Well this is an mighty strange casting pair but who knows, stranger things have worked. A new sageuk drama is being prepped titled Flower that Blooms at Night and late last year was reported to be starring Honey Lee in her first acting project after having a baby. Now her male lead has been cast with young rising actor Lee Jong Won who came to my attention in Gold Spoon as the second male lead and debuted only in 2020. I like him but I feel the age and experience gap is big with this pairing. The drama is an investigative rom-com sageuk about a widow living two lives and her meeting with a grandmaster type male lead character as they team up to solve mysteries. The drama is from the PD of Lovers of the Red Sky and will air later this year.
Gross. Smells like a flop… Honey Lee deserves better.
IDK but the sageuk dramas for this year sound bland and basic. Last year also barely had any sageuk dramas but only AoS and UTQU stood out but neither was a proper historical drama. This year we have Joseon Lawyer, Flower Scholars Boarding House, Flower That Blooms At Night, Our Blooming Youth and two time travel/fantasy dramas with sageuk elements but none of them sound interesting. Only OBY is gaining attention for being an adaptation of the Chinese novel but even then nothing very eye catching about it. There was a time when sageuk dramas would dominate Kdramas but not anymore. Everything is dark and gloomy crime or medical dramas these days. I blame Netflix for the excessive tonal shift.
This is an interesting point but I think proper sageuks were going out of style years before Netflix became a player in Kdramas. I think the homegrown shift to fusion dramas really killed the genre.
I will never understand how setting essentially modern storylines and characters in period costume is the least bit compelling. The West especially is all aboard this trend and as such, most historical fiction these days seems unwatchable. China weirdly still has the volume to make proper historical dramas alongside the legions of mediocre xianxia so kudos to them I guess.
I agree with your whole comment. It was big epic sageuk that made me a K-drama fan 15 years ago and I miss ’em. I never watch period dramas now except for discovering an occasional old Chinese historical that takes the genre seriously. This past fall I found the 2010 Three Kingdoms and it was like a vacation trip to the good old days.
Another agree here. It was because of sageuks like Damo and Chuno that made me fall in love with kdramas. Before that, I was watching tvb classics like Return of Condor Heroes, Duke of Mount Deer, New Heavenly Sword and Dragon Saber. Good old days indeed.
@kellie and DramaAddict, glad to see others agree that proper historical dramas are the best!!!
Re: Romance of the Three Kingdoms 2010, the brief romance between Liu Bei and Sun Shaoxiang still makes me blush all these years later. Yu Hewei with his charisma and subtle acting made something work that absolutely should not have. The dumb teenybopper idol actors that are typically pushed as romantic leads could never.
there was also Bloody Heart early on but it was probably a bit too intelligent for the gen pop
Thoughts about Bloody Heart and King of Tears?
Our Blooming Youth is actually quite good, mostly because the two leads are great actors with good chemistry. Their micro expressions really make their interactions sparkle on screen. I thought I wouldn’t want to watch another historical after I just finished the somewhat lackluster The Forbidden Marriage, but Our Blooming Youth really shows how good actors can make a drama compelling.
Still nothing to shout about or makes us go wow like Bloody Heart or the Red Sleeve. The epicness is absent.