The flaws of “Now We Are Breaking Up” are so numerous and comprehensive that evaluating it feels more like issuing an autopsy report than a typical review. In the event any reader requires a synopsis, a successful fashion photographer (Jang Ki Yong’s Jae Guk) and a clothing designer (Song Hye Kyo’s Young Eun) romance each other while attempting to overcome the many obstacles that seek to disrupt their relationship. There’s more but it’s not necessary to delve into beyond that one sentence.

If the production early on seemed to have one viable strength, it was the pairing of Kim Joo Heon’s PR firm CEO Do Hoon and Choi Hee Seo’s mercurial Chi Sook. That they were the most colorful personalities on this drama should be considered a scientifically proven fact. That they would wind up as the secondary romantic couple was obvious from early on. That the entertainment value would noticeably increase each time they were together on screen (for a while) was plain. And then once they were together, Do Hoon insisted that Chi Sook drink tea instead of wine. He declined any physical contact. He basically seemed bent on discontinuing anything she did for fun. The actors shouldn’t carry the blame here as both from the drop portrayed the characters as vibrant and warm. The writing, sadly, for this subplot was determined to take this drama’s most engaging characters and bleach them with a concentrated boredom solution.

Although it was never a prominent arc, one of the welcome diversions through the first half of its run was the antagonistic but flirty banter between Oh He Sun’s layabout rich boy Chi Hyung and Yura’s no-nonsense Hye Rin. The opposites attract relationship trope is popular because it’s like the equivalent of a layup in basketball - anyone with any basic skill can accomplish it. But after regular, albeit intermittent, screen time after Chi Hyung’s introduction for the next few episodes, this narrative essentially vanishes.

That’s not all the subplots though. Several episodes in, Young Eun’s father retires from his school principal position which then launches her mother’s seemingly long-planned scheme to pursue divorce and independence. It would seem that she long held a grudge for being left managing the household and felt unappreciated. How this manifested were scenes where the father would discover that daily tasks around the house were more difficult that he imagined, became angry, demanded help from the mother who would then mock his inability and refuse to help him. The entire storyline was unnecessary and meant less time for what might have been (hypothetically) more compelling viewing. It was made worse by repeating in near verbatim form the scene with one household activity after another - breakfast, cleaning, laundry, etc.

And there’s still another secondary storyline. Park Hyo Joo’s Mi Suk had been a runway model but her glory days are long behind her. Her husband is hitting on a younger woman at work. Her two best friends are living the glamorous single life. Her mother-in-law is a monster. And then she gets a terminal cancer diagnosis. What follows is one of the few times that “Now We Are Breaking Up” manages to connect a measurable sequence with consistent emotional resonance. She faces the grim diagnosis head on. She strengthens her friendships with Young Eun and Chi Sook. She shines as Jae Guk photographs her. And she makes an out-of-retirement victory lap appearance as a model. Had the storyline ended here, this would have been a solitary bright spot but instead, her character elects to befriend the husband’s admirer and recruit her as her replacement and it’s given an almost matter-of-fact treatment as if a terminally ill woman would ordinarily dismiss the anger and feelings of betrayal to reach out to her husband’s mistress with friendly gestures. It’s such an exotically bizarre turn to take that even the would-be-mistress is flummoxed by the sequence. But does any party take notice of the obvious madly waving red flag? Nope.

As for the primary arc of the romance between Young Eun and Jae Guk, it earns a place on the podium of most bland and passionless couples to see the screen in recent memory. Jae Guk is primarily a one dimensional character except for the rare scene where he is actively working as a photographer. His conversations with friends, family and, in particular, with Young Eun are a cycle of lifeless expressions, monotone delivery and rehashed subject matter. The central conflict propped up against our romance is that Jae Guk’s older brother, now deceased, had a relationship with Young Eun while engaged to another woman. It is somewhat of a provincial, old-fashioned conflict which doesn’t translate particularly well to an audience that isn’t always steeped in longstanding Korean cultural norms. Still, even if it was a compelling dilemma for Jae Guk, the exposition of it by interactions with his adoptive mother (Cha Hwa Yeon’s wealthy socialite Hye Ok) and his brother’s ex-fiancee (Yoon Jung Hee’s department store exec Yoo Jung) should be filled with unrestrained emotional outbursts of anger, resentment, jealousy, blame and grief. Instead, it’s three characters, each of them in an endlessly mechanical and mundane manner, sleepwalking through generic dialogue.

Relatively more positive thanks to a steady diet of work crises, Young Eun has some depth as a character, both individually and in her relationships with her friends, family and colleagues. The portrayal of Young Eun, disappointingly, is irrefutably bad. Song Hye Kyoo did not earn her A List Status by accident. She has a long and accomplished resume’. And she may not be a naturally dynamic actor, but her performance here is unrecognizable against her previous work. Whether Song Hye Kyo was following an editorial decision for Young Eun to be an expressionless automaton or she was left to her own devices to interpret the character in such a manner, it is a colossal bomb. The character has many admirable qualities - perseverance with her work and loyalty for her friends among others - but none of them connect to a viewer through Song Hye Kyo’s wooden performance. What would be a compelling drama (or documentary) is one that follows how Song Hye Kyo terminates her current representation and finds a new agency that can keep her away from an insufferable dud like this going forward.

“Now We Are Breaking Up” is a bad show; a really, really bad show with a long list of unnecessary subplots and superfluous characters, a bleak desert in place of a primary narrative and scant redeeming qualities of any kind to speak of. Anyone that was central to its creation should be considered potentially contagious with lousy judgment and possible cosmic-level curses and avoided at the longest distances possible.