Review of The First Night with the Duke / 남주의 첫날밤을 가져버렸다

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.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

To keep myself from going insane from the grind of applying to jobs and doing research about them, I spent quite a bit of time in the evenings watching television shows. I never used to be a television girl until I was forced to be. I worked as a professional film and television critic for three years at an online outlet before departing and working on this blog full time, and I grew to love television beyond grudgingly accepting whether a show was good or not.

I would have probably gone mad, and I mean it, if I had nothing else to do besides applying to jobs. This was a months long search that felt hopeless at times, and while I did have income streams coming in through my freelance work, I was finding escapism through these television shows. I watch a lot of Korean dramas especially because I speak a good amount of Korean, and I know there’s always more to learn about the country and its people.

That’s how I ended up watching The First Night with the Duke. I typically don’t go for historical dramas, but I’ve been in the mood to push my taste further than what I go for usually while I still have the bandwidth and time to do so. When I’m working a 9-5 I’m probably going to just want and brain rot with comfortable shows and movies for a while.

Enough rambling! Let’s get into the blog post.

After being sucked into a historical webtoon, a girl finds love and peace with its stormy male lead.

We first learn of the main character in the contemporary and real world: she goes unnamed at first and is simply referred to as K in the series. Her normal life is something that she doesn’t aspire to continue living, as she’s mocked by her classmates and lives on the fringes of society at her university. One of her only pleasures is reading a historical webtoon that’s ongoing, but things are about to drastically change for her.

One day K wakes up and finds herself actually in the world of the webtoon. She’s now in the body of an extremely minor character: Cha Seon-chaek. We learn more about what happened to the real Seon-chaek later on in the show, but for now K is actually kind of ecstatic to live in the world of her favorite webtoon.

She assumes Seon-chaek’s identity and starts living her life. Seon-chaek is from a wealthy family, and although she had no significance in the actual webtoon before this point (she kind of just shows up for a scene or two and is legitimately a minor character), the new Seon-chaek is going to create ripples in this world.

Seon-chaek doesn’t intend to do that, but when she is mixing cocktails and alcohol for the local people one night, she drunkenly sleeps with the main protagonist of the webtoon. His name is Lee Beon, and while he’s a cold figure who seems like no one can get close to, he believes in one thing adamantly: if you’ve slept with a woman, you have to marry her.

So he insists on marrying Seon-chaek, much to her horror. She resists him at first because of his attitude and how he responds to others, but after spending some time with him and having reflecting moments, chatting with others about how grateful she should be that a prince is interested in her, she decides she’s going to put her name into the gauntlet for eligible maidens who can marry the prince.

Thus begins the trials for who exactly can marry Lee Beon. We already know who’s stolen his heart after they slept together, and he knows it too, but Seon-chaek isn’t exactly making friends with some of the others girls that are competing for his hand. Seon-chaek also knows that Lee Beon was supposed to end up with the original female lead, named Jo Eun-ae, and she does at first try to make them happen but falls for her own heart’s desires after a while.

There’s quite a bit of drama, humor, and some dark moments scattered throughout this series. I will say that twelve episodes seemed like an appropriate amount of time to wrap this story up, although there are definitely some holes about this “living in a webtoon” concept and how exactly Seon-chaek is creating a ripple effect.

Overall Thoughts

I’ll have to say: I didn’t love this drama, but I didn’t hate it either. I thought Lee Beon’s affection for Seon-chaek were cute, although they did come across very much as a fictional character’s motives. It did come across a little like fanfiction in that way for me, although it was nice to watch.

And when I say that, I mean I was entertained by this show. Sometimes a show lacks any chemistry, pacing, or doesn’t seem compelling enough for me and then I drop it after four episodes or so. There are times where I’ll drop it even earlier if I really don’t like the show. I don’t review those shows, but the fact I watched all twelve episodes of this show proves that it was entertaining in some ways.

That said, this isn’t high art to me, nor do I think I’ll be returning to it in the near future. Maybe someday, but I can see how this might be someone’s favorite drama out there. Taste is so incredibly subjective, but I feel like this a show most people would like, but might not love.

Go watch it if you’re interested! Give it a chance and watch a few episodes before deciding to continue or not. It might become your favorite.

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