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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Uhm Jung-hwa, Song Seung-heon
Latest Nielsen rating: 1.9 per cent
Two years after the smash hit Doctor Cha, Korean screen icon Uhm Jung-hwa returns as the titular protagonist of the fantasy comedy My Troublesome Star, alongside Song Seung-heon, last seen in The Player 2: Master of Swindlers.
Uhm plays Im Se-ra, a 1990s star who suddenly wakes up 26 years later in 2025 to find a very different reality.


When the series begins, in 1999, Se-ra is played by Jang Da-a (Pyramid Game). She is a beloved rising star dubbed “Korea’s first love” who has already conquered the world of K-dramas and ads and is on the cusp of becoming a full-blown film star.
But after being cast in her dream project, Se-ra learns what is really expected of her when she winds up in a private club with a male power broker. She escapes, but fears that she has thrown her career down the drain.
Then, just after winning a major trophy at a film awards show, she gets into a car crash. When she wakes up, 26 years have passed, although no one acts as though she has just woken up from a long coma.
Bewildered at her changed looks and the world’s dizzying new technology, Se-ra has trouble adjusting to her new circumstances.

Her unwitting anchor during this confusing phase is police officer Dokgo Chul (Song), who brought Se-ra – under her real name, Bong Cheong-ja – to the hospital the previous day after a different crash. That might sound confusing, but apparently Se-ra has been conscious for the previous 26 years, even if the Se-ra we have been introduced to doesn’t realise it.
Neither realises that they’ve already met before. In 1999, Se-ra was accused of fraud, and when contacted by the police she explained that her swindler father, illegally using her name, was the real culprit.
Regardless, Se-ra still needed to go to the precinct to make a statement and it was the job of Chul, then a young detective, to repeatedly harass the busy starlet until she agreed to visit the station.
They formed a connection during one of those calls, when the traumatised Se-ra unloaded on Chul just after escaping from the club room. And while they met briefly during her station visit, the spark between them is put out for a quarter of a century following Se-ra’s mysterious disappearance.

When Se-ra borrows someone’s iPad to look herself up – after first goggling at the mystical technology – she finds articles about her disappearance back in 1999. However, she doesn’t seem to have disappeared at all.
Rather, she is living under her birth name Cheong-ja and has fallen on hard times. She lives in a gosiwon – a cheap single room on a floor with shared facilities – and works at a school cafeteria.
She is still in contact with her younger sister, whose daughter attends the same school she works at and has aspirations of becoming an idol.
Also at the hospital around the time she wakes up, although they don’t meet straight away, is her former manager Kang Du-won (Oh Dae-hwan, The Tale of Lady Ok), who has since become the president of one of the top agencies in Korea.

Du-won’s star client is Se-ra’s former nemesis Go Hui-yeong (Lee El, My Liberation Notes), who wound up taking the film role she was due to play, which catapulted her to stardom.
Se-ra and Du-won are bound to meet properly soon, but the question is: will he be moved to reignite Se-ra’s defunct career at the expense of Hui-yeong’s?
In the meantime, the show gives us plenty of early romcom shenanigans between Se-ra and Chul, whom she calls whenever she gets into trouble, which is pretty much all the time.
With its body-swap fantasy premise – unless Se-ra is actually suffering from amnesia – and celebrity world backdrop, My Troublesome Star provides nothing new in the narrative department.
Instead, it seeks to stand out with its loud and melodramatic brand of humour, centred around a spirited and committed performance by Uhm.

This leads to very broad comic scenarios, such as when Se-ra, returning home from a shift at the cafeteria, trips and sends a bag of kimchi flying all over a bus and a snotty high school teen.
The former red carpet icon is reduced to mopping the floor of the bus and receiving irate phone calls from the teen’s mother.
With a heightened but specific brand of comedy that calls to mind the recent Miss Granny drama remake Who Is She, the tone won’t be for everyone.
A good litmus test for viewers will be how they feel about the rosy-cheeked and freckled makeup of the older Se-ra – amusingly larger than life or aggressively in your face?
My Troublesome Star is streaming on Viu.


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Uhm Jung-hwa appears alongside Song Seung-heon in My Troublesome Star, about a rising actress who wakes up confused from a 26-year coma


Uhm Jung-hwa appears alongside Song Seung-heon in My Troublesome Star, about a rising actress who wakes up confused from a 26-year coma.


K-drama My Troublesome Star: Uhm Jung-hwa dials up the camp in fantasy comedy

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Uhm Jung-hwa appears alongside Song Seung-heon in My Troublesome Star, about a rising actress who wakes up confused from a 26-year coma

Uhm Jung-hwa appears alongside Song Seung-heon in My Troublesome Star, about a rising actress who wakes up confused from a 26-year coma