Review of What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim / 김비서가 왜 그럴까

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2024 is the year of catching up on my blog posts. Despite a brief stint where I spent some time abroad in Busan, South Korea for a competitive language scholarship, I spent my last semester of graduate school and the fall working on my blog.

Unfortunately a job opportunity I was waiting for, and was strung along for three months as I waited for a visa to process, didn’t work out so I watched a lot and read a handful of books here and there.

I’m way ahead of my blog posts, but while I was doing all of this, I looked back into my archives and realized I had a bunch of old reviews from way back when and I didn’t have a blog. I’ve always been kind of doing this as a form of documenting my life, but for so long I never put it online as a digital archive.

So my goal lately is catching up on those posts, editing them, and updating the content so it’s a little bit more relevant to the modern moment. What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim is one of the dramas that I watched a few years back, and this is an updated post from then.

Let’s get into the review then, shall we? I know introductions can be a bit rambling sometimes, so I don’t want to go into detail about the more unnecessary content. We’re here for the review!

After a highly competent secretary resigns, her prominent boss will do whatever it takes to get her back.

This series you can kind of guess what it’s about from the title alone. Our female lead in the series, Kim Mi-so, is a highly competent secretary who works for Lee Young-joon, a vice-chairman at a Korean corporation. She does everything she needs to, even under high stress situations, and she’s honestly taken for granted.

At the beginning of the series, though, she decides it’s time to move on and start something new with her life. She submits her resignation, but Young-joon refuses to accept it at first.

As Young-joon learns pretty quickly, Mi-so is basically his right arm. She was the reason he was able to keep everything together throughout their time together, and no other secretary will match up to her expertise in his eyes. That said, he will do anything to get her back.

Despite him being a difficult personality, as he chases after her, he starts to realize that he has feelings for her. More on the romance in the next paragraph, but it was honestly refreshing to see such an accomplished career woman step back and decide she needed to take her life back into her own hands.

The romance in this one takes a really weird pivot about halfway throughout the series. While it becomes more obvious in the beginning that Young-joon has more than professional feelings for his secretary, Mi-so is more professional and sees their relationship as just that.

For her, she begins to have romantic feelings when she realizes that Young-soon was a part of a pivotal moment in her childhood. After she has that little revelation, it becomes a not-so-little pivot towards how she feels about him. Suddenly she’s more in love with him, implying the feelings were there all this time.

This didn’t work as much for me as a viewer, as I’m more focused on plot than vibes when it comes to these things. If you aren’t looking to question your dramas though, I could see how this flies a bit more under the radar. I personally am just more picky about how exactly these kinds of events unfold on the screen.

Overall Thoughts

I honestly enjoyed this drama. It has its comedic and serious beats throughout, but I did wish that the romance element was toned down a bit more. It would have been refreshing to see the female lead take destiny into her own hands and forge a path independent of her former boss, but this is a Korean drama. The romance was inevitable.

That said, I don’t mind the romance. I do wish it was a bit stronger, and that the female lead’s motivation was a bit less sudden. It leans more cheesy in terms of romance and story because of that, and I felt like the drama was just selling itself short.

I can see why people love this show though. It’s funny when it wants to be and doesn’t take itself too seriously. If you don’t take it too seriously either, you’re probably going to enjoy it.

So if you haven’t watched it and want to, go ahead and do so. Give it a chance. Or maybe, if you’ve seen it already, rewatch the show. It’s been half a decade since it’s been released!

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