Pure in Heart (2006)

This was a meaty 167 episodes daily drama that left me with conflicting feelings. To get some positives out of the way, I much appreciate the roughness and scuffiness of older dailies over the jaded cleanliness and overly-sanitized modern dailies. It's a good thing that conflicts don't last a long time in this lengthy drama, but this also created a problem I'll talk about later. The drama took advantage of its length in regards to the main point of tension with the objecting parents of the ML, simply, let the girl hang around long enough until they get used to her. Now, let's get into the underlying problems. There was a love triangle involving the 70ish elderly father, his 50ish son, and the restaurant lady, I've never seen such an absurd, trashy and distasteful love triangle like this one before. It's shocking how much screen time they dedicated to that which was for almost the entire runtime. Due to its length, the drama was somewhat divided into 2 halves that were different enough to consider one a downgrade over the other. The exact point that split it into 2 halves was when the pseudo love triangle/square over the FL was resolved. In comparison, the most glaring difference was with the characters' writing of the duo Uk Yeong & Yun Jeong, they made them dumb, quirky, and borderline retarded, just because they were out of the circling conflicts from the first half and had no other roles to justify their existence in the drama. It's clear that its length was problematic. There was a shocking lack of material to fill the runtime. Initially, it had many small side plots that seemed promising but were completely dropped off after a handful of episodes, for example, the rouge sister Yun Ji and her ostracized family. There was only 2 main plotlines running in parallel, whatever was the FL involved in and the repulsive elderly love triangle. This could've been easily fixed since they already had enough pieces laid out. For example, give Shin Hyeong a full family background dynamic to interact with everyone rather than being a random employee with no attachments to anything, replace the elderly love triangle with another involving Wu Suk and other characters, despite the established premise but giving the female lead some familial connections would strengthen her character's existence, and lastly give the lead couples more problems to overcome rather than a couple of elongated ones. Finally, there was a huge lack of affection from the female lead while the male lead was always loud, clear and persistent about his love, she couldn't reciprocate his feeling with the same level if any at all, leaving a constant weird imbalance in their relationship. As if she was pressured to accept his love and run with it, nonetheless, this was less of a problem later on. At the end of the day and despite everything, this was just an okay vanilla daily drama.