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Pierce Conran

This article contains mild spoilers.
Lead cast: Park Hyung-sik, Huh Joon-ho, Lee Hae-young, Hong Hwa-yeon
Latest Nielsen rating: 13.1 per cent
As Seo Dong-ju, Park Hyung-sik of the K-pop boy band ZE:A navigates a treacherous corporate world filled with love, betrayal and melodrama in Buried Hearts, a series with entertaining peaks cresting between the wide valleys of its meandering story.


After fleecing a dangerous and very powerful individual out of almost 2 trillion won (US$135 billion) Dong-ju hides out in a small port, where he spends his days playing basketball with the local urchins on the shore or waiting for the love of his life to join him.
She is Yeo Eun-nam (Hong Hwa-yeon, I Am a Running Mate), the granddaughter of Daesoan Group chairman Cha Ga-cheon (Woo Hyeon), for whom he worked.
Days pass with no sign of Eun-nam so, in the hopes of twisting her arm into finally joining him, the young man dresses up one sunny day in a tuxedo, picks up a violin and records himself performing passionately on the deck of a yacht.
What he does not realise is that Eun-nam was already there but was physically stopped from joining him by the stooges of Yeom Jang-sun (Huh Joon-ho, Bloodhounds), the man whose money he stole.

As soon as this violin recital ends, an assassin appears and shoots the young romantic, who falls into the depths of the sea.
The assassin – Eun-nam’s stepfather, Huh Il-do (Lee Hae-young, Bloodhounds), the chief executive of Daesan Energy, who is in Jang-sun’s pocket – assumes Dong-ju is dead. But Dong-ju washes up on the shore, having lost his memory.
The above covers only a short part of this SBS melodrama-thriller series. The images are big, the emotions are brash and the tone is more than a little silly, and this is exactly what the show is aiming for – a heightened mix of drama and corporate high jinks.
In such moments, and in the furious melodrama with which the story began a few episodes earlier, the series seems to know how to entertain its audience.

A shame, then, that, as we delve deeper into the story, these kinds of moments become increasingly rare. Whether this is down to a lack of fun ideas or a hesitancy to overload the show with tawdry melodramatic peaks, Buried Hearts has a tendency to spin its wheels in between the highs.
However, the story and its characters are not always rich enough to sustain these down moments, and at a full 16 episodes, it quickly begins to feel too stretched out.
Dong-ju attempts to put his life back together, and in so doing is quickly found by both friends and foes.
He is cautiously brought back into the fold, and although Jang-sun would very much like him dead, he needs the Swiss bank account password in Dong-ju’s head to retrieve his slush fund – a number that Dong-ju cannot currently remember.

This artificially extends the story without needing it to go anywhere. Relationships and motivations are spelled out once again and the narrative gets stuck in a holding pattern until Dong-ju’s memory returns – although even when it does, not much changes.
This is because Dong-ju is the kind of perfect K-drama protagonist who is mysteriously immune to the torture to which Jang-sun ultimately subjects him.
The only element of the story that exhibits any meaningful evolution in this midseason stretch is Il-do’s sense of guilt and his shifting allegiances.
Il-do has long been jealous of Dong-ju’s skills and his favoured position as Ga-cheon’s second hand, and Jang-sun used that bitterness to his advantage both to have Il-do do his dirty work and to have something to hold over him.

Jang-sun only discovers that his slush fund has been stolen after the assassination attempt on Dong-ju – he originally had other reasons for wanting him dead. He shifts the blame for Dong-ju’s attempted killing onto Il-do, who then desperately wishes for Dong-ju to come back to life so that the money can be recovered.
Dong-ju does return, and in dramatic fashion. He saves Il-do from drowning at the same spot where he was shot, although at the time he does not know who he is saving.
While Jang-sun bides his time to figure out how to get his money back, Il-do slowly has a change of heart.
His evolution as a character will surely play into how Buried Hearts concludes its run in a few weeks, but with six episodes remaining and very little else going on, the series is in dire need of a few more ingredients to spice up its ending.
Buried Hearts is streaming on Disney+.


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(From left) Park Hyung-sik as Seo Dong-ju, Woo Hyeon as Daesoan Group chairman Cha Ga-cheon and Lee Hae-young as Daesan Energy CEO Huh Il-do in a still from Buried Hearts.

Lee Hae-young as Huh Il-do in a still from Buried Hearts.

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This revenge drama about a swindler who targets a powerful man, then loses his memory, has a few high points but mostly lacks excitement


This revenge drama about a swindler who targets a powerful man, then loses his memory, has a few high points but mostly lacks excitement.


Disney+ K-drama Buried Hearts midseason recap: slow-moving drama set in corporate world

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}This revenge drama about a swindler who targets a powerful man, then loses his memory, has a few high points but mostly lacks excitement

This revenge drama about a swindler who targets a powerful man, then loses his memory, has a few high points but mostly lacks excitement