Review of Crash Course in Romance / 일타 스캔들

For a hot minute, this drama was the one I kept seeing all over my timeline whenever I logged into my Instagram. I don’t know if their marketing team was paying off the social platforms to keep people watching, or if Netflix was, but because I was being trained to see the information for this show every time I opened that app, I ended up watching it out of curiosity.

I’ve also been on a kick lately of Korean dramas featuring older people, and when I mean older, I mean like middle-aged characters. The fact I saw Jeon Do-yeon as the female lead did the final part in convincing me to actually sit down and watch the show.

A good indicator for me if a Korean drama is decent or not is if I sit down and watch all of it without getting majorly annoyed at the pacing or plot.

I ended up watching Crash Course in Romance all the way through, but the story towards the end was starting to grate my writer instincts. I was not having it towards the end of this drama because they were pulling all the random twists that honestly didn’t make sense in some ways.

Onwards with the review!

A famous math teacher and a banchan shop owner cross paths and fall in love.

We begin this drama with a focus on the female lead, Nam Haeng-seon, who is portrayed by Jeon Do-yeon. She’s raising her sister’s daughter all by herself, while also taking care of her young brother, who has Asperberger’s.

Haeng-seon was forced to give up her life on the Korean National Handball Team—which, if you know anything about handball, it’s that South Korea actually has a really good national handball team—because she had to take care of young Hae-yi, and the coach of the team made her choose between Hae-yi and the team.

Haeng-seon chose Hae-yi and effectively ended her life as she knew it in order to open up a banchan shop. Her mother was a restaurant owner, which explains her connection to famous math teacher Choi Chi-yeol later on in the drama.

Choi Chi-yeol is everywhere, and the competitive mothers in Hae-yi’s class all scramble to get their kids into his courses. Haeng-seon doesn’t have the time to sit out in front of the building to ensure her daughter has a seat, but when she becomes convinced that Hae-yi has potential, she leaves the shop temporarily to get her a spot into the math class.

Hae-yi begins to shine and overtakes the top student in the class, who doesn’t like that at all. The girl tells her mother, who then looks to sabotage Hae-yi and has her removed from the star-student class composed of all the top scorers in the hagwon.

Chi-yeol ends up crossing paths with Haeng-seon originally and they get off on a bad foot. However, he comes to her banchan shop after sending his assistant there, as he lowkey has become addicted to her food.

We learn later on that when Chi-yeol was a young boy trying to make it on his own, he ended up going to to Haeng-seon’s mother’s shop, who took care of him good.

I’m imagining in some ways he falls for Haeng-seon because of this memory of comfort, but that could be a reach. We also learn as a rookie teacher he had a student tragically die, which makes him a bit traumatized as well.

At the same time, suspicious things start happening around the building.

A student who sasses Chi-yeol at the star student class ends up being pushed off the top of the building by a mysterious figure, and later on, other students end up being killed—Hae-yi, in the last couple of episodes, ends up becoming one of these victims but lives to tell the tale and expose who the culprit is.

It becomes obvious around episode twelve who did it, because the show drops obscure hints early on then connects the dots in a in your face kind of way around that episode.

Anyways, drama spirals in and out of the show. The press get wind of Haeng-seon and Chi-yeol’s relationship, Hae-yi is accused of cheating because of her male classmate, who mildly has a crush on her, gives her the answers to a test, the pressure of the rich moms.

There’s a class dynamic going on to a lot of these interactions as well because of how Haeng-seon is working class, while a lot of the other mothers are wealthy and come from two-income households.

We end up getting more backstory on the head mother of the gang, as well as her daughter, but that’s a B plot where her husband is cheating on her with a younger woman.

We also get some cute moments with Haeng-seon’s brother and the people around him. Despite having Asperger’s, which ends up putting him in some bad situations from people who don’t know, he ends up able to make connections with the people around him.

Because of the brother, Haeng-seon and Chi-yeol meet for the first time, although it’s under bad circumstances when he steals her brother’s phone in order to delete pictures off of it. Lots happening in this show, as this review is only scraping the surface.

Overall Thoughts

I think this is a show that should’ve only been about twelve episodes.

It tries to force many different connections that aren’t believable in a more slice of life kind of drama, and I just can’t get on with the sheer amount of plot twists introduced in a short amount of time. I think it if were more straightforward and cut it short after a certain point, then it would have worked really well.

I liked the characters and thought of them as pretty realistic, but the situations were simply forced. Otherwise, this was a pretty good show and I’m glad I watched it. The last few episodes got kind of repetitive in a way that wasn’t entertaining anymore, though.

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