Beautiful Love, Wonderful Life

This is a story about love and deception. The deceptions come in every form - outright lies, obfuscations, failure to speak up, misleading silence, misdirection, rampant insincerity. Against this tidal wave, the main characters fight to find happiness. Their battles never fail to engage.

Essentially, it tells of three intersecting families. The first consists of a father, Kim Yeong-Woong (Park Yeong-gyu) a former athlete who has been unemployed for decades, his put upon wife, Seon Woo-yeong (Kim Mi-sook), and three daughters. The oldest, Kim Seol-Ah (Jo Yoon-hee) through a combination of brains, beauty and grit, has managed to become a popular TV announcer. The middle one, Kim Cheong-Ah (Seol In-ah) our heroine, is honest, kind, and open-hearted. The youngest, Kim Yeon-Ah (Jo Yoo-jung), taking after her father, is a budding athlete, a tennis player, still in high school.

The second family is the inevitable chaebol family. No dads around. Instead, the Chairwoman of the Inter Marketing group, Hong Hwa-Young (Park Hae-mi), is a nasty, self-centered bully. She has one son, Do Jin-Woo (Oh Min-suk), the Vice Chairman, who becomes infatuated with Kim Seol-Ah and marries her against his mother’s fierce opposition. Kim Seol-Ah marries him for his money and position, as she straightforwardly tells him, and abandons her family as the price of marrying into the elite. The Chairwoman’s sister, Hong Yoo-Ra (Na Young-hee), is a well-regarded and supremely honest judge, with two sons. The older, Goo Jun-Hwi (Kim Jae-Young), after completing military service and spending time abroad, joins Inter Marketing as a low level executive in the sports marketing department. He doesn’t let on that his cousin is the Vice Chairman and he manages to sustain this deception deep into the series, with comic effect within his department but not so comic in his dealings with Kim Cheong-Ah (it is never explained why it takes so long for Kim Cheong-Ah to find out, especially after Kim Seol-Ah returns home). Goo Jun-Hwi is actually the largest shareholder of the company, but he keeps his identity secret from the whole company because he is a humble person and likes to keep a low profile life. He was also greatly affected by the death of his brother. He was studying international law overseas but due to his brother's death and receiving a suicide letter that his brother sent him that said that he wanted to be a basketball player, Jun-Hwi decides to discontinue his career in the legal field and comes to Korea instead to work in his family's company. He comes back to Korea a very jaded and anti-social individual who does not care for relationships with others and just focuses on his work, until he meets Kim Cheong-Ah.

Nine years before the main action of the drama begins, the younger brother, Goo Jun-Gyeom (Jin Ho-eun), distraught after killing an old lady in a hit and run, decides to kill himself after his mother covers up the crime and effectively frames a young delinquent, Kang Shi-Wol (Lee Tae-sun), who had the misfortune to be passing by around the time of the accident. Through an online service he meets Kim Cheong-Ah, then a high school drop-out who also decided to kill herself after being savagely bullied at school (the bullying included both psychological torture and brutal physical assault which her family failed to notice). On her way to meet in person at a riverside villa rented by Goo Jun-Gyeum, she meets Goo Jun-Hwi in the train (he’s in uniform on his way back to his military base) and slightly falls for him. They part and she then meets the younger brother, with whom she spends a wonderful day before beginning their preparations to commit suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. But, perhaps believing that both no longer want to go through with it, she falls asleep. Nevertheless, as she sleeps, he takes sleeping pills stolen from his mother, slips out of the villa, goes to the river, and drowns himself. Cheong-Ah wakes up and sees a letter that Jun-Gyeom left for her that tells her to live because she is a victim. She realizes what is happening and dives into the river to save him, dragging him out and performing CPR, but she is too late.

Through the interference of Kim Cheong-Ah's mother, everyone (except Kim Cheong-Ah, her mother and Goo Jun-Hwi -who received a suicide note mailed by his brother to him before his death) believes that the younger brother died a heroic death trying to save her. It becomes too late for Kim Cheong-Ah to reveal that her mother had lied and she too becomes part of the deception. And perhaps in her heart, she believes the day she spent with him actually did save her, even if it did not save him. Over a period of time, Hong Yoo-Ra, still unaware of the truth, looks out for Cheong-Ah and befriends her. Cheong-Ah cannot bring herself to tell her what really happened. Over the years, both to atone and to conceal her crime, Hong Yoo-Ra includes Kang Shi-Wol in a program where, with her family's money, she sponsors young offenders to try to reintegrate them in society. Goo Jun-Hwi does not destroy his brother's letter but he hides it from his mother. He continues to wonder why his brother did it and eventually begins concerted efforts to find out. Eventually, Jun-Hwi finds out that Cheong-Ah is the girl that was with Jun-Gyeom on the night that he died. However, because she tells Jun-Hwi that she never wanted Jun-Gyeom's brother or Jun-Gyeom's mother to know about how the brother actually died, Jun-Hwi does not reveal his identity to her.

