In the day and age of too much media saturation and PPL overload, I appreciate when a project openly declares its intention and doesn’t muddle up the joint with anything else. Companies are now sponsoring content to the degree above simply PPL and earlier this year Lotte Duty Free reunited popular costars Jang Geun Seok and Park Shin Hye for a series of short webisodes combining Jeju and the shopping at its duty free stores.Today comes the first episode of the online web drama called Love LINE (Chinese title One LINE Romance) starring K-actor Lee Min Ho and TW-actress Bea Hayden. Sponsored entire by the LINE messaging app, the drama centers around Lee Min Ho playing a famous songwriter named Min Ho and his cute LINE romance with a Taiwanese tourist visiting Korea named Ling Ling. There is also a darling golden retriever named Brown and a lost USB drive named Cony. Get the drift? I quite enjoyed the first episode because of how inoffensive and breezy it is plus a whiff of self-deprecation.

Lee Min Ho leaves the house to go find inspiration for a new song and when his manager comes by and hears he took off wearing random casual clothes, she mutters a hope that there won’t be pictures of his weird outfit plastered on the web later. LOL on acknowledging how Lee Min Ho’s fashion sense in dramas have been so off. Then Min Ho runs into Ling Ling in a touristy area of Seoul except there is not a single other soul around and when she asks him to snap a picture he’s so self-absorbed he thinks she wants to take a picture of him. Then magic happens when the sun shines on her giving him inspiration to finally write a new song. They add each other in LINE but she drops her USB before heading to the airport so he rushes there to give it back before she leaves. Their first LINE chat involves her sending him a Thank You sticker and when he pulls up his sticker list to text back, his doggie Brown barks and he accidentally sends her a I Love U sticker back. I don’t know why but I found this whole thing so silly it’s cute so check it out for yourself.

Episode 1 of Love LINE (English subs):