Review of The Potato Lab /
감자연구소

Welcome! If you’re new here and stumbled on this blog through the mythical, magical powers of the Internet (I’m going to guess it was a Google search), I’m glad to have you here in my digital home. My name is Ashley, and this website/blog serves as an archive

Once upon a time I worked professionally as a film and television critic at an online outlet, and did all of the film festival rounds and the fun, wonky stuff you would imagine a critic did. I got tired of that, although it was a lot of fun at times, and I wanted to focus more on the kinds of movies and television shows that made me sing: aka, mainly BIPOC and international cinema and literature.

And that’s how this post came to be ultimately, as I started a blog on my author/writer website and have been logging what I think to the world ever since. Korean dramas have been something I’m deeply passionate about (along with Korean cinema), especially after studying abroad in both Seoul and Busan on two different occasions.

Back in late 2024 I was unexpectedly left unemployed from a huge opportunity that I was reassured was going to be happen, and ever since then I’ve been focusing on the blog while also job hunting. At the time of typing this I still have not found a new opportunity, so I’ve been seriously catching up on my Korean drama game while my finances allow me to do so.

It’s such an incredible privilege to just focus on my blog, which makes a few pennies here and there from the display ads hovering around, and I’m glad I had the foresight to save as much as I did. I was watching Potato Lab when it first started airing, but then had to take a break because I was on a trip to a conference in Los Angeles and had no time whatsoever to sit down and read or watch anything.

So I continued the show when I came back home to Maryland, and woo, I have a lot to say about this one.

Let’s get into the review to prevent even more rambling from my end!

A potato researcher falls for a higher up at the company after he’s sent to her lab to monitor it.

Our main female character, or female lead, in this drama is Kim Mi-kyung, who’s deeply passionate about potatoes. You read that correctly: her one and only passion is potatoes. This feels like a bit of an exaggeration from whoever wrote the synopsis of this show, as she does have more complexity and dimension at times beyond “into potatoes.”

Anyways, she has some serious emotional baggage from her last relationship, which did not end well (and he did not treat her well, judging from some of the flashbacks we get throughout the series), and it also doesn’t help that her ex is someone she’s going to run into often, as he’s a higher-up at the company who holds the leash on her potato lab.

While Mi-kyung is working at the lab with her team, it leads her into the path of So Baek-ho, the director of Wonhan Retail. He books a spot at her brother and friend’s AirBnB situation in the mountains to watch over the potato lab’s team, and at first, Mi-kyung and him clash quite a bit.

It’s the classic trope of an enemies to lovers in this series, especially when we see that Baek-ho might be the reason she loses her job further on in the series. That becomes one of the few points of friction in the series; I say few in the previous phrase because of how this series fails to create tension, especially in the beginning portions.

Like I found myself really grinding to get through this series because the writing itself feels lazy. I can enjoy a slice of life drama, but I went into this show with different expectations, and the characters themselves feel like they are forgettable at times.

I wanted to know more about Mi-kyung’s teammates and all, but it seems like certain elements of the story are prioritized over others (i.e. like Mi-kyung’s brother’s affair behind her back), but they don’t mesh well enough at the end of the day. They’re just pieced together in a way that doesn’t feel entertaining to me.

The middle portion is a lot of fluff between the leads, who are adults and recognize their feelings pretty early on in the show and act on them. I do like them as a couple, they fit together quite well, but with the B plots I seriously wasn’t feeling like this needed to be 12 episodes even, which is tragic in some ways.

Overall Thoughts

I picked this show up mainly because I thought it would be like Brewing Love or even Business Proposal, both of which I enjoyed quite a bit. I’m a sucker for shows set in the food industry, and this had a unique premise from the potato lady part of the synopsis alone.

Perhaps someone else (and I’m sure someone out there likes this more than me) enjoyed this show a lot more. I think my expectations might’ve been a little too high, especially since I was watching this directly after When Life Gives You Tangerines, so the tropes and writing felt so subpar for me.

But if someone else likes it, good for you! I’m happy for you. Taste is so incredibly subjective, and that’s why you shouldn’t put full weight on reviews like these. One I might dislike might be your favorite show or movie, and that’s fine at the end of the day.

If you’re interested in the show and haven’t watched it, give it a chance. Form your own opinion beyond what I, someone on the Internet, is writing about it. Maybe we’ll agree. Maybe we won’t. And that’s fine! But I don’t think I’ll be returning to this show in the near future.

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