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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Shin Hye-sun, Lee Jin-wook, Kang Hoon
Latest Nielsen rating: 2.16 per cent
Shin Hye-sun finds herself caught between three TV news announcers and a pair of starkly different personalities in Dear Hyeri, a romantic drama with an unusual twist.
Beginning in 2015, the series shows us the happy home life of couple Joo Eun-ho (Shin, Welcome to Samdal-ri) and Jung Hyun-oh (Lee Jin-wook, Sweet Home). Through the years, Eun-ho challenges Hyun-oh repeatedly in the flat they share, asking him to choose between her and whatever it is he is doing whenever she asks him.


Although he eventually learns the right answer, that does not stop them from eventually breaking up.
By the time we reach the present they are no longer an item and we learn a couple of pertinent details about them. Eun-ho and Hyun-oh are both TV announcers. Not only that, they work for the same network, PPS.
Beyond their break-up, which occurred because Hyun-oh did not want to get married, what separates