Advertisement
Advertisement
Korean drama reviews
Get more with myNEWS
A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you
Learn more
Lee Hye-ri in a still from May I Help You. She plays a funeral director who can commune with the dead in the fantasy-tinged comedy K-drama series.

K-drama May I Help You: Lee Hye-ri, Lee Jun-young lead frothy and heart-warming romantic comedy tinged with fantasy

  • Lee Hye-ri, much improved as an actress, plays funeral director Baek Dong-joo, who communes with the dead and fulfils their last requests in May I Help You
  • Fellow K-pop star Lee Jun-young’s character runs an errand service, and crosses paths with Dong-joo when paid to stand in as her boyfriend to break up with her

Girl’s Day singer Lee Hye-ri is back on screens in the fantasy-tinged May I Help You, a frothy mix of romantic comedy and heart-warming drama. Co-starring alongside her is fellow K-pop singer Lee Jun-young of the group U-Kiss, in one of his biggest roles yet.

With her bubbly charm, Lee plays the lead character Baek Dong-joo, a young woman who starts working as a funeral director, only to discover that she has the ability to commune with the dead.

Her first departed client was a young boy and, although her natural reflex was to run away in fright, she soon discovered that ignoring these new ghosts causes her to get into freak accidents, such as getting knocked out by a home run baseball outside a stadium, or tumbling down a flight of stairs outside a church.

Unable to avoid the call, Dong-joo begins to help these ghosts move on to the afterlife, which they can only do with her physical assistance. However, according to her priest, she is only obliged to fulfil the wishes of a certain amount of the dead. By the time the show starts the count is down to 16.

In a strong opening scene, Dong-joo is looking after the recently departed Yeon-hee (Seo Young-hee). Following a short conversation she walks into Yeon-hee’s funeral, goes up to one of her friends and slaps her hard across the face.

As pandemonium erupts in the room, it is soon revealed that this friend was having an affair with Yeon-hee’s husband. Fulfilled, Yeon-hee gracefully walks off into the bright lights and Dong-joo’s counter switches to 15.

9 new Korean drama series to look out for in October 2022

Also striving to help people is Kim Jib-sa (Lee Jun-young), who has just founded an errand company called “A Dime a Job” with his uncle Vincent (Lee Gyu-han). Their concept is to run errands for people for the low starting price of 100 won (70 US cents), although clients can tip them far more than that.

Their main client base is a group of mothers whose children all attend the same school. The bright and handsome Jib-sa often spends his mornings donning a green vest and performing morning traffic duty at the school, where he has quickly grown popular among the mothers.

One day a young man sheepishly walks up to Jib-sa and asks him to run an errand for him. The next day, Dong-joo goes to meet her boyfriend at a cafe, only the person she meets there is Jib-sa, who has been paid by her beau to break up with her on his behalf.

Lee Jun-young as errand boy Kim Jib-sa in a still from May I Help You.

Dong-joo doesn’t take the news lightly and Jib-sa gets a banged up shinbone for his troubles. This unfortunate first meeting will not be their last.

Back at the funeral parlour, Dong-joo has a new corpse to deal with. She meets the kindly taxi driver Kim Joon-ho (Ahn Nae-sang), who has just died in a car crash. Joon-ho would like Dong-joo to find his son, who he abandoned as a child and has never seen since.

The son was left in the care of Joon-ho’s brother-in-law, who is now, along with his wife, the only mourner at the funeral. Hoping to pocket the insurance money for himself, the brother-in-law has no intention of alerting Joon-ho’s son.

Lee Hye-ri as Baek Dong-joo in a still from May I Help You.

Jib-sa appears before Dong-joo once more, this time as a mourner at Joon-ho’s funeral. She assumes that he is Joon-ho’s son, but little does she know that Joon-ho has been hired by the brother-in-law’s wife to be a stand-in mourner, as they couldn’t be bothered to stay overnight.

May I Help You is a series held together by chance encounters. This means that we get frequent coincidences right from the get-go, but the show can more or less get away with this thanks to its fantastical premise.

There’s a sense that things are fated to be between Dong-joo and Jib-sa and, while it remains to be seen whether one of those things is romance, we do know that they will eventually pool their abilities by running an errand service for the dead over the next few weeks.

Lee Jun-young (left) as Kim Jib-sa and Lee Gyu-han as his uncle in a still from May I Help You.

The less generous view is that these coincidences are a telltale sign of lazy plotting. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of other evidence to support this view.

Thanks to the spirited performance of Lee Hye-ri, who is steadily improving as an actress following her broader turns in shows like My Roommate Is a Gumiho, we are happy to follow Dong-joo’s exploits. But the truth is that little about her character makes sense.

She was a table tennis player but, following an injury, she perplexingly decided to become a funeral director. Meanwhile she’s also studying to become a civil servant and she frequently takes confession with a mysterious priest.

Lee Jun-young (left) as Kim Jib-sa and Lee Hye-ri as Baek Dong-joo in a still from May I Help You.

It’s hard to find a common thread to these different sides to her character. We may get more insight later on, but for now we have to place our trust in her and hope that the destination will be worth the rocky narrative journey the show is taking us on.

Narrative quibbles aside, May I Help You is mostly fun and very watchable, thanks to its clear visual style and colourful cast of characters.

May I Help You is streaming on Prime Video.

Post