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Pierce Conran

This article contains mild spoilers.
2.5/5 stars
Lead cast: Kim Ji-eun, Bae In-hyuk, Jung Gun-joo, Park Jae-chan
Latest Nielsen rating: 4.16 per cent
When we watch something that we deem to be too long, it all well and good to say that its makers should have cut a certain amount of minutes or episodes. It is another thing to determine exactly where those judicious cuts should have been made.
Every so often, though, it is obvious what should have gone, and seldom do we get so clear an example of this as Check-in Hanyang.


Simply put, this show had all the makings of being a solid series that could have deftly tied together the formulas of its three separate genres – hotel drama, romantic comedy and period drama – into a tidy and fun 12-episode arc.
Sadly, at 16 episodes, Check-in Hanyang peaked early. About eight episodes in, it decided to cut all the hotel drama and slam on the brakes, descending into a drawn-out second half padded with a clichéd tale of palace intrigue and a love triangle.
In the early episodes, Hong Deok-su (Kim Ji-eun, One Dollar Lawyer), Lee Eun-ho (Bae In-hyuk, The Story of Park’s Marriage Contract), Cheon Jun-hwa (Jung Gun-joo, Bitter Sweet Hell) and Go Soo-ra (Park Jae-chan, My Sweet Mobster) band together during their challenging internship at the prestigious Yongcheonru Inn, hoping to make the cut.
They endure complicated training and face off against dastardly rivals, all the while hiding their identities – three among the quartet keep big secrets about who they really are.

Youths proving themselves in a high-pressure environment, each with ulterior motives fuelling their actions, is a simple but enduringly effective set-up.
Yet despite all the high-level treachery that follows, the show’s best moment came early on, when these youths had to figure out how to quickly clean and dry laundry that had fallen on the ground.
All four of them make it through the internship and become full-time employees at Yongcheonru. At this point, the backstories and ulterior motives shift from the background into the foreground.
Deok-su, a woman disguised as a man, is actually the vengeful Hong Jae-on, who believes that Yongcheonru’s general manager Seol Mae-hwa (Kim Min-jung, The Devil Judge) killed her father.

Eun-ho is in fact Prince Mu-yeon, who is attempting to track down a ledger that would prove that his father’s predecessor was murdered. Jun-hwa, meanwhile, is the lazy son of Cheon Mak-dong (Kim Eui-sung), the owner of Yongcheonru who wants his son to grow up to become his successor.
While this was always on the cards, it is disappointing that the fun training phase of the series ends before the halfway point of the season, particularly as none of the palace intrigue to come holds any element of surprise.
Check-in Hanyang is predictable to a fault and the romantic triangle between Jae-on, Prince Mu-yeon and Jun-hwa is similarly turgid and familiar.
It is somewhat ironic that the show falls so deeply into this trap of dated stereotypes as the one thing it does get right is its theme of youths attempting to pry themselves from the dark shadows of their fathers.

That said, there is nothing wrong with the older cast here – Kim Eui-sung (Taxi Driver) is formidable as the villainous Mak-dong – but this is a show that worked best when it was focused on the shenanigans of its young leading quartet.
The romantic aspect of the show suffers from the same problems. It is light and carefree to begin with, with some very chaste and confused yearning on the part of Mu-yeon and Jun-hwa, who are not aware of Jae-on’s identity and gender.
As the story shifts from youthful fun into lugubrious drama, Jun-hwa does figure out that the object of his affections is in fact a girl, but it takes forever for Mu-yeon to cotton on. Rather than amusing, his stubborn obliviousness becomes tedious and irritating.
After all that build-up, Mu-yeon and Jae-on’s romance is also a brittle letdown, falling flat in a glum purgatory between epic period romance and cutesy romantic comedy.

Check-in Hanyang manages to breathe a little life into the fiery staging of its predictable climax, but this hardly qualifies as a suitable reward for making it all the way through the show’s repetitive and glacially paced back half.
Sometimes you need to cut your losses and check out early.
Check-in Hanyang is streaming on Netflix.


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After a promising start involving exciting hotel drama, the Korean Netflix series descends into a turgid, predictable palace mystery


After a promising start involving exciting hotel drama, the Korean Netflix series descends into a turgid, predictable palace mystery.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}After a promising start involving exciting hotel drama, the Korean Netflix series descends into a turgid, predictable palace mystery

After a promising start involving exciting hotel drama, the Korean Netflix series descends into a turgid, predictable palace mystery