Happy Ending Outside the Fence (2022)

An Ambitious Failure That I Still Kind of Liked

So there's a lot to appreciate about this series... and a ton of problems.

I really appreciated that the producers attempted to do something different by creating a complex plot with complex emotions and problems that don't really imitate any other BL that I've ever seen. The cinematography was quite nice and OST was great. Additionally, Ha Jong Woo brought an adorable and goofy demeanor to his character that reminded me of a labrador retriever. I can see how some people were annoyed by his spacey almost surfer-esque character, but I thought it was endearing. I also couldn't take my eyes off his lips. Also, a lot of people commented that they were annoyed by Im Too Chul's character, Kang Woo Joo. I have to disagree. He's got great comedic timing and without him this series would have been interminably dull. Ha Jong Woo's character, Han Tae Young was kind of flighty, and Karam's Cha Jung Woo and Leo's Kim Jung Hyun were very dour. If it had just been the three of them, the series would have felt to aimless and too dark. It needed Im Too Chul to keep things upbeat and pushing plot points that the other characters were too self-immersed focus on.

However, despite the producers attempts to do something different, they also lost sight of the forest through the trees. Somehow they thought it would be clever to never directly explain what Cha Jung Woo said or did at the beginning of the series to offend the legendary writer Jang Su Cheol. This was a huge mistake since the entire driving force of the series were the ramifications of this act. It's always possible that my confusion is a victim or poor subtitling, but I've read the comments on here and it seems many other people have the same issue.

Other glaring problems included the unfortunate choice of repeating scenes from the previous episode. I'm not talking about a 30 second, "previously on Happy Ending Romance..." kind of thing. I'm talking about whole scenes replayed. Like 10 minutes of a 30-minute episode were scenes from the previous episode. This happened more heavily in the early episodes, but it really sucked. It always sucks when shows do this! Do the creators really think we can't remember what happened half an hour ago (in this day and age of binge watching) or if watching weekly single episode roll-outs, that we can't remember what we watched last week? It's a little insulting to the viewers' time.

The show also spent a lot of it's time having Han Tae Young explain his infatuation with Cha Jung Woo's writing and how it made him quit trying to write and instead decided to focus on publishing. We got it! You don't have to have him explain this over and over and over. He explained to to Kang Woo Joo and then it felt like he covered it with Cha Jung Woo multiple times. Again, it feels like the creators are underestimating our intelligence. It would have been better to remove some of these scenes and instead built a better story around what Cha Jung Woo did initially to set off this chain of events.

It would be easy to blame the actors for how they presented their characters, and where they failed to make them seem real. There were were plenty of failures of this sort in this series. However, ultimately I blame the directors and writers. If the writers can't write a believable and multidimensional character, and if the director can't articulate and guide an actor to a nuanced performance that displays the full range of the character, then the writers should have written better characters, and the director should have done more rehearsals, or additional takes to coax those performances out of the actors. In this series Cha Jung Woo is portrayed as a wounded, fragile and depressed man with zero personality. He's not cute, nor interesting. He's just a boring sniveling baby that no one would like. So much so, that Han Tae Young falling in love with him is completely unbelievable. No one would like Cha Jung Woo. I don't care how much they loved his writing. The writers needed to write a better character for Cha Jung Woo, and the director needed to a ensure a better performance out of Karam so that he does something or says something that makes it believable that Han Tae Young is falling in love with him. There was ZERO chemistry between these two characters. I also think that failure of the show to reveal Cha Jung Woo's "original sin" added to this problem. If we knew what he did, we may have been more sympathetic to his depression, but not knowing what it was makes us think he should get over himself already. And this is where the series really failed. They failed to put forth a couple that you were rooting for. You sort of wanted Han Tae Young to run in the other direction. Not only was Cha Jung Woo a risky investment for his publishing house, he also seems like he'd be a sucky boyfriend.

My criticism of one dimensional characters continues with Kim Jung Hyun. This character in my humble opinion had the greatest challenge, and it totally failed. The writers, directors and producers of the show thought they were being clever with this character by being deliberately opaque with his motivations, but in the end the performance of the character (again, due to writing and direction, not the actor's talents) felt incredibly one note. It's like they told him to just be a moody bad guy. They didn't give him any lines or scenes to hang the characters true feelings on. This wouldn't have had to give away the series' twist either. There are many possible ways that they could have portrayed Kim Jung Hyun as caring about Cha Jung Woo, without only making him look only like a controlling bad guy. With a little nuance they could have made you feel that he cared about Cha Jung Woo and their relationship, while still allowing that creeping feeling entering in the story that maybe Kim Jung Hyun was still up to something no good. Then when the final episodes take place, you might feel the pull of this three way relationship and the pain of all the characters, but instead you're just happy that Kim Jung Hyun who was portrayed only as a villain for too much of the series, is finally getting his punishment. It's a cheap trope instead of a thoughtful character arc. How much more would we have been shocked by Kim Jung Hyun trying to block Cha Jung Woo from writing, if we saw Kim Jung Hyun being very loving to Cha Jung Woo to his face, and then doing this stuff behind his back. We would have thought he was a terrible two-face liar. But in the end, when the truth came out, we would have been able to identify with his loving side. As presented, even though he was motivated to do something good for Cha Jung Woo, he couldn't surmount his villain status and we just don't really care about him.

In the end, I still enjoyed watching a BL drama that attempted to tackle something other than love for love's sake. A crush is never enough for an entire series plot. This unique plot gave the characters something to care about other than the "will he or won't he fall in love with me" trope. Unfortunately, with the execution of this series they made things unnecessarily confusing by never revealing an important plot point, portraying characters to one-dimensionally, and most importantly, by forgetting to develop an actual love story.

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