Review of Shopping King Louie /
쇼핑왕 루이

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.

I’ve been running a little series for a while now where I revisit old television shows and movies I’ve watched throughout the years. Even in the past, before I started this blog and began taking it more seriously, I was always jotting down what I wrote about XYZ show or movie.

A blog post ago I began noticing, as I cranked out all the reviews for this batch of the nostalgia series, is that I’m stuck in 2016. A lot of the dramas I’ve been revisiting are from 2016, which is quite the nostalgia ride because I was sixteen when these shows all came out. I’m now almost 25, speak Korean at a somewhat decent level, and even lived in both Busan and Seoul to study abroad.

All of this is to say I’ve grown up, and my opinions about these shows might’ve shifted throughout the years. Regardless, today’s review is on an old classic of mine: Shopping King Louie. This show used to be my blast when I was sixteen, so I was very curious to see how it might’ve changed in my mind.

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

A rich young man with a shopping addiction loses his memory, and meets a girl who helps him realize the value of things.

Our main character, and the one introduced in the title, is Louis. My hunch is this is a French Revolution reference, but we don’t go there at all in this drama.

Louis is someone who has enough money, as he’s a rich heir and probably a chaebol, to buy whatever he desires in love. That leaves him with quite the shopping addiction and he often finds himself being the literal shopping king. He’ll literally buy anything that speaks to him any way.

Consumerism aside, things are about to change for young Louis. When something happens and he manages to lose all of his memories, including the fact he is a rich heir, it leads him on the path of Bok-shil. Bok-shil is a girl from the countryside and probably represents everything that Louis could not fathom before.

But while Bok-shil might not live the luxurious life that Louis was living before, she’s still happy. She has the grounded perspective of someone who’s entire existence wasn’t literally built on consumption, so the longer these two start staying together and hanging out, the more she’s stupefied by his shopping habits.

Even with amnesia, he’s still someone who likes to shop. I guess some things never change, but Bok-shil doesn’t have the money to keep buying stuff like he does, so throughout the course of the series she's pretty much parenting him on how we only need certain things to survive and that others are wasteful.

She does learn to let go and live a little too, as she has this frugal mentality that I can distinctly recognize as the child of an immigrant and a factory worker.

We were tight on our money growing up, so some of Bok-shil’s statements and mentality are definitely coming from a place of needing to survive, which is something she unlearns throughout the drama, especially when she realizes the guy she now likes is really rich.

Classic Korean drama of rich boy poor girl trope there, and it’s in classic 2016 fashion. This show leans on the comedic elements of the situation and romance, so it feels more natural than something like The Heirs, which, as I revisited, felt like something that was so forced. I did not like rewatching that much.

Overall Thoughts

This was a bop back in 2016, and, if we’re going to be honest, I found this to be a good time almost a decade later. It was. a vibe, although I’m not exactly someone who sees myself as pro-capitalist in the sense where Louis’ hyper-consumerism would give me straight up anxiety. If this were reality, I would have a breakdown if I were Bok-shil.

Regardless, I think it’s such a cute show. It’s one of those series where I would watch if I wanted some escapism and vibes, and is something that I wouldn’t take seriously. Like while I was crying when I was watching When Life Gives You Tangerines lately, this was upbeat and gave me some good laughs.

Go watch it if you haven’t already and want to! I think it’s worth checking out, even if you space your watch time out so that you’re not entirely binge watching it in one go.

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