The creative team behind Strong Woman Do Bong Soon assembled all the ingredients necessary for a delightful screwball comedy. Fun wacky premise? Yes—a diminutive woman is born with the strength of your typical superhero. Of course, she wants to go through life without being noticed, so she must hide this gift. Charming and beautiful lead actors with good chemistry? Yes—but then we expect that from every K-drama at this point. A powerful man in need of protection? Yes—a CEO accustomed to being in charge must hire the Strong Woman to be his body guard. Naturally, their agendas clash to create comedic plot points. Villains appropriate to a screwball comedy? Yes—not one but two dysfunctional families and a group of inept mobsters are the comic foils to our two heroes. Action sequences in keeping with the screwball premise? Yes—at one point, the titular Strong Woman singlehandedly brawls with 30 mobsters and vanquishes them all in true cartoon-violence style. That is to say, it’s both funny and satisfying. Having assembled these ingredients, the creative team delivers a finished product that delivers on the promise of its premise. For much of the time, Strong Woman Do Bong Soon is a textbook example of what a viewer would want from a screwball comedy.

But this creative team was not content with the strong comedic elements they compiled. They must have concluded the story needed some drama too. So, to their wacky tale featuring cartoonish-feats of strength, leads squabbling with parents whose goals for their kids differ from the kids' own goals for funny, if typical, family conflict, and a half-hearted but light love triangle, this creative team threw into the mix the following additional and super-amusing ingredients: brutal, violent misogyny; kidnapping and torture; multiple ways to ridicule and demean gay men; and turning domestic violence into a joke. To say these elements do not mesh with the elements discussed in the fist paragraph would be to grossly understate the degree to which Strong Woman Do Bong Soon went off the rails as a series.

Once the viewer decides no longer to overlook the brutality of scenes that involve the stalking of women, the beating of women, the mental and physical intimidation of women after their kidnapping; once the viewer can no longer stomach the tired, cliched portrayals of gay men whose only purpose in the story is to make the point that being gay is disgusting and gross and to serve as the butt of jokes for others; once the viewer decides that domestic violence is never funny even if the perpetrator is the wife rather than the husband—well, once the viewer really reflects on those things Strong Woman Do Bong Soon ceases to function as an innocuous screwball comedy. At that point, it’s just an unwatchable mess.

And that’s a shame, because when the series wasn’t being actively misogynistic, insultingly homophobic, or miscasting a social problem for comedy, the rest of it was quite entertaining. This show was popular in its day—and plenty of fans continue to choose to overlook the issues I mentioned above, precisely because the screwball comedy ingredients actually deliver effective screwball comedy. But I cannot imagine people will watch this mess in the future and think it aged well.