Review of Second Shot at Love / 금주를 부탁해

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 coming across in the world.

When it comes to blogging, or even watching movies and whatnot, I’ve been in such a weird headspace lately. I started a new job after quite a bit of a spell of not having any besides freelance and contract work, and now that I am actually working, I’m not watching as much as I used.

Part of it is fueled by my newfound YouTube addiction, but part of it just is that I can’t stay awake long enough to get everything I want done. I haven’t even been going to the movies lately to see them in-person because I simply am just tired after I get everything else done.

Call this a regular phase of corporate America and adulting, but I want to find a balance and go back more to the things I love. Sometimes life is simply trying to find a balance between the things that keep you alive, providing food, shelter, and warmth, and the things that you actually want to spend your life enjoying.

Originally, I wasn’t intending on watching Second Shot at Love, nor did I really know anything about it, but on a random Monday night I was in need of a new drama and went onto my Viki account to see what was out there. Lo and behold Second Shot at Love happened to come up, and the synopsis seemed interesting enough to me. So I pressed play and ended up finishing a few weeks later!

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

For one woman who’s been living in the city, her alcoholism gets in the way with her professional and personal life, leading her back to her hometown and to love.

Our main character in this show is Han Geum-joo, who, at the start of the series, lives in another town compared to where she grew up. She sees herself as someone who loves to drink in moderation, but in reality she’s actually an alcoholic. That’s going to shape the dynamic of her relationships throughout the course of the series, as booze can get in the way of her actions and create some major friction between her and her loved ones.

Anyways, at the start of the series something major happens in her life, forcing her to realize that she has a problem on her hands when it comes to alcohol. She comes back to her hometown and with her family in order to find herself during this period, and one part of the series is about how she tries to live and adapt back to her hometown.

Her mother especially disapproves of her habits, but Geum-joo also isn’t going to see results immediately, especially as she’s only just starting to come to terms with the fact that she has an alcohol problem. Things get even more complicated when she sees her old childhood love, Eui-joon, is back in town.

He worked in Seoul as a medical specialist up until this point, but he’s back here in order to work for the health center. That’s fairly admirable considering he probably made a lot more money while living in Seoul, but when he crosses paths with Geum-joo, who seemingly is falling apart, he’s unimpressed with how she’s acting.

Turns out when they were kids and having their own little romance then, he was a seemingly different person. He was a lot more kind, although I found that he’s still kind in his own way at the beginning of the series—although he’s seen as cold. For Geum-joo, who stumbles across him while drunk, he definitely comes across as cold.

A part of the series is dedicated to their blossoming relationship and how they’re slowly but surely getting back together. Geum-joo, while also trying to figure out her own problems, learns that Eui-joon has had his own personal issues that led to why he comes across as a lot more stoic than he used to be.

There are some subplots scattered here and there, but there aren’t a ton of episodes in this show and I honestly found them kind of unremarkable. They’re not really worth discussing to me because of that—they just kind of existed in a way where they were there, but could have been cut out and the main story would’ve been fine.

Overall Thoughts

I thought this series was fine overall. Both of the leads did a decent job, which I expected from these actors, but I found the most interesting part of the series was the main character’s alcoholism. As someone who has lived and studied in Korea, alcoholism is definitely a rampant problem among people living there (not everyone—it’s always disingenuous to group entire nations of people together), but I found that it wasn’t really discussed in productive ways.

The romance was okay, the side plots were mediocre. I did enjoy the smaller town setting. As I get older and after living in Busan, I found that I appreciate the smaller towns in Korea a lot more, so when I see that kind of representation in dramas and television shows it catches my interest. A lot of shows are set in Seoul, which makes sense, but I want to see beyond that.

I didn’t hate this show though. I could see how someone else might really like it, so if it seems up your alley, then definitely give it a chance!

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