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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Lee Dong-wook, Lee Sung-kyung, Park Hoon
Latest Nielsen rating: 3.23 per cent
A few months after appearing as the head of an insurance team in The Divorce Insurance, Lee Dong-wook returns to screens in more familiar territory as a reluctant and lovable gangster trying to keep his dysfunctional family together and reconnect with his first love.
Park Seok-cheol (Lee) is a respected gangster who has followed in the footsteps of his retired gangster father Park Sil-gon (Cheon Ho-jin, My Liberation Notes). The trouble is, he never had any intention of entering the life; he always dreamed of being a poet or a novelist and now he wants out.


Much like the senior protagonist of Lee Chang-dong’s masterful film Poetry, Seok-cheol is enrolled in a community centre poetry class when we first meet him in the present – his criminal colleagues think he is at the gym.
Unlike the protagonist of Poetry, Seok-cheol has no trouble getting up and regaling his classmates with his poems. However, their content – stabbing people, or stepping in a puddle and not knowing whether it is urine or one’s own blood – revolts them.
Seok-cheol draws inspiration from his life, including at Myoungsan Industries, where he works under gang boss Kim Chang-soo (Lee Moon-sik, Big Bet) and captain Oh Sang-yeol (Han Jae-young, Dongjae, the Good or the Bastard).
Sang-yeol promises Seok-cheol that he can quit the gang if he helps them with one last job. That job involves getting a group of protesting residents to back down and let Myoungsan take over their neighbourhood ahead of a lucrative redevelopment plan.

Against the odds, Seok-cheol gets it done. But regardless of the promise made, there is no way that Chang-soo will let go of his most prized lieutenant.
This is particularly so as friction begins to brew between Myoungsan and rival gang Samjoon Construction, led by the hot-headed Kang Tae-hoon (Park Hoon, Bloodhounds).
While the gangland background is important, The Nice Guy is a family and romantic drama at heart.
Seok-cheol’s younger sister Seok-hee (Ryu Hye-young, Law and the City) is a nurse waiting for her doctor boyfriend to be open about their relationship, while his older sister Seok-kyung (Oh Na-ra, Alchemy of Souls) has run away from home, saddling her family with a major gambling debt that father Sil-gon is unable to pay.

Seok-cheol is already trying to go straight at the start of the show, but his desire to do so grows when his first love, Kang Mi-young (Lee Sung-kyung, Dr. Romantic season 3), comes back into his life.
Mi-young is a talented musician whose dreams of becoming a singer are frustrated by her intense stage fright. She gets around her inability to sing in front of people by maintaining a YouTube channel, but chokes any time she gets a chance to audition.
Instead of pursuing her dream, she spends most of her days working service jobs, including as a barista, barbecue restaurant server and cleaner.
Seok-cheol and Mi-young fell in love as teenagers but were separated when the latter’s family moved away. By the time Mi-young re-enters Seok-cheol’s life, they are both fed up with their lives and ready to pursue their artistic ambitions.

However, The Nice Guy opens with a flash-forward of Mi-young and Seok-cheol happily boarding a bus to leave the city – but before he can get on, Seok-cheol is stabbed by someone he appears to recognise before collapsing to the ground.
The Nice Guy marks the return of film director Song Hae-sung, known for modern classics such as Failan and Maundy Thursday. His last film, 2013’s Boomerang Family, also focused on a dysfunctional family, among them a layabout ex-gangster who had been in and out of jail.
Song has always liked to focus on characters who begin life as criminals and try to change their ways.
With this small-screen debut, Song is once again in familiar territory, but the formulaic necessities of this star-driven drama squeeze out much of the sensitivity and artistry that made his earlier works so memorable.

But K-dramas tend to plod forward with plot-heavy first steps, and now that The Nice Guy has done the work of introducing the lay of the land, there is plenty of time for Song to work his magic on the characters over the course of the rest of the summer.
The Nice Guy is streaming on Disney+.


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Lee Dong-wook as Seok-cheol and Ryu Hye-young as his sister Seok-hee in a still from The Nice Guy.

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A gangster who dreams of writing poetry reunites with his first love, played by Lee Sung-kyung, in this new series directed by Song Hae-sung


A gangster who dreams of writing poetry reunites with his first love, played by Lee Sung-kyung, in this new series directed by Song Hae-sung.


Disney+ K-drama The Nice Guy: Lee Dong-wook tries to go straight in gangland drama

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}A gangster who dreams of writing poetry reunites with his first love, played by Lee Sung-kyung, in this new series directed by Song Hae-sung

A gangster who dreams of writing poetry reunites with his first love, played by Lee Sung-kyung, in this new series directed by Song Hae-sung