Hit the Top (2017)

Let me start about my saying I am a huge romantic. It doesn't take much for me to root for a couple and I almost always with very few exceptions root for the endgame OTP from the beginning until the end. I usually don't watch dramas that don't seem to promise much romance. However I started this one not expecting it to be a very romantic drama, it was not advertised like it would be. I started it because I'm a fan of Yoon Shi Yoon and because I was interested in the plot and the teasers looked very funny. I'm a huge Kpop fan with an interest in the history of Kpop and it's beginnings in the mid-to-late 1990's, so the drama being about both struggling modern day idol trainees and a 90's idol top star who travels to the future sounded right up my alley. I also was intrigued by the father-son connection and I'm a sucker for good heartwarming family drama especially of the "Surprise, You're a Daddy" variety. So I was expecting a drama about struggles of youth in music industry, friendship, family, comedy, and maybe just a dash of romance.

At first I really loved this drama, I was raving about it everywhere, convincing everyone I could to watch it. The thing that shined the most in the early episodes was the comedy, it was gold! The jokes were rapid fire, I still remember many of them and laugh. But even in all the other aspects I was not disappointed at all. I shipped Ji-hoon and Woo-seung, because I found his crush on her really cute and he was such a nice guy. Woo-seung was the only thing that was a little disappointing at first, I liked her character, but the acting was pretty bad imo and I usually don't complain about acting, but here it was sometimes distractingly bad. But even though I shipped them and thought the drama was maybe setting them up to be endgame, I was fine with them not ending up together and didn't expect the drama to focus much on this romance aspect. I did not see Hyun-jae and Woo-seung as a possibility at all, I found it a bit gross because of the Hyun-jae likely being Ji-hoon's biological dad, so he'd be ending up with his son's crush. I really truly did not think the writers would go there. Sure there were signs in the beginning like the kisses, but those were clearly jokes, so I didn't take them seriously. I wish I did.

It wasn't until episode 17-18 that I started to realize the drama was not going the way I wanted or expected it to go. Maybe I should have realized earlier, but when Hyun-jae cuts his hair to a modern hairstyle ditching the glorious 90's hair he had before, I finally understood that he was going to be the romantic lead and this was going to be a rom-com from that point onward, not the sit-com like feel it had before. He was no longer going to be an entertaining comedic character with many flaws but a huge heart, but just a bland male lead as bland as his modern hairstyle with no personality to speak of. Suddenly there was a love triangle between father and son over a girl. I normally am not fond of love triangles, but this one was uniquely horrible. And that girl once a competent independent woman was reduced to a helpless damsel in distress who acted completely illogically just so two boys could fight over "saving" her. For several episodes it was literally a competition between the two men over who could be their first to save her, with the episode ending on a cliffhanger of them both running to save. It made no sense, but Hyun-jae won the contest by saving her the most times so therefore they became a couple or something. I don't know, they had no chemistry and the story did nothing to make up for that. The leads having feelings for each other was just told to us, but never shown, so when they get together it's sudden. Oh and the cliches, oh the romance cliches. Early on the drama was poking fun at them (a spinning accidental kiss in a car where they pan out and show that the car is actually inexplicably spinning). But then it plays them painfully straight not an ounce of comedy left, I cringed so many times. I'm fine with these cliches sometimes, when there is chemistry and a believable build up, but this was a relationship built entirely on cliches, that was nothing but cliches, with no depth or true romance at all.

In the end it becomes a mediocre or even bad rom-com (and very light of the comedy for that matter), not the amazing sit-com/variety/family drama it was in the first half. All the other characters and plots are thrown to the wayside in favor of the lead's boring romance, a romance so bland that the blandness rubs onto everyone else including the leads who no longer feel like the actual characters but merely placeholders in an execise of how (not) to write kdrama romance. After episode 22 I finally dropped this drama, only to read recaps for the rest of the episodes and watch the last few episodes. I still foolishly held out hope that maybe it could recapture a bit of the magic it had in the beginning, but each recap just seemed worse and worse. When I picked it up again I did not feel like I missed anything, the time-travel mystery was obvious to me from the beginning, the father/son connection that had so much promise in the beginning (and was presented as the main plot initially) amounted to essentially nothing (utterly ruined by the love triangle), all the other side plots and side characters got peanuts in the end. Even Ji-hoon, arguably the protagonist in the first half, was reduced to side character in the second and therefore it no longer seemed necessary to give his character the proper development and story he deserved. From an ensemble cast with so much potential, to focusing exclusively on the main leads (and really only the male lead, since the female lead's development was abandoned and she became nothing more than his girlfriend in the end). Maybe it would've worked okay if the main leads were as interesting as they were in the beginning, but no, everything and I mean everything had to be sacrificed for the sake of the OTP. And since these two characters were utterly incompatible romantically in the beginning they had to become different, very boring people in the end to make it work.

Had I reviewed this drama when I first watched in while it was still airing, I probably would've given it one star because I was so frustrated and disappointed with how it turned out. Now with a lot of time passed since I watched it I feel a rating right in the middle is perfect. The first half was maybe the best thing ever, the second half was close to the worst thing ever. It was a classic bait-and-switch. The writers knew what they were doing. Maybe they did it because of audience feedback (lots of knetz complaining about the lack of romance and YSY no getting "enough" screentime) or maybe they intended it from the start. I don't really care either way. I felt cheated and betrayed. Some people will be okay with the bait-and-switch, some will probably even enjoy the second half more. I do not understand those people. If you just really wanted to watch a rom-com, watch a good one, not the pathetic attempt at one this drama has. So in the end, all I can recommend is maybe the first half of this drama if you are okay with leaving things hanging and just want to laugh. Other than that I cannot recommend it.

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