İyi Seyirler Dileriz.
My Country Calls (2010)
My Country Calls
국가가 부른다 / Secret Agent Miss Oh!
(May 2010 – June 2010)
who’s in it
Lee SooKyung (Loving You A Thousand Times)
Kim SangKyung (Lawyers)
Ryu Jin (Powerful Opponents, Really, Really Like You)
Horan (member if jazzy music group Clazziquai)
Hyun Woo (Pasta)
what’s it about
Lee SooKyung plays a chipmunk—though obviously not in the literal sense. She’s a wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, cute but overly chirpy critter-like character of a person. Our heroine is a beat cop, you see, and she’s blessed/cursed with a friendly, wholesome round face and large brown eyes filled with the fever of sincerity and self-delusion. She’s hapless at her job and, frankly, a bit of a dirty cop, but in the most G-rated and harmless way possible. She regularly rubs people the wrong way but she thinks herself the pillar of professionalism. Her Achilles Heel is her mother, of course, as a nuisance parent is always the woe of every kdrama heroine and My Country Calls does not deviate from this common formula, including the fact that her financial troubles are also the direct result of said parent’s troublemaking. Like mother like daughter, we learn quickly that self-reflection isn’t a strong suit for either woman. Officer Oh HaNa is both earnestly caring but also annoyingly meddlesome and—sigh—frustratingly naïve.
When she unwittingly helps the bad guys and interferes with a National Intelligence Agency investigation (multiple times), she gets on the wrong end of Kim SangKyung’s interest, a gruff NIA agent who is all business all the time. Not to mention, one who is starting to think that she’s a mastermind crook masquerading as a cop.
Likely, these two will eventually bridge the wide gulf between their personalities to develop a mutual attraction while going after the crime organization the NIA is trying to bring down. Ryu Jin also features as a peripheral love interest, and gorgeous crooner Horan also takes part in the criminal fun in her acting debut.
commitment
16 episodes
network
KBS
wildcard factor
Your patience and a large heaping plate of faith...faithful patience, shall I say?
And in a bit of fangirlness, I need to mention Hyun Woo, who plays a young NIA agent here. He’s simply adorable, just as darling here as he was in the exceptional drama Pasta. He was an idol chef there, in this drama, he’s an idol agent.
first impressions
SLOW. And not that funny. The show didn’t know if it wanted to be a romantic comedy or an action thriller and therefore decided to aim for both, missing the target by a mile. The first few episodes felt like a car ride on a country road filled with pot holes, bumpy and distracting and aimless. As a passenger, I kept wondering, “What is the point of this drama? Am I even going to care about these two people when they get more involved in one another’s lives?” The answer in my head kept replying in the negative.
Read more »
