Vineyard Man is a less-known romantic comedy from a couple years ago. I’m not sure why it’s unpopular as it stars Yoon Eun Hye of Goong ,and is one of the few modern kdramas I’ve seen where the hero actually isn’t a jerk. Then again, heroes who act like jerks seem to be a requirement for most kdramas, so maybe that’s it.
YEH plays Ji Hyun, a young fashion designer in Seoul who gets fired after her manager steals her design. That same day, her great-uncle comes to Seoul and tells her family that he’ll leave his 1000 acre vineyard to Ji Hyun if she’ll live and work on the vineyard for a year. Eager to get and sell the vineyard, Ji Hyun’s family sends her there, content to let her work to give them the easy life. Like most irresponsible kdrama families who get their daughters in trouble, this is supposed to be cute. There, she learns that the overseer of the vineyard is Taek Gi, a man who she had a misunderstanding with in Seoul that resulted in both spending the night in jail. Eventually, though, they overcome their differences and the expected happens.
It isn’t my favorite kdrama, but it certainly isn’t my least favorite, either. The first few episodes showed promise, but also hit a bunch of my irritation points. For one thing, too much of the humor was in humiliating the characters, a type of humor that’s never appealed to me. Then there was the nature of the misunderstanding, which I think went too far, and petty little revenge bits that just seemed to make things worse, and weren’t funny to me. Thankfully, they didn’t last long.
The big thing, though, was Ji Hyun’s manager stealing her design. Because of course a successful career woman is going to be so threatened by a part time intern that she’s going to steal her design and deliberately sabotage her chances in the industry. Yes, I know things like that do happen, but kdramas’ vilification of smart, successful women with careers and/or goals to make the often flaky, irresponsible, and aimless “cute” heroines look good is one of my major problems with them. (The other is the vilification of family as something to be “beaten”-and I’ve long since accepted that, more often than not, I will hate the “cute” families, sympathize with the ones I’m supposed to hate, and be fine with the ones in between. Then there’s the fact that most “heroes” are alpha jerks to some degree, treat the heroine with disrespect half the time, and she normally ends up suffering in the name of his angst.) Tangent aside, they do, thankfully, make up for that somewhat with another character later on.
I liked that, for once, it was the guy who figured out he liked the girl first, and sat around angsting over it while she was with the other guy, and that he pursued her in the end. (Complete with bus chasing and making out.) Taek Gi stuttering and trying (and failing) to tell Ji Hyun that he liked her was adorable.
I also liked how they handled the other parties-Ji Hyun’s senior classmate Dr. Kim, and Taek Gi’s ex-girlfriend Su Jin-in the normal kdrama love square. For once, it’s the other guy who’s portrayed as a jerk, and the other girl who’s written as being likable and sympathetic. Dr. Kim wasn’t portrayed nearly as negatively as most kdrama other women, of course, but I’ll take what I can get. And even though I don’t like Dr. Kim, I do like the indication at the end that they’ll get together, even moreso since it wasn’t just tacked on to the end, but they were shown as getting along and probably being compatible earlier in the series.
