With the weather cold and the pandemic continuing to force people inside, there’s no better time to curl up in front of the TV or computer screen to binge watch some shows. While the options for big blockbuster films or hit US shows may be dwindling, Netflix thankfully has a section teeming with content for bingers to enjoy: K dramas.
Because of Korea’s relatively successful handling of the pandemic, dramas have still been able to be filmed and produced safely during social distancing. Continued production coupled with increased viewership has lead to many dramas enjoying large success over the past year, such as Crash Landing on You, Itaewon Class, Hospital Playlist, and Record of Youth.
One such drama that enjoyed similar success was the drama Start Up: the story of young aspiring businessmen and women hoping to change the world by creating the next biggest company. The drama stars, Suzy, Nam Joo-hyuk, and Kim Sun-ho who, while pursuing their dreams of success, get tangled in a complicated love triangle. While the concept itself was charming and shows the passion and tenacity of young entrepreneurs, the show ends up fizzling out as it reaches the end of its story.
*Spoilers*
The show begins by laying out what will become the foundation of the love triangle and main conflict between the three main characters. The first episode flashes back to 15 years ago, showing a young Seo Dal-mi, the main female protagonist, and her stressful familial life. Her parents get divorced, forcing Dal-mi and her older sister In-jae to choose which parent they want to live with. Dal-mi chooses to live with her father while her older sister In-jae chooses to live with her mother and her mother’s new husband. This causes immense conflict between the two sisters which will follow them into adulthood. Due to an unfortunate accident, Dal-mi’s father ends up passing away and Dal-mi is left to live with her grandmother who owns a small hot-dog shop.
Meanwhile, the audience is introduced to a young Han Ji-pyeong: an orphan who won a small virtual investment competition. Dal-mi’s grandmother sees Ji-pyeong looking for shelter one night in the rain and feels sympathetic for this morose and stubborn teenage boy. She offers him her hot-dog shop as a place to stay. But in exchange, he must write letters to Dal-mi in order to console her. As they both attempt to pick a pen name for Ji-pyeong, they spot a story on the front page of the newspaper, showing a young boy who won a local math competition. They end up choosing his name, Nam Do-san, and begin to write letters to Dal-mi from that point forward.
Dal-mi ends up slowly falling in love with the writer of the letters as they ease her sorrow and bring her happiness. 15 years later, after Dal-mi has just quit her job, she also continues to talk of Nam Do-san and wishes to meet him desperately. Little does she know, Nam Do-san is struggling as the CEO of Samsan Tech: a small, start up tech company run by Do-san and his two best friends in the attic of a rundown apartment. Ji-pyeong, on the other hand, has become a majorly successful venture capitalist.
Through a series of events, Ji-pyeong finds the real Nam Do-san. He tells Do-san about how he’d used his name to write letters and tries to convince him to pretend to be the “Nam Do-San” from the letters. He pressures him into attending a networking event with Dal-mi. Ji-pyeong tells Nam Do-san to lie about his company and helps him appear much more wealthy and successful in order to help Dal-mi impress her sister. The story then continues as Do-san starts to fall in love with Dal-mi, despite the fact he knows he’s not the one who wrote the letters. Ji-pyeong also starts to catch feelings for Dal-mi as well, but is ultimately frustrated because he can’t reveal he is the writer of the letters.
Overall, the show begins very exciting; full of passion and energy as the audience watches Dal-mi, Do-san, and their team build a company from the bottom up. They face many different challenges such as competing with Dal-mi’s sister, In-jae, and her start up team, struggling to find funding for their AI based app, and the later unravelling of Ji-pyeong and Do-san’s secret to Dal-mi.
But after Dal-mi discovers the secret around the letters, the show begins to lose steam and the excitement surrounding it. The team gets separated at one point as their company is acquired by a large tech company and subsequently everyone is fired except for Do-san and his 2 best friends, Yong-san and Chul-san. This leads to a three year time gap where Do-san and his friends work in Silicon Valley to complete the requirements of the contract while Dal-mi stays in Korea and goes to work for her sister’s company.
The biggest problem in the show is Ji-pyeong’s character plays too big of a role within the story to make him a side character, but his role is not big enough to be a main character. His feelings towards Dal-mi seem very undeveloped and thrown on as a ‘plot point’, as they don’t interact much during the course of the show.
Because of this, while Nam Do-san’s boyish and geeky charm shines throughout the show, Ji-pyeong’s character seems to diminish Do-san’s appeal to the audience. Even though I was definitely team Do-san, Ji-pyeong’s ill-tempered yet secretive, thoughtful attitude coax the audience into favoring him at times and undermine Do-san as the male lead. He consistently barks his, at times, harsh criticism at the team yet behind the scenes silently roots for Samsan’s success. His support can be seen through his attempts to guide Samsan down the right path in order to achieve what they want.
His character does develop as he struggles to mentor Samsan Tech. Ji-pyeong comes to realize his morose and brutally honest personality affects other people, but his ending leaves the viewer unsatisfied. He ends up investing in the company, despite previously stating that he would never, and continues being the team’s mentor throughout the end of the show. He also ends up investing in a company that provides orphans with aid and wishes to guide orphans into success, mirroring his own past with Dal-mi’s grandmother.
In order to fully convince the audience to root for Do-san, they needed to make Ji-pyeong’s character less prominent or alter his story-line to make Do-san seem like the obvious choice for Dal-mi at the end of the story. The audience instead is left feeling bad for Ji-pyeong at the end of this story as he seems to not have gotten his “happy ending” unlike Do-san and Dal-mi.
Despite all of this, Start Up was a fun and creative way to show the ins and outs and inevitable hardships of the start-up industry. Overall I’d rate it a 7/10 for its creativity and relative excitement during each episode.
Kommentare