In The Poetics, Aristotle noted that beginning dramatists tend to be adept at creating believable characters and moments, but often struggle to fit them into tightly constructed plots. City Hunter, oddly enough, suffers from exactly the opposite problem. The overall story structure is fairly sound, with a compelling through-line and decent pacing. Unfortunately, the devil is in the details. Individual scenes make little sense, with character motivations that shift on a whim depending on the screenwriter’s immediate needs. It doesn’t help that the characters themselves (and, in the case of the leads, the actors who play them) seem completely out of place in the world the script tosses them into. For the sake of the Republic of Korea, I hope that the HR department at the real Blue House is a better judge of competence than whoever assumed that Park Min Young would make a great secret service agent or that Lee Min Ho was an MIT-trained PhD. I’m willing to suspend disbelief to an extent, but when the character who’s supposed to be the show’s resident super genius resorts to dropping flowerpots on his beloved’s head in an attempt to incapacitate/flirt with her I’m out. The sheer incompetence on the micro level is particularly frustrating because on the macro level the show is dealing with genuinely relevant and intriguing problems, ranging from age-old questions of justice vs. vengeance and vigilantism vs. the rule of law to more modern issues of affordable health care and access to education. It’s a show that could have worked, and worked really well. The narrative architecture is there, but perhaps they should have brought in a novice writer to do the decorating.