Pump Up the Healthy Love: Episode 1 (First Impressions)
Pump Up the Healthy Love: Episode 1 (First Impressions)
by Dramaddictally
The new KBS sports rom-com Pump Up the Healthy Love made its way onto our screens this week with an out-of-touch take on the boy-meets-girl story. Cartoonish, over-animated, gimmicky, and somewhat grotesque, I could hardly sit through Episode 1, let alone stick it out for the long haul.
Editor’s note: This is an opening review only. For a place to chat about the entire drama, visit the Drama Hangout.
EPISODE 1
When I start a drama, I try to understand what it’s intending to do and then pick out the parts that matter most for the recap, even if it means looking past a little nonsense. In this case, I stared blank-faced at my laptop for an hour, trying to ascertain how this thing even got made.
Our male lead, DO HYUN-JOONG (Lee Jun-young), is a former bodybuilding champ who now runs an in-debt gym and insults every passerby that comes along, in the name of wanting to “improve their health.” One such passerby is our love-starved leading lady, LEE MI-RAN (Jung Eun-ji), who wants nothing more than the sexual attention of a man.
We meet Mi-ran when she’s crying in the street, begging her so-called boyfriend to sleep with her, falling at his feet, and wondering why no one wants her. Hmmm. I’ve got nothin’ against a proactive female lead: my problem here is that she’s not asserting her wants so much as dying for validation — and we’re supposed to find this comical and cute. In fact, this is the moment Hyun-joong steps up and offers her a flyer for his gym because, evidently, that’s exactly what she needs right now.
We learn that this lack of confidence is a life-long problem for Mi-ran as we take a tour through her past, where none of the boys ever liked her “in that way.” But the kicker is that the main reason for her being rebuffed is that she’s overweight. (Full stop.) Of course, there is no visible evidence of this supposed weight problem on the actress, so instead, she’s shown eating in every scene to make it clear just how much of an issue this is. (My eyes cannot roll any harder than this.)
One day, in the heat of desperation for any kind of male attention, Mi-ran drunkenly enters what she thinks is a night club, dancing around the pole and putting herself out there. When the lights flick up, it’s actually a health club — and she’s accidentally entered the lair of our militant male lead.
In a K-drama-esque encounter, Mi-ran begins to fall, Hyun-joong catches her, and the camera captures the still of her in his arms. The disruption of the trope happens when he correctly guesses her height and weight — which is “lower than you might think, since fat weighs less than muscle.” (Are we laughing yet? Because these are the jokes.)
He tries to sell her an overpriced package of total-life training that’ll change her whole existence in three months. If you change your body, you change your life, he says. He may need dough to save his cash-strapped gym, but really, he’s worried about her health, he tells his employees after Mi-ran leaves crying and asking how he can shame her like that.
The drama is doing what it can to make Hyun-joong palatable. So, we see him at his gym after close, pumping iron, thinking about the harsh training he himself went through to get the overly ripped body he has, and (I guess?) worrying about his finances. However, he’s also portrayed like a stereotypical meathead who seems like he’s lacking more than emotional intelligence.
We see Mi-ran at her office job where we learn that the guy she calls her boyfriend (who’s also her co-worker) is leaving the country today and he didn’t tell her beforehand. She’s sad and wants to know if they’re breaking up, and he takes her hand, tells her he loves her, and then says she’s so amazing that she’ll definitely find someone else. Really, she’s too good for him, so it only makes sense for him to ditch her.
Before they part, she asks why he wouldn’t sleep with her. After an obtuse and annoying cut in the dialogue when a bus blows by, we later learn the reason: he just can’t get it up with her. (Note: He does not say it’s because of how she looks, but this is how she interprets it.)
The next thing we know, Mi-ran is rushing into Hyun-joong’s gym, ready to pay whatever it takes in order to access that life-changing plan he was talking about. She falls for a second time, he catches her yet again, and it’s the same joke as before: “You’re overweight.”
Just in case we might hate Hyun-joong too much up front, we get an epilogue scene that shows us he was there when the now-ex-boyfriend broke up with Mi-ran. Hyun-joong knocks the guy down (out of her view) and tells him to be honest and not to blame her for his problems. I guess we’re supposed to surmise that Hyun-joong already likes Mi-ran and that him being mean is really for her own good?
I have nothing positive to say about this. I think it’s aiming to shock in order to be funny but I’m not shocked, I’m bored. This feels like old material, rehashed from at least a decade ago, but not even done right. This is no Oh My Venus. And, granted, that show is from 2015 and I have no idea how it holds up, but my memory tells me it had some heart. Pump Up the Healthy Love, on the other hand, is all crude humor, harsh tone, and out-of-touch themes.
While I won’t be sticking around for this one, the set up tells me that somewhere along the line the story will plant the idea that it’s Mi-ran’s confidence that comes from her gym time (not really the changes in her body that matter so much). With that epilogue, I gather that Hyun-joong already sees the good in her and just wants her to see it too. But for me, it’s all about the process of getting there. And I have no desire to see him belittle her until the moment she has an epiphany about her self-confidence. Yeah. No. Not even Lee Jun-young in bikini bottoms can save this thing.
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