Review of Clean with a Passion for Now / 일단 뜨겁게 청소하라!!

I had known about this drama for years, but I never felt particularly compelled to watch it for the longest time. I think what finally convinced me two major factors: it kept appearing on my Netflix recommended section, and for work at MovieWeb I was writing an article about Kim Yoo-jung, who portrays the female lead in this drama.

I think she was about eighteen when she filmed this, which was shocking to me considering how much older Yoon Kyun-sang is compared to her. I get uncomfortable with very big age gaps, especially because Kim Yoo-jung’s character looks young compared to the male lead.

Anyways, I sat and watched the entirety of the drama. It’s cute, but it’s not the greatest drama I’ve watched in recent years. I didn’t hate it though considering I actually sat and watched all of it over the course of a week. Some Korean dramas I’ve found to be completely unbearable because of how the plot just isn’t there or the characters are annoying. This drama just ranks in mid in my tier of Korean dramas.

Onwards with the review!

A male CEO of a cleaning company finds his exact opposite in a woman who starts working for him.

The narrative of Clean with a Passion for Now is grounded in the female character, Gil Oh-sol, for a good chunk of the drama. At the beginning, we, as the viewer, learn that she lives with her brother and father in a small apartment.

Her mother died in a tragic work accident when she was a bit younger, and Oh-sol was once a talented runner with a promising career in front of her. Her mother’s death changed everything, and now her father is scrambling to support the family.

Oh-sol is also job hunting, and when she collects trash in a popular area one night, she runs away from her college crush and ends up crashing into a car owned by Jang Seon-kyul, the CEO of the company Cleaning Fairy.

She gets trash all over his car, which is a big mistake. Seon-kyul is wealthy, but he has a major fear of germs.

The show plays this up because he ends up wearing gloves, goggles, and a mask at certain points because he’s so afraid of catching and touching dirty objects.

He charges Seon-kyul for the damage she caused, but she obviously cannot afford any of this due to her current situation. Still looking for a job, she ends up joining Cleaning Fairy with one of her brother’s friends, and when she arrives at the company, Seon-kyul is horrified to see her there.

Thus begins trying to support herself. Oh-sol is a threat to Seon-kyul’s existence because the gag at first is that she is unable to clean or shower because she doesn’t have time.

There’s a big class element here because of how she’s constantly working in order to support herself and her family, which is why she ends up not taking care of herself.

She also makes fun of the guy who lives above her family by himself, but as it turns out later in the drama, he’s a famous psychiatrist and actually is the one who is treating Seon-kyul.

The show then delves into several different subplots to keep it stretching it across sixteen different episodes. There are events happening on the job, such as people treating Oh-sol as inferior due to her status as a cleaner.

At first, Seon-kyul is one of the people that becomes one of her problems, and then the guy upstairs becomes a problem because he confesses that he likes Oh-sol.

That one kind of comes out of nowhere, and I thought it was oddly placed and then kind of forgotten about outside some of dramatic details that appear in smaller ways.

Her father loses his job and ends up having to wash cars for a living in a parking lot, and then, later on in the drama, we find out that Seon-kyul is connected to the death of Oh-sol’s mother through his grandfather, causing even more drama because people can’t move on from the past due to a lack of accountability from the guilty parties.

Throughout the drama, Oh-sol and Seon-kyul grow closer despite them denying their feelings at first, with a little bit of help from his secretary who’s involved in her own subplot where she lies to Seon-kyul about some critical things, and, with time, Seon-kyul learns to overcome his fears because of Oh-sol.

Overall Thoughts

It’s a cute drama, as mentioned before. But I think it’s missing something major. The female and male lead lack any chemistry whatsoever, and I think that’s part of the problem when it comes to their age gap.

The drama itself also tries to invent plotlines that become more tedious as time goes on, because by around episode eleven, I was starting to mentally check out from the content being presented in front of me.

While we needed to see the character growth with Seon-kyul and Oh-sol, the emotional gratification just wasn’t there for me. In the end, I just didn’t care for the characters and what they were going through because of how predictable the show had become for me. I’m sure it’s someone else’s cup of tea though!

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