For the longest time I’ve been looking forward to this show to finally finish airing. Having looked up some spoilers in the comment section, things seemed more than great, yay happy ending, yay no breakup, yay wholesomeness. As such I could not help myself and hopped on the hype train and so I ended up having too many expectations leading to some disappointment. Don’t get me wrong HomeCha is a great kdrama, but it’s not nearly as great as I hoped it would be.

About the Kim Seon Ho - Shin Mina OTP pairing, I can only say that I have seen onscreen couples with better chemistry before, but it was fine. The rest of the cast did a phenomenal job. I liked every single supporting actor with one exception and that exception is only due to my personal bias, so I won’t elaborate on that. Even the child actors were surprisingly good.

The story is typical romcom story, without the downright magical setting I don’t think I would have praised it, but It worked very well for the most part.
I have two major problems with the story. Firstly the love triangle felt very artificial. Yes it’s great how and how fast they wrapped it up, it’s also great how civilized the characters were about it and even the bromance aspect of it was decent. I felt the only point of the triangle is that Soompi could write an exciting article about how we should look forward to it. Oh well, I realize I’m probably being unfair with this statement. So feel free to ignore this point, overall this triangle execution is still above average. The bigger issue is episode 15, or more specifically the reveal of the main mystery, why is Hong Doo Shik living the life that he is living, why did he retire to his hometown. Frankly the whole explanation made me angry. It’s beyond nonsensical. Not only did he turn the other cheek again and again whenever someone blamed him, but he also blamed himself for such a stupid noble reason. I guess I could say that I had my concerns about his characterization before, but when the final reveal came I could only roll my eyes in frustration. I think the writer herself had no idea what tragic backstory she is going to go with up until that point, so she kept procrastinating as long as she could and in episode 15 she handled it like a technician, by then knowing that the show was already an unbreakable success. I wish I had known in advance, I would have just fastforward buttoned all those flashbacks, oh well.

The product placements were often pretty immersion breaking. The writing interns were not on top of their game, at least when it comes to the smart incorporation of product placements. PP should be out of the way, not directly influencing a main characters personality and that’s exactly what happened here. The whole explanation about Hye Jin liking brandname stuff, designer bags, designer shoes is just too much. There is also that scene, when she bought a 5 million Won necklace, despite being in the red. (and later on said necklace reappeared again in a comparably stupid way) So yes the drama is so full of product placement related content, that at times I felt I should be paid for watching it, not the other way around.

The most comparable kdrama that I’ve seen is When the Weather is Fine. The story is pretty similar overall, but I think that drama is much better up until the production team COMPLETELY ruined it somewhere near the end. Homecha despite not being quite as good in the early episodes at least provided us with a nicely wrapped up happy ending & I can grumble about ep15 all I want, but that’s not nearly enough to ruin the drama for me, so with that in mind I’ll go with the rating of 8,5.