Back to the present, nine years later, Do Jin-Woo, is having an extended affair with his secretary, Moon Hae-Rang (Jo Woo-ri). Hae-Rang is needy and clingy but she seems to offer Jin-Woo the love and affection his wife has never shown him. The two of them get in a car accident during a tryst and both fall into a coma. An extended side plot concerns the Chairwoman's efforts to frame Cheong-Ah's friend, Baek Rim (Kim Jin-yeop) for an accident clearly caused by Jin-Woo. During the hospitalization, Seol-Ah meets Hae-Rang’s brother, Tae-Rang, whom she at first thinks Hae-Rang’s husband. Tae-Rang is actually the chef-owner of a restaurant in the Inter Market headquarters building. The two gradually fall for each other. Hae-Rang wakes up after a few weeks and somehow falls into the good graces of the Chairwoman, who decides to use her to break up her comatose son's marriage. She makes it impossible for Seol-Ah to nurse her husband, throws Hae-Rang in her face, and repeatedly bullies her. Finally, goaded and intimidated beyond endurance by the Chairwoman, Seol-Ah divorces her husband even though he is still in a coma. When he wakes up, a year after the accident, he rejects Hae-Rang and tries, initially in abusive fashion but later with more contrition and restraint (and no lack of persistence against equally determined rejection by Seol-Ah as well as his mother's vociferous objections), to get his ex-wife back. A significant amount of comedy is drawn from his attempts to ingratiate himself with his former in-laws as part of a protracted campaign to win back Seol-Ah. Whether he will succeed in melting his ex-wife's fragile frozen heart is a key driver of the drama.

Meantime, Cheong-Ah and Jun-Hwi meet again and she falls for him again. Although sullen and cold-hearted, he begins to fall for her and to soften in the process. He becomes a more warm and thoughtful person because of Cheong-Ah's influence. Because of Jun-Hwi’s determination to hide his identity, it takes a very long time for Cheong-Ah to discover that it was his brother who committed suicide or that his mother is the judge, who has befriended her. But the hiding of his identity was also to protect Cheong-Ah as he knew that it would hurt her if she knew the truth. As she had told him, that she never wanted Jun-Gyeom's brother or mother to find out the true details of Jun-Gyeom's death. Cheong-Ah and Jun-Hwi are also very important characters in the drama to having those around them change.

Three further intersections. First, the Moon father, Moon Jun-Ik (Jung Won-joong), is a police captain. Cheong-Ah, in part motivated by a desire to save people and pay back her debt for her role in Jun-Gyeom's suicide, has been studying for years to become a police officer. When she finally succeeds on the 15th try, she’s assigned to Moon’s police station. This being a story of deception, everyone conceals Hae Rang’s cheating from the father, whom they fear would collapse from shock if he found out. Hae-Rang was also one of the leaders of the girls who bullied Cheong-Ah at school. Keeping this from Captain Moon takes a lot of selfless and never really explained restraint on the part of multiple characters. One important point here is that the Moon children, Tae-Rang, Hae-Rang and a younger brother, Pa-rang (Ryu Ui-hyun) were all adopted by the kindly Moon Joon-Ik. (They are all aware that they were adopted. In Hae-Rang's case, this was at the age of 8 after multiple bad experiences with foster families.) Second, Goo Jun-Hwi identifies Kim Yeon-Ah as an athlete to be sponsored and, while she deserves the sponsorship, which Jun-Hwi promotes before he learns who her family is, she is sometimes used as a pawn in the conflicts between her family and the chaebol. Third, Kang Shi-Wol has a twin sister, from whom he was parted at the age of five - he has a single photograph of the two of them at age five as a keepsake. His search for her parallels his efforts to clear his name of the hit and run. It was later revealed that his twin sister is Moon Hae-Rang.

That’s an extended set-up for a 100-episode drama, in which true love must be born, develop, flourish and prevail against lies and deceptions (most of them eventually revealed in damaging ways to the deceivers) and much selfishness. At times provocative and infuriating, it is nevertheless a captivating story.

• In this table, the blue numbers represent the lowest ratings and the red numbers represent the highest ratings.
• N/A denotes that the rating is not known.
• Each night's broadcast is divided into two 40-minute episodes with a commercial break in between.

• Official website (in Korean)
• Beautiful Love, Wonderful Life on IMDb
• Beautiful Love, Wonderful Life on KBS World

• Beautiful Love, Wonderful Life at HanCinema