K-drama Lovely Runner: frothy fantasy romance with Kim Hye-yoon and Byeon Woo-seok bursts out of the blocks

Lead cast: Kim Hye-yoon, Byeon Woo-seok Latest Nielsen rating: 2.7 per cent Kim Hye-yoon (SKY Castle) and Byeon Woo-seok (Strong Girl Nam-soon) team up for Lovely Runner, a frothy and febrile fantasy romance teeming with teen spirit, K-pop, fangirl wish fulfilment and no less than four “saved by the umbrella” moments in its first two episodes alone. Lovely Runner is a time-slip drama, the popular Korean subgenre in which characters magically, and usually inadvertently, travel to or communicate with the past; these include shows ranging from Signal to A Time Called You. Kim plays Im Sol, a woman who lost the use of her legs in her youth. At first, her handicap renders her listless and despondent, but one day in hospital, while angrily gripping a shard of broken glass, she receives a chance call from the radio show that happens to be playing in her ward. She rages at the peppy host on the other end of the line, but radio guest Ryu Sun-jae (Byeon), a member of an emerging K-pop band, unexpectedly provides her with words of comfort: “Thank you for staying alive.” 7 of the best new Korean drama series to watch in April 2024 The call gives Sol a new lease on life and, years later in the present, she has become a bright young woman undaunted by the constant rejections from the film companies she applies to work at. She is Sun-jae’s biggest fan, with her room having become a shrine to him and his band which has become sensationally successful in the intervening years. Sol plans to attend a concert by Sun-jae’s group, but a series of misfortunes forces her to stay alone outside. However, she nevertheless enjoys the faint echoes of the music she can hear. More bad luck follows as she breaks her phone and is caught in the rain, and her electric wheelchair runs out of power in the middle of a bridge. Here we get our first big umbrella moment, as Sun-jae, being driven away from the concert in his van, notices poor Sol and steps out to shield her from the rain. With his gentlemanly conduct and kind words, Sun-jae reinforces Sol’s spirit, but little does she know that his smile is masking personal demons which lead him to jump from the roof of his hotel that very night. While he fights for his life in hospital, a desperate Sol tries to rush to him, taking along with her most treasured possession, a digital wristwatch which used to belong to him. On the way there the watch is knocked off her wrist and, as she crawls out of her wheelchair and into a stream in the dead of night to retrieve it, Sun-jae’s death is reported on a news panel hanging from a skyscraper looming overhead. She grips the watch in despair, and after pressing its buttons is magically transported back in time: Sol comes to in a high-school classroom. The clock has turned back to 2008 and she has returned to her school days, before the accident that cost her the use of her legs. This also means that Sun-jae must still be alive, and that is something she can easily check on since they went to the same high school. However, she did not know him back then, which makes for an awkward scene when she bursts into the swimming pool during a mock trial and rushes over to hug him in relief. Lovely Runner’s first couple of episodes briefly set up the present story before jumping back into the past and, as Sol situates herself in her fantastical new milieu, we are treated to a range of deliberately cute and cringey scenarios. Many of these involve a befuddled Sun-jae, but some also involve her first crush, another rocker by the name of Kim Tae-sung (Song Geon-hee). Although present-era Sol’s feelings for him are dead and buried, she is mortified to discover that she has been transported back to the day after her high-school-age self confessed her feelings to him by way of an earnest and cloying poem. Armed with her knowledge of the future, Sol wants to protect Sun-jae from harm, but the rules of this particular time travel series preclude her from talking about the future. Whenever she does, time freezes and no one can hear her. Yet while she may know things about the future, Lovely Runner ups the ante and gives us a two-way street between its lead characters, as it turns out that she does not know everything about the past. With a lively performance from Kim, which recalls Kim Tae-ri’s role in the similarly lively but richer drama Twenty-Five Twenty-One, and a charming male lead in Byun, Lovely Runner is off to a good start. Lovely Runner is streaming on Viu. If you have suicidal thoughts, or you know someone who is, help is available. For Hong Kong, dial +852 18111 for the government-run “Mental Health Support Hotline” or +852 2896 0000 for The Samaritans and +852 2382 0000 for Suicide Prevention Services. In the US, call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. For a list of other nations’ helplines, see this page.