Prime Minister & I (Korean Drama with English subtitles)

Great story line and intriguing characters

I am currently watching this series online (it's my first Korean drama) and I'm enjoying it so much. Every episode makes me laugh out loud with the show's unmatched creativity in a part-Sounds of Music, part-Princess Diaries storyline. I highly recommend!

In THE PRIME MINISTER AND I director Lee So-Yeon founds a love affair in the most unlikely of sources, between a twenty-something female reporter for a scandal newspaper and the forty-two year old Prime Minister of South Korea. What makes this pairing unlikely is not the mere age difference but rather their divergent personalities. Im Yoona is the reporter who seeks only to uncover salacious gossip about celebrities. She is smart but immature in her perception of the world. For her, anyone of note is fair game to uncover dirt. Lee Beom-soo is the recently appointed Prime Minister and he is a stuffy martinet of a father who rules his three children with an iron hand. His wife was killed seven years earlier in an automobile accident and during the interim he has one set of skills that enables him to navigate flawlessly the byzantine pathways of Korean politics but he is totally inept at maintaining a private life. The two meet as she tries to covertly photograph him in what she deems a compromising situation. He catches her doing this and then incredibly enough she decides to pursue him romantically since her ailing father with Alzheimers is pushing her to marry him. The PM treats her the way he treats everyone else, with sarcasm and condescension. It is simply not credible that she would even consider him as a mate. In a drunken stupor, she begs him to marry her. Even more incredible he eventually agrees to a "contract" marriage. During their marriage both act with astounding prudery. They never kiss, hold hands, or see some bare flesh. They sleep in separate rooms. Now all of this is a huge pill for the viewer to swallow, but further muddying the dramatic waters is a series of equally hard to accept subplots. The PM's assistant (Chae Jung-An) is a female admirer of his from their college days who has loved him relentlessly for two decades. As is customary in Korean romantic dramas, someone close to the leads lies in a coma and it is the eventual unraveling of the coma patient that ties the loose plot strands into a vaguely defined whole. The key here is the word "vaguely." The entire plot has its gripping moments most of which revolve around key scenes of excessive sentimentalism again a Korean cinematic staple. But if one looks at the concatenation of one episode after another for the series run of seventeen episodes, one can almost see and hear the director tell the actors to engage in one incredible plot contrivance after another. Still by the time the series wound down I found myself nearly accepting these contrivances, but nearly is not good enough and this is why I give it only three stars.