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Pierce Conran

This article contains spoilers.
3/5 stars
Lead cast: Shin Min-a, Kim Young-dae, Lee Sang-yi, Han Ji-hyun
Latest Nielsen rating: 4.76 per cent
Love has many forms and definitions, but strip away the hearts and butterflies and you are often left with one constant: security.
Security means different things to different people – ranging from physical and psychological to social – but boils down to being with someone who makes you feel safe and provides you with an emotional home.


No Gain No Love, starring Shin Min-a (Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha) and Kim Young-dae (The Penthouse), threads together many romances over its run and in each case the thing that seals the deal is when the partners know, without a doubt, that they are safe with one another.
Son Hae-young (Shin) has led a life of protecting herself from the unfair systems around her. It is right there in her name: Son Hae-young in Korean is a homonym for “no damage”. Her stubborn view of fairness is rooted in her complicated upbringing.
Hae-young was raised by a very caring mother, whose big heart saw her look after an endless stream of foster children. The trouble is, that meant she unintentionally neglected her daughter during crucial phases of her childhood.
We know this all season long, but the big nugget of information the show keeps from us until the very end pertains to her father.

We learn that he was murdered, by none other than the father of Nam Ja-yeon (Han Ji-hyun, The Penthouse), Hae-young’s roommate and one of her mother’s former charges. Hae-young has known this all along while Ja-yeon has kept what she thought was a secret bottled up all these years.
Ja-yeon is a popular young writer of web novels, whose steamy writing and bubbly personality are at odds with one another. But once we learn about her past we begin to wonder whether she has subsumed some of her trauma into her writing.
Her history also helps to explain why she is rendered so upset by the malicious online comments posted on her stories, which we are initially led to believe were written by Bok Gyu-hyun (Lee Sang-yi, Bloodhounds), the heir to the company Hae-young works for.
Gyu-hyun slowly endears himself to Ja-yeon, a task made easier when it is revealed that his frustrated assistant Yeo Ha-joon (Lee You-jin) was actually behind the offending remarks.

Ja-yeon’s trauma resurfaces when her father is released from jail – though initially, we are only aware that he is the infamous “murderer” from her past. While this makes life difficult for her, it also provides an opportunity for her to open her heart to Gyu-hyun, when he bravely comes to her aid after her father breaks into her apartment.
Meanwhile the cool and self-possessed Hae-young, who engaged in a marriage of convenience earlier in the series with the selfless and charming convenience store clerk Kim Ji-wook (Kim), is taking some time to warm to her new husband.
His being revealed as the secret illegitimate son of the chairman of Hae-young’s company – and thus Gyu-hyun’s half-brother – does not push the needle that much. If anything, it makes her lose some trust in him.
That trust is completely eroded when she discovers Ji-wook’s biggest secret: he was her mother’s final foster child, long after she had left the nest.

The death of Hae-young’s mother forces her to confront all the complicated feelings she had for her, a knot of love, compassion, confusion and disappointment. This is also when she realises that Ji-wook was there to help her mother’s own sudden and devastating loss.
Less successful is the romance of Hae-young and Ja-yeon’s friend Cha Hee-sung (Joo Min-kyung), a voice actress in an open relationship who winds up getting pregnant by another partner and being confused about whether to accept her boyfriend’s proposal.
With big emotions, amusing scenarios and charming lead performances, No Gain No Love is a well-executed iteration of classic K-drama tropes.
The show falters somewhat in its finale, which indulges heavily in traumatic memories and sentimentality while leaving some of the threads of its story dangling a little haphazardly: namely, pretty much everything to do with the character Ji-wook, who is not sufficiently fleshed-out despite being the male lead.

The journey is not quite over yet, as next week we will have the opportunity to return for the two-episode spin-off Spice Up Our Love, which will focus on Ja-yeon and Gyu-hyun, as well as the characters in Ja-yeon’s fiction.
Speaking of which, perhaps we will finally get to see Ja-yeon meet her biggest fan, Gyu-hyun’s mother, who has become a budding writer herself.
No Gain No Love is streaming on Amazon Prime.


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There are big emotions and charming lead performances from Shin Min-a and Kim Young-dae, but No Gain No Love stumbles somewhat in its finale


There are big emotions and charming lead performances from Shin Min-a and Kim Young-dae, but No Gain No Love stumbles somewhat in its finale.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}There are big emotions and charming lead performances from Shin Min-a and Kim Young-dae, but No Gain No Love stumbles somewhat in its finale

There are big emotions and charming lead performances from Shin Min-a and Kim Young-dae, but No Gain No Love stumbles somewhat in its finale