’s hard not to be enamored by the show’s grace and humor, the series quietly ignores some of its more serious implications. In general, the show implies that the only way out of the abusive relationship is help of another man, this is Ji-hyuk for Ji-won and Lee Seok-joon (Ha Do-kwon as another executive from U&K Group) for Yang Joo-ran. Inadvertently writers of the show suggest that without help of men women are helpless (and rich and powerful men at that), which is a problematic implication.
Additionally, this is yet another K-Drama which glorifies in-work romance, particularly a romance between a supervisor and a female subordinate, which is generally considered inappropriate in the Western world. While the show presents it as a modern Cinderella story (as BoA’s character mentions ironically in the show in a sort of self-conscious way), it is very easy to read it as a story of a supervisor obsessed with a female subordinate, using his position and money to seduce her. And this is no joke, as Ji-hyuk literally showers Ji-won with money, one time even granting his then girlfriend real estate and assets in a total value of 80 billion won (around $60 million), which seems to be a bit excessive, even for a K-Drama. I long for a day when K-Drama romcoms with main leads of similar or more equal backgrounds are more common. Men do not always have to be chaebol heirs (or literal princes), their girlfriends do not always have to be poor as a church mouse.
Those flaws aside, Marry My Husband is a very enjoyable romcom, which has lots of twists and turns, definitely a must watch for a K-Drama lover.
Marry My Husband on Wikipedia and MyDramaList
