There are lots of Korean romcoms and a smaller but significant number of Korean medical dramas. But Doctor On The Edge on Hulu combines both genres. Is there room to do both genres justice?
Opening Shot: A drill sergeant addresses new army recruits.
The Gist: Do Ji-ui (Lee Jae-wook) is in that group of recruits, doing what’s essentially basic training. But he’s not really a soldier. He’s a plastic surgeon, who is going to work a year as a public health doctor in lieu of military service. We see how well he reacts in an emergency when two instructors fall off a climbing wall and he rushes to their aid.
The one assignment he doesn’t want is on an island, where one of his colleagues told him that three bad things happen: “Incidents, people and love.” He’s also deathly afraid of the water. But he ends up getting assigned to the remote island village of Pyeongdong-do.
He is so afraid of boarding the ferry that he takes something similar to Xanax, but he ends up taking two, leading to him hallucinating that a mysterious woman in a white shirt and red sweater jumped off the boat.
Ji-ui wakes up in the medical clinic where he is supposed to be working; it turns out that he passed out on the boat and the woman he thought had jumped, Yook Ha-ri (Shin Ye-eun) , carried him there on her back. How he knows about that is that their suitcases accidentally got switched.
When he goes to where she’s staying to switch bags, she grabs him as a dog chases her; it turns out to be a friendly pup owned by one of her grandmother’s friends. When she tells Ji-ui what happened, he doesn’t believe her at all.
Ji-ui works with the demanding head nurse, Hwang Shin-hye (Joo In-young); Uhm Jeong-seon (Lee Soo-kyung), who is from the island; Yong Joo-cheon (Kim Yoon-woo), a friendly doctor who uses traditional methods; and Hyun Chi-yeon (Hong Min-gi), an arrogant doc who tells Ji-ui to his face that plastic surgeons are “money grubbers.”
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Doctor On The Edge is similar to other medical K-dramas, like Resident Playbook, mixed with a romantic K-drama like Forecasting Love And Weather.
Our Take: Doctor On The Edge does a decent job of combining both of its genres, though the first episode concentrates more on Ji-ui trying to figure out how to work on at a tiny clinic on a remote island, especially when he clearly has PTSD related to being on the water. As he attempts to get on another ferry near the end of the episode, we see flashbacks that indicate that his trepidation isn’t an irrational phobia. We’ll imagine that will be explored as the series goes on.
But it also shows how good Ju-ui is in an emergency, as we see when he tries to warn a fisherman that he’s about to have a heart attack, and ends up saving the man’s life when he collapses after ignoring Ju-ui’s advice. There will be more cases like that as the seasons go along, in that small-town vein that we’ve seen on shows like Best Medicine.
The centerpiece of the story, though, is how Ju-ui connects with Yook Ha-ri. We only know that she visits the island to see her grandmother and pay tribute to her late parents. At this point, we don’t know that she’s a nurse and the two of them will work more closely together. But most Koean romcoms take their time to build chemstry between the main characters before they jump into each other’s arms, so that’s not unusual. We just wish we got to know more about Ha-ri than we did in the first episode.
Performance Worth Watching: Shin Ye-eun plays Yook Ha-ri with enough charming quirkiness to definitely hope we find out that she’s more than just the Korean version of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: As all of Ju-ui’s flashbacks about being on the water comes flooding back, someone puts a pair of headphones on his head. He turns and sees that it’s Ha-ri.
Sleeper Star: Joo In-young is funny as the stressed-out and demanding nurse Hwang Shin-hye.
Most Pilot-y Line: When the doctors go to eat at the restaurant of Hong Geum-ja (Lee Yoon-mi), Ju-ui cringes when he eats what looks like eel, with the heads still on.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Doctor On The Edge has just enough medical drama and romantic comedy to be watchable, and it seems to avoid a lot of eye-rolling Korean romcom cliches.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
