If you watch enough romantic K-dramas, you can pretty much name all of the story beats before they happen. So what separates one show in this genre from another are the characters who are falling in love. In Doona!, a regular college student and a depressed K-pop star start a relationship. Will that make things a little more interesting?
Opening Shot: A woman imagines herself jumping into water and drowning as her performance as a K-pop star is in the background.
The Gist: The woman having that dream wakes up alone on the floor of a sparsely-furnished room.
Lee Won-jun (Yang Se-jong) is a college student who has decided that, now that his sister is out of the hospital, he can move to Seoul instead of commuting in from the suburbs. His friend owns a seafood business and is such a fan of the girl band Dream Sweet that pictures of them adorn the inside of his truck. He has a particular affinity for Lee Doona (Bae Suzy), the lead singer.
When he gets to the share house where he’s rented a room, he sees a woman smoking gold-foil-tipped cigarettes. She seems familiar but he can’t pinpoint where they’ve met. She sees the Dream Sweet hoodie he’s wearing — a supposed gift from his buddy that he ends up wanting back — and gets annoyed.
Won-jun keeps seeing the woman around the building, and she starts to think he’s some sort of stalker. Then he remembers where she’s seen her: She’s Lee Doona from Dream Sweet. He has to convince her that he’s not a fan, despite the hoodie she saw. But she just seems to be done with it all, including the attention being a K-pop star garnered.
As Won-jun is posting flyers offering his tutoring services, he runs into an old high-school girlfriend, Kim Jin-joo (Shin Ha-young); they go out for a beer and she tells him that she got into the same university where he’s going, so they’ll be seeing a lot of each other. It seems obvious that he still likes her.
When he comes back, he sees Doona sitting in the cold and snow. When she passes out, he accompanies her to the hospital and claims to be her guardian when she tells him she has no one to help her out. That turns her opinion of him, and she ends up spending days trying to get him to go get a bite to eat.
When they talk on the roof while he’s doing laundry early one morning, he finds out that she’s not into him “that way,” but that she rarely meets anyone she can consider a friend. But after a frustrating period where he loses a potential tutoring job, he sees someone take his number from a flyer, only to find out that it was Doona. He tells her off, but feels bad about it the next day and finally offers himself up to get a bite to eat. She makes a dramatic visit to him in class, and a friendship begins.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Doona! could be a K-drama version of Starstruck, with the genders reversed.
Our Take: The way the lovebirds in Doona! meet is pretty standard for romantic K-dramas: They meet and don’t get along at first. Then they find they actually like each other, but don’t start anything romantic at first. There are often complications, like old flames or other people getting in the way of the main characters’ happiness, but things tend to to work out.
At least the pairing here has a little different dynamic, given that he’s an ordinary college student and she’s a K-pop star who doesn’t want to be a star anymore. So there’s that part of it; Doona is depressed, and we’re not sure why. It could be the weight of fame was just something she couldn’t handle, or it could be family issues. But it’ll be interesting to see how her relationship with Won-jun will bring those issues to light.
Of course, there is also the matter of Jin-joo, who seems like a pretty nice person and the opposite of the bold Doona. Will things between her and Won-jun spark again or will his continued feelings for her slow things down with Doona? And, it does seem that at some point Doona will come out of her doldrums and perform again. How will her fame affect things with Won-jun? There are just enough variables here to make Doona! a bit more interesting than the average romantic K-drama.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: A soft-focus shot of Doona smoking and talking on the phone shows over the credits.
Sleeper Star: We like Kim Jin-joo as Shin Ha-young, simply because she’s the opposite of Doona in almost every way.
Most Pilot-y Line: One of Won-jun’s housemates gives him a long list of rules and stays in his room, but another says it’s a good place to be open and free. We’re not even sure how these opposite roommates are going to factor into the story, but it seemed to be one of those superfluous character bits that are rife in these kinds of K-dramas.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Doona! is a pretty standard romantic K-drama in a lot of ways, but the added dynamic of a regular guy and a depressed K-pop star falling for each other makes things just a little more interesting.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.