There’s already a lot of compelling fare on air right now. Still, you might want to make room in your drama-viewing schedule for the bright, infectious, and thoroughly tongue-in-cheek soapy romcom Woori the Virgin borrows a great premise and ultimately makes its own.
A remake of the American series Jane the Virgin, itself a loose adaptation of the Venezuelan telenovela Juana la Virgen, the series follows the life of Woo-ri (Lim Soo-Hyang), a 30-year-old virgin who took a vow of celibacy as a teenager, both because of her very religious grandmother and the fact that her mother gave birth to her when she was a teenager and raised her by herself, in the process missing out on her shot to become a singer.
Woori has been dating fellow church-goer Lee Gang-Jae (Shin Dong-Wook) for two years. Gang-Jae is a dogged detective during the day and a doting partner in his off time, who respects Woo-ri’s promise to keep her virginity until her wedding night.
Woori works as an assistant writer on a hit soap which stars the flamboyant Choi Sung-il (Kim Su-ro) and is sponsored by a major cosmetics company whose handsome young CEO Raphael (Sung Hoon) happens to be Woo-ri’s first kiss.
Mari goes to her Ob-Gyn clinic, and at the same time, who should drop in but Woori. The heartbroken doctor Yeo Jin-hee (Hwang Woo-Seul-Hye), who distractedly tends to both, artificially inseminates the wrong person by accident. Overnight, this 30-year-old was graced with an unfortunate immaculate conception.
K-dramas often feel confined to small worlds governed by an unending parade of coincidences. Woori the Virgin is hugely guilty of this, with its relatively small group of characters clashing in the most unlikely of ways, early and often – but this is the rare case where these coincidences heighten the dramatic and primarily comedic thrills of the show. It lampoons soapy conventions while also lovingly embracing them.
Speaking of soaps, this delightful satirical melodrama hails from the Korean network SBS, which previously gave us the scandalously entertaining Korean soap (aka ‘makjang drama ’) The Penthouse; let’s ignore that terrible final season.
Thanks to Chung Chung-Hwa, who adapted and directed this 14-episode remake, Woori the Virgin is bright and filled with giddy visual humour. The first episode takes advantage of our lack of knowledge about critical characters to place them in very compromising situations before pulling back to reveal the whole picture, which invariably tells a very different story.
