I admit it. I watch a lot of Korean shows. The ones that come across my radar on Netflix are usually romances. They’re predictable, and long. Typically, like the one I’m going to talk about, they’re sixteen episodes over an hour long each. There’s the guy and the girl. They’re fated to end up together, you know that. There’s the right guy and the wrong guy (but he’s not so bad) and the mirror image problem for him. There are the secondary character romances and the family entanglements. All this is predictable.
But many of the shows make it work anyway. I want to talk about “Romance is a Bonus Book”, which is a horrible title, by the way.
I love this show. I love it for it’s setting. The girl, older and wiser than she seems, is dropped into a publishing house as a newbie intern, where the guy is a senior editor, several years her junior. The long episodes get us deep into the process of publishing books, and it’s obviously been written or researched by someone with a deep love for the process. We get marketing sessions, proofreading, dealing with unsolicited manuscripts. We get the joy of landing a new author, of seeing the newly printed book, and the tragedy of a visit to a printing house to see truckloads of unsold books converted to pulp for pennies.
I tend to watch an episode and then turn back to my own writing with renewed determination. I’ll be sad when it’s over. I don’t even care if the characters get their quirky problems worked out. I just want to see more of that publishing company.