Shopping King Louis

So, for whatever reason, I just wasn't in the mood to watch another episode of 20th Century Boy & Girl (though I do think I'll finish it). I wanted something silly after spending a couple of days churning through other people's manuscripts (other than the one I did for my third publisher, a bunch of friends and I decided to kick off a proper crit group rather than just meet/work like we normally do and our first meeting is tomorrow, so I've read through 15K words for them). Anyway, arguably the silliest looking thing on my list (other than the Weightlifting Fairy one) was Shopping King Louie/Louis (seen it both ways).

And it is, indeed, fairly goofy though, to be fair, a lot of serious stuff has happened in the first episode already. Louie of the title is the sheltered grandson of a wealthy shopping heiress. After losing her husband and child (Louie's parents, when he was young) and receiving a dire prediction that he'd be in danger if he hung around her, Kang Ji Seong (Seo In Guk) aka Louie has been living a super rich lifestyle in France while she is in Seoul. Basically, he shops and stays safe. It's a lonely life. He really doesn't have any friends and has definitely never experienced romance. Instead, he has a butler who has been like a father figure to him. When his grandmother collapses with pneumonia, Louie rushes to be by her side.

He doesn't seem like a bad guy, per se, just that particular type of clueless rich chaebol who doesn't know any better and has never had a chance to grow up. Coincidentally, while watching TV at around the midpoint of the episode, he watches a documentary about a girl from backwoods Korea that is the heroine of the show and is intrigued. You see, he has an eye for things -- in shopping, that means he can immediately pick out the best of the best, the rare, etc. So we know she's the one.

Though, considering what he buys in the shopping spree they show, that means that my taste is definitely not chaebol richy-rich. It was mostly hideously ugly jewelry crusted with diamonds. Ahem. Anyway.

The girl is Go Bok Sil (Nam Ji Hyun), a very sweet young lady who had been living in the middle of nowhere without electricity or anything fancy in order to take of her aging grandmother. Her younger brother had also lived with them but had taken off for Seoul after he got a taste of big town life when his sister had been the subject of that backwoods Korea documentary (which had shown her digging up herbs, etc. -- one sweet note here...in the documentary, she makes a comment about how the one thing she really wishes for is a refrigerator because everything has to be made fresh every day. Louie, watching it, immediately tells his butler to buy a refrigerator and send it to her, though the butler then has to explain they don't even have electricity and it's a documentary, not a charity show--at any rate, I think, at least, it's to show that his character isn't intrinsically a rich asshole).

Right after she finds a large 50 year old rare wild ginseng, she comes home to discover that her grandmother has died. Here's some of the dark I was talking about. So she packs a single bag of stuff + the wild ginseng (which is supposed to be worth up to 5000 won) and heads off to the big city to try and find the only family she has left. Her brother. There's one brief clip of him shown hanging on to the back of a speeding moped.

On the train ride there, Bok Sil offers a rice ball to a granny in the seat across from her. Evil granny pretends to choke on it and sends our naive girl off to get water from the next car. As the train stops, granny apparently steals her bag (i.e. everything she has, except for the wild ginseng tied around her waist) and vamooses. Bok Sil goes to the police once she arrives in Seoul, but they are not super helpful and she doesn't even have a mobile phone for them to contact her on. She's penniless.

As she sits, forlorn, in the train station, wondering what to do, she spots Cha Joong Won (Yoon Sang Hyun). He looks rich. He also has one of those ridiculous pencil thin moustaches that make him look like a teenage boy that just started to be able to grow facial hair and won't shave it off even though it's so sparse it looks more like he's left bits of dirt on his face than anything else. Omo! I'm having a hard time taking him serious as an actor in this. Erm.

We've seen him before, actually. He's a relatively high up dude in the shopping conglomerate owned by Louie's grandmother (oh, look, an unlikely coincidence as two main characters meet!) and is one of those generally correct, but socially asshole-ish guys who shows no particular kindness to anyone. Earlier, we also saw his mother and father delivering food to his fancy apartment and going Oh, woe! He never eats the side dishes I bring him! and her searching his apartment with sweeping laser vision Help me find evidence he's ever brought a woman here! Oh woe! How can he be nearly 40 and with no hope of getting married?!

We also see him on a date in Busan, where he's basically insulting to his blind date his mother set up, saying she's too pretty and looks like a doll. That's where he's coming back from and I suppose it is telling that he sees Bok Sil and thinks who is this swarthy woman? Because she certainly doesn't look like a doll. Not sure that swarthy was the right translation, but she does look healthy and normal and not delicate.

She tells him her sob story and asks him to buy her wild ginseng (ah, now we understand why she was looking for well-dressed people). They argue back and forth about it, him not even sure why (it's not like he was looking to buy some wild ginseng from some random girl), and it winds up with him giving her a fraction of it's worth and saying he'll pay the rest once he gets it appraised. He gives her his phone number as she doesn't have a phone.

At the very end of the episode, we see Bok Sil run over to someone she thinks is her brother from behind, as they are wearing a unique tracksuit (he'd bought a knock off one, whereas Louie had bought the original, most expensive one). It's a dirty, disheveled Louie. If I hadn't read the show description, I'd have no idea what's going on as they drop that on you out of nowhere, but it's because he suffers some kind of accident after getting off his plane (his first time flying by himself!) and has lost his memory.

So, yeah, this is going to be one of those shows with ridiculous coincidences. It's also got the silly sound effects and I think it's gonna be predictable as all hell BUT I was in the mood for something just weirdly silly and not taxing, so I'm okay. I think I've just got to be in the mood to go along with these kinds of shows.

Yeah, dude, I'm horrified too. I can barely look at you.

I do really hope the one guy shaves though. I mean, seriously, is there anyone that finds that attractive? I'm sure he's a lovely man when he doesn't have something crawling across his face and has a better hair cut...though based on a Google image search, he often has it (though better hair often helps). Why, dude? Why? And, finally, an actor who is actually older than me. But, man. Urk.

Will edit once I've watched more (though am not gonna do full on recaps...this post is already kinda long for a show that I think I'm going to like but not love).