Forecasting Love and Weather (2022)
Review of Forecasting Love and Weather / 기상청 사람들: 사내연애 잔혹사 편 (2022)
When I first heard awhile back that Song Kang and Park Min-young were going to be starring in a Netflix drama together, I was immediately intrigued.
If I recall correctly, the two of them have a rather large age gap (it may be seven years, don’t quote me on that one), so. I was wondering what exactly the premise of this drama was going to be.
I was then further interested when I found out that it was going to take place in a division of the Korean version of national weather forecasting because that’s something we really have not seen before in the Korean drama world.
And so Forecasting Love and Weather debuted on Netflix episode by episode—a painful method for the impatient people like me—and I found myself actually disappointed by the drama. Let’s dive deeper into this review, shall we?
A chief agent at the Korea Meteorological Association falls in love with one of her employees.
Our female lead in Forecasting Love and Weather is Jin Ha-kyung, a thirty-something year old who has just been broken up with by her cheating fiance. The cheating fiance also works at the same place she does, but as an informant for the KMA’s spokesperson office. He has cheated on her with a younger employee of a publication, but, as it turns out, she has cheated too.
Lee Si-woo (Song Kang) is her former boyfriend, devastated by the landslide she evoked literally right before a couples’ vacation for the two of them.
Lee then begins to work at the KMA, too, causing all of their lives to collide even more than ever. Turns out Lee and Jin are the perfect match for each other. as they have traumatic parent situations and Jin has a home and bed he can crash on.
The B plot heavily relies on the fact that Jin isn’t a married woman, so her mother freaks out about the fact she hasn’t found a husband yet. Jin’s sister falls in love with someone on the KMA team, while members of the KMA team—the older ones—are struggling with their marriages.
It seems like all is hopeless for a good four episodes before the show tries to cram together solutions for everyone, even if they feel rushed and they honestly don’t make much sense.
What’s interesting about this show is that it heavily tries to connect weather to the conditions of everyday relationships, specifically when it comes to love. When turbulence enters Jin’s and Lee’s relationship with each other, so comes the typhoon in Jeju.
When Lee gets hurt it should be an encounter that brings that them together, but it instead actually forces them away from each other and they temporarily break up. Which is a major problem to me, because this whole plot line just doesn’t make sense to me.
They break up when they clearly love each other very much, but it seems like something that’s dragged out for a couple episodes, which makes it too long/dragging to watch, then they decide to get back together because their coworkers practically beg them to. The series ends on them reuniting after it the prediction of snow comes true, which is like cool, but so what?
Perhaps one of the biggest pitfalls of the show is the fact that nothing actually ever happens. This can be true for quite a few office dramas, but the fact it relies too much on the weather to propel the plot further and not much more makes it slightly difficult to watch at the end of the day.
The only conflicts come from the fact that Lee and Jin were cheated on and they work with their former partners, then they start dating, but once they all get cool with each other that tension just eases away quickly.
Lee’s injury adds a tiny bit of tension, then his father getting cancer, but then those also fade away into the background. The B plot of the pregnancy of the second lead couple also tries to add some tension, but then it, too, resolves itself quietly.
Perhaps, then, that the problem also is the fact that both couples lack any chemistry. I like Park Min-young and Song Kang as actors, but together they did not shine. The age gap may have been quite a bit of an issue, so might be the fact that she was his boss.
I did like, however, the fact she was the one in a superior position to him. Too often we see the woman in the couple being put int he position that makes her less powerful to her boss, who will be the male lead.
But Park Min-young’s Jin is a confident, assured woman when it comes to her job and is capable of leading a team through times of crisis. I also liked that the show brought up the fact that they began their relationship by sleeping together while drunk—this shows that Korean dramas are updating for the time.
Overall Thoughts
It’s got an interesting premise, but it’s bogged down by the lack of chemistry between the characters and a lackluster script that nothing really happens within.
I like the concept that the show tries to tackle when it comes to sunshine after a storm, the light breaking through the darkness, because it ends with the fact each of the characters gets their happy ending when it comes to their individual arcs.
The one employee gets back together with his wife, the sister dates the other employee, the one girl gets to teach, etc. I think that the show could’ve gone so much better if it wasn’t hindered by these simple factors, but it’s dead and done. I did enjoy the poetic statements scattered throughout as well. So my verdict is that it’s not good, but also not terrible.
