Review of Emergency Couple /
응급남녀

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m watching.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

This blog post is a part of the series I’ve been running on my blog where I revisit old haunts. I’ve been watching Korean dramas since I was thirteen years old, as a middle schooler watching The Heirs for the first time, and I’ve come so far since. I lived in Korea twice for study abroad, in Busan and Seoul, and I speak a decent amount of Korean. It was interesting the second time I studied abroad that I realized I could really start understanding the Korean in the dramas.

It’s been eleven years since Emergency Couple came out, and I can’t believe it’s been that long. I watched this show ten years ago in 2015, when I was still in my second year of high school, and in some ways it feels like it was just yesterday when I watched that. It’s fascinating to also see how far Korean dramas have come in this time, as they feel like so much higher quality, even though the 2014 shows were still pretty high quality.

So in many ways it was fascinating to revisit this show, and the some of the older ones, in particular because of how the world has changed when it comes to television. Having a blog like this will continue tracking that, as I hope in ten years I can come back to this page and see how my thoughts have changed then, too.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much.

Two former lovers, much to their chagrin, find out they’re doing their medical residencies in the same hospital.

Straight off the bat, I would say this is a show that shows life is funny and a series of coincidences. Our two main characters are Jin-hee and Chang-min, and they were once in a very serious relationship when they were young adults. He was a medical school student, and she a dietitian, but when they wanted to get married, their families were very against the notion of them getting together.

Chang-min’s family, who were wealthy, threatened to cut him off if he married her, and he has to quit his dreams of becoming a doctor to go through with their marriage, as he won’t be able to financially survive without them. He becomes a pharmaceutical salesman to make ends meet, but he’s incredibly depressed about his position.

Jin-hee also isn’t handling the situation quite well, and their new situation is what ultimately destroys their love for each other and causes the marriage to break off. But this divorce is for the better, as Chang-min ends up going back to medical school to chase his dreams, and Jin-hee, too, goes to medical school.

That’s what sets us up for the events in the television series: they’re both place in the same hospital as interns. Worst of all, they have to work in the high stress environment of an emergency room.

And at first, this is going to create a lot of friction. They’re always fighting with each other and disagreeing, much to the chagrin of probably everyone working around them. But they have a job to do and patients to save, so they’re going to have to put away their hatred for each other

All is fair in love and war, and while it seems like these two hate each other to the point of no return, it becomes abundantly clear that hate is actually love after a while. At first I thought these two should definitely not be getting back together, especially for Jin-hee.

Her situation was particularly awful the first time around, but this is a show that makes one realize that sometimes the wrong person might be right later (although don’t romanticize that notion, live your life and do something else for years like these characters).

Overall Thoughts

It’s a cute show, but it should probably not have been as long as it was. I don’t know if it’s my more modern brain fried by shorter shows, but I feel like a lot of older Korean dramas stretched out the plot for as long as they could in order to fit more B plots in. Like sure, the side couple was cute and I shipped it, but I wanted the show to wrap up more neatly than it did too.

Regardless, even a decade later, I still had some fun watching this show. Some of the shows I’ve revisited I haven’t had fun with, and the fact I actually wanted to watch this all the way through is an achievement in itself. A new habit is that I drop dramas I’m not vibing with, as I know my time is precious.

Regardless, I think this is a show worth watching if you haven’t seen it, or rewatching if it’s been a while. It was a good time for me, and if you have an interest in it, it’ll probably be worth it!

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