K-drama Secret Royal Inspector & Joy: Ok Taecyeon, Kim Hye-yoon offer compelling lead performances in easygoing period procedural
- Charming K-drama set in the era of Korea’s Joseon kingdom brings together murder, food, corruption, and a flash of superhuman ability
- The lead characters, an inspector and a divorcee who joins forces with him, are brilliantly played by Ok Taecyeon and Kim Hye-yoon
This article contains mild spoilers.
In this era of increasingly short attention spans, amid a cornucopia of entertainment options, hooking an audience early has never been so important. This places a lot of pressure on the opening of a show to stand out, and in order to so, writers are sometimes forced to break their own rules.
Secret Royal Inspector & Joy, the charming new procedural comedy drama from tvN, set in the Joseon dynasty era in Korea and featuring Ok Taecyeon and Kim Hye-yoon, has just such an opening. The first scene is a very brief sequence of a man being killed on a boat on a rainy night, which sets up the mystery, but more important is what happens right after that.
In the show’s first full scene, we are introduced to Ra Yi-eon (Ok Taecyeon), a handsome young government officer happily washing some seaweed before his assistants rush in to the yard with his cloak and lunchbox in hand, urging him not to be late for work.
They dash down the dusty path towards the government building and he tosses the box in the air, jumps up, dresses in mid-flight, does a somersault and lands back on his feet in time to catch the box.