[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Shooting Star" Episode 2

With ratings of 1.792% in its second episode, "Shooting Star" is on a very slight uptick. But aesthetically the drama is still at a bit of a loss as to what it wants to actually do. I was a bit perplexed when the second half of the first episode ended up being focused on the potty humor inherent to a weirdly invasive workplace physical exam. And the second episode has more of the same, with our heroine being chased into a bathroom by the leading man.

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Top stars at some talent agencies might be a bit aggressive and full of themselves. But Tae-seong takes this to an unreasonable extreme. The rumormongering we see about him either being romantically into or even dating Han-byeol is actually one of the more charitable explanations of his behavior. The more obvious alternative is that he's simply a huge jerk, and the Africa trip was just a means to head off the inevitable hit to his reputation.

I actually do better understand why the first episode had so many Africa scenes now. Without them, Tae-seong is too unsympathetic to work as the lead character. Unfortunately the Africa scenes remain horribly irrelevant to the actual story, not to mention patronizing. I'm still bristling at how the trip keeps being described as the Africa trip. Africa's a pretty big place! And it's pretty clearly implied that Tae-seong spent most of his time at just the one village!

Tae-seong's just too flawed conceptually as a character to really work. As the lead, we see too much of him to be able to write off his behavior as thoughtless. He's clearly being malicious, to no actual purpose. We don't even really know what motivates him in terms of his career, which is weird. If you've ever read any of the many interviews published on HanCinema, you know that actors love talking about their creative motivations as artists.

There are still fleeting glimpses of an actual good use of the premise. Take the opening, where Han-byeol advises an older actor to choose a project with a director he doesn't like rather than a writer he doesn't like. This is because a hostile writer might try to kill off his character. Now, presumably this is a soap opera actor, since actors in other kinds of genre dramas can't be killed off so easily. That's my deduction, not the drama's, which is showing frustratingly little attention to genuinely interesting details.

Review by William Schwartz

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"Shooting Star" is directed by Jamie K Lee, written by Choi Yeon-soo-II, and features Lee Sung-kyung, Kim Young-dae, Yoon Jong-hoon, Kim Yoon-hye, Park Sojin, Lee Jung-shin. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2022/04/22~Now airing, Fri, Sat 22:40 on tvN.