Thoughts on Successful Story of a Bright Girl, or…The Cute, The Immature and The Evil

A while back I was browsing the internet and I found a little blog community of Korean learners. One of them created a little survey thing that all the members took, and among the questions asked were what the answerer’s favorite dramas were (since many of us Korean learners end up watching them whether we like them or not). I read several of them, and one I gave especial weight to was filled out by one of the few men in the group. I figured that if another guy recommended a drama, it might be more up my alley than a drama recommended by a woman.

That was how I heard of this drama, Successful Story of a Bright Girl. It’s from 2002, which makes it a bit ancient by drama standards (it’s hard to believe 2002 was 12 years ago now, sheesh), but I actually liked it a lot. It was considerably less pretentious than a lot of today’s dramas. That was a definite plus for me, because the older I get, the more I get fed up with the preaching and sanctimony that’s prevalent in most media.


Plot

Blah, blah, spoiler alert and all that.

Yang-Soon is a poor country girl who lives with her grandmother. Her parents are con artists who are constantly on the run from the people they’ve swindled. One day, she’s pulled out of class by two women who are owed money by her parents. They decide that if her parents won’t pay them what she owes them, their daughter will have to settle the debt. They get her a job as a housemaid in Seoul, where she’ll work until the debt is paid off.

Her job as a housemaid involves cleaning two houses: In one house, the residents are a female executive from Snowy Cosmetics and her spoiled brat adult daughter Na-Hee. In the other house is Gi-Tae, whose parents ran Snowy Cosmetics until they died rescuing him from drowning. Gi-Tae has lived in the house alone since he was a teenager. Gi-Tae is now the president of Snowy, but due to his unconventional life circumstances, he hasn’t fully matured, and exhibits many childish tendencies. Na-Hee is Gi-Tae’s girlfriend, though he doesn’t particularly have much affection for her. Unbeknownst to Gi-Tae, his uncle and younger cousin Joon-Tae, both executives at Snowy, are plotting to take over the company themselves, leaving him out in the cold.

Yang-Soon and Gi-Tae don’t get along at first, but despite his immature behavior, Gi-Tae is captivated by Yang-Soon’s strong-willed and smart personality. When Yang-Soon wins an art contest for Snowy Cosmetics, she’s able to pay off her debt and quit working as a maid. However, when she tries to return to her house in the country, she finds out that Gi-Tae, desperate to maintain contact with her, has bought her house. Desperate to get away from him, Yang-Soon hops a bus to another region, where she gets a job at a branch of Snowy Cosmetics.

A year later, Yang-Soon returns to Seoul as a member of her branch’s baseball team, where she’s reunited with Gi-Tae and the friends she made in Seoul a year earlier. Her return, however, coincides with the final stage of Joon-Tae and his father’s plan to take down Gi-Tae. When Joon-Tae successfully steals all of Gi-Tae’s property, including leadership of Snowy Cosmetics, Gi-Tae is lost and must rely on Yang-Soon to get back on his feet.


Writing and Acting

The acting was surprisingly good. Jang Na-Ra, who played Yang-Soon, gave a really moving performance when she was crying over the death of her grandmother. Although...they showed the scene again in a flashback during a later episode, and her acting didn’t seem as good then. I guess I was just feeling her emotion more when it actually happened.

Some of the writing was a bit cheesy (of course), and a lot of the scenes and moments had a corny feel to them (of course). What can you say though? It was cute. That's all they were really going for.


Music

Here are the songs I identified:

Olli’s Club – It’s Allright
Willa Ford – I Wanna Be Bad
Ringtone from “The Nutcracker”
조장혁 – Love Song
Dance-pop version of Ellie Greenwich’s “Sunshine After the Rain”
“Just the Two of Us”
The Commodores - Easy
Patti Austin – Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
혼지시킨 사랑
둥근 해가 떴습니다
유미 – 사랑은 언제나 목마르다
“How Deep is Your Love” cover
“(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons”
Plus One – Last Flight Out


English

Words: scan, makeup show, before & after, T-bone steak, panel, hot pink, test, naissance (French, actually), marketing team, cable car, terminal, fair play, concept, romance, fax

There were also a few cases where I couldn’t tell whether they were using English.


Hey, I Know That Person

The grandmother who was in Protect the Boss and Assorted Gems was here as (again) a grandmother. Yang-Soon’s grandmother, to be exact.

There was a security guard who reminded me of Eun-Seol’s father from Protect the Boss, but I’m not sure if it was the same guy. It was a small role, so I don’t even know if he was credited.

The actress who played Sam-Dong’s mother in Dream High played Na-Hee’s mother here.


Other Observations

This one really got me worked up emotionally. The villain, Joon-Tae, was so evil that I literally wanted to kill him with my own hands. At one point in the middle of the story, Gi-Tae actually held him hostage with a knife, and I was actually hoping he’d get stabbed to death right then and there. That’s how much I hated him. He gets his comeuppance at the end (of course), but he doesn’t die. I think the scene of him nearly getting killed by Gi-Tae was supposed to be a substitute for him actually getting killed, because the writers knew the audience would hate him that badly, but didn’t want things to get gory. A wise choice, I’d say.

Yang-Soon was one of the most beautiful female leads in any drama I’ve seen. She seemed like the All-Korean Girl. A very wholesome, sweet beauty. What a gem of a woman.

There was a minor character who seemed to be written out near the end. She wasn’t really consequential, but it didn’t seem right that she just kind of disappeared. I guess they felt that the character wasn’t important enough to keep bringing the actress in, since she had almost no lines and only served as an extra set of hands.

Like so many of these dramas, the ending felt a bit haphazard, but it was good enough. There was a part of me that didn’t want the two lead characters to end up together, but predictably, they did. They weren’t a bad couple, it’s just that their relationship seemed like it could’ve worked as a temporary period of helping each other, rather than a true love that was meant to last forever.


Final Thoughts

I really liked this one. As I said before, I appreciated the lack of preachiness and pretension, and the fact that I was able to get so emotionally involved with it indicates its merit. What the heck. I feel like giving it a fairly high ranking.

1. Beethoven Virus (5)
2. City Hunter (7)
3. 49 Days (9)
4. Dream High (13)
5. Unexpected You (4)
6. Successful Story of a Bright Girl (15)
7. Sandglass (11)
8. Three Dads, One Mom (2)
9. Assorted Gems (14)
10. Delightful Girl Choon-Hyang (10)
11. Ad Genius Lee Tae-Baek (12)
12. Lovers in Paris (1)
13. Hwang Jin-Yi (6)
14. Spring Day (3)
15. Protect the Boss (8)