Another one to add to the "pretty good early episodes but that's it" pile. Except this time, the 1st episode is actually hot garbage, then the next few episodes become surprisingly great once the script is flipped on its head, and after that, we're back to bad again.

Amazing to me how typical kdrama have had the same format of 16 episodes of 1 hour each for decades at this point…

And yet, most writers continuously can't manage to hit the 16 episodes count without adding pointless bloat. It's really not that complicated, just add side story elements that are relevant to the main narrative instead of boring slapstick that has nothing to do with it.

This one also has the additional problem of wanting to delay the main romance so much (because they hate each other) that eventually it becomes entirely impossible that they'd ever fall for each other. Their mutual dislike has been a central part of their character for too long, which is also an undesirable side effect of my point above on bloat. If they had properly mapped the story, this wouldn't have happened.

But it was doomed to fail anyway because they made the male lead way too toxic, like irreparably so. Somehow even worse than in Secret Garden and that's saying quite something.

It's a bit of a shame because the lead actors Kim Jae-wook and Krystal Jung were great, but their characters sucked. Unless your thing is emotionally and psychologically abusive men (I'm not judging)... don't watch this.