SBS Plus & TBS Channel 2 (Japan) / 2012 / 20 episodes (40 parts)
Genres: drama
Written by Park Yeong-sook
Directed by Kim Jin-young, Nam Gi-hoon
More information: Wikipedia / HanCinema
Full House Take 2:
New Voices in a Familiar Home
It was a bold thought to dream up a second series for the smash hit Full House from eight years prior. Personally, I was reluctant to watch it, fearing that an unsuccessful attempt would damage the original, great experience. It took No Min-woo for me to finally persuade myself to view it, because ever since I saw him in Rock Rock Rock, I have given him my vote of confidence in anything.
The new series was ultimately born as a Korean-Japanese-Chinese co-production and was aired after its entire production was completed, which is a rarity considering that the majority of series are still being filmed while the first episodes are already being broadcast on television channels.
Fortunately, this second series is only loosely connected to the first story, adopting a few of its motifs and turns, and even those rather only as reminders. The characters are completely different, and the story itself is independent.
The Full House itself, as a building, is not as dominant a character in this drama as in its predecessor, but reclaiming it is at stake here as well—only now, it is not the girl but one of the male protagonists fighting for it. Instead of the original romantic square, we now find a classic triangle, although a fourth character appears later who, in reality, does not cause much stir in the existing relations but helps clarify the reasons for the conflicts.
The setting of the series was placed into the K-pop scene, which was already thundering at full throttle on the international stage in 2012; thus we can thank this for numerous performance snippets, and a portion of the conflicts also sheds light on the hidden relations of the industry, which promised almost certain public success.
The two male members of the love triangle are two idols from a formation called Take One, who cannot stand each other and are in constant struggle in both professional and personal fields. Beside the popular, universally liked Won Kang-hwi (Park Ki-woong), the other member is the grumpy, ill-mannered Lee Tae-ik (No Min-woo), who struggles for the recovery of the Full House designed by his father, which is the property of the agency that also employs him. A talented, beginner girl, Jung Man-ok (Hwang Jung-eum)—whose given name means Full House in English translation—joins the duo, trying her hand as a stylist.
Naturally, both men begin to take an interest in the girl, who, despite maintaining a smooth and affectionate relationship with Kang-hwi, finds her heart drawn for some reason toward the reserved, hard-to-read Tae-ik. Shortly, we find everyone under the shared roof of the Full House, and then in the hapkido gym, which is the property of Man-ok's grandfather, where the girl is actually an instructor. While the romantic skirmishes are ongoing, the boys embark on solo careers, during which they are completely vulnerable to the interests and arbitrariness of the agency. They must take up the gauntlet against this as well.
The greatest difference of the second series, however, lies in the way the events are shown. While in the original Full House we moved forward along internal, emotional shifts, now external events drive the story forward much more. Through this, the atmosphere of the two series also differs greatly; in the second one, we do not truly find the intimacy so characteristic of the first, in which we could perceive the smallest emotional flickers magnified. The same applies to the humor, which this time is also not really the protagonists' own, but rather entrusted to characters intended to be funny, occasionally quite crude.
However, the story is well-written and contains interesting conflicts and turns. The strength of the drama is once again in the well-developed characters and the acting. The girl is not a conventional beauty; there is something of a young girl's bohemianism in her, but she is a determined, strong personality. Kang-hwi's story receives a turn strongly characteristic of melodramas with the deterioration of his vision, which I feel to be somewhat foreign or exaggerated in this piece. It has the advantage, nonetheless, that it provides a great acting opportunity for Park Ki-woong, which he realizes very beautifully.
Among the characters of the first Full House, Lee Young-jae is reflected most in Lee Tae-ik. No Min-woo had to show the same thing as Rain once did, and this is none other than the tension between the character's inner feelings and the inability to show them. Yet they solved the similar task in completely different ways. No Min-woo is not as multifaceted as Rain, but he has a wilder emotional world, in which determination rather than path-finding dominates. The instinctive humor that flowed so naturally from his predecessor is not his own, but he is at home in situational comedy. Generally, he is like a drawn bow, constantly tensed to the breaking point. While Rain's face revealed everything, No Min-woo's posture speaks, but even more so his eyes. In his passionate moments, his burning gaze becomes visible, with which he could sometimes even kill. At the same time, he is still gentle, and loneliness radiates from him just as it once did from Young-jae.
Among the supporting characters, the employees of the agency must be highlighted, among whom villains and honest people wanting to act for the credibility of their profession can equally be found. The drama is not stingy with the undisguised presentation of blinded, unscrupulous fans either; we could think many scenes about them are funny if we did not know their truthfulness. And of course, there is the media as well, both traditional and social, with its influence shaping the fate of the characters. As well as the hapkido grandfather, who is more fearsome than anyone (for a while).
Perhaps to distinguish the world of the series from the real K-pop reality, the drama's stylists (especially the hairdressers) went to great excesses; sometimes they should have been told off. Fortunately, it is true for the actors here as well that they are naturally such beautiful people whose appearance was difficult to spoil even in this way.
The first series became famous for its music too; unfortunately, the second falls short of it in this field as well. Although there are beautiful songs in it, they fall into oblivion quite quickly.
The second Full House nevertheless did not cause any particular disappointment, although it could not come close to the greatness of the first series. Regardless, it is a drama providing a pleasant, entertaining experience.
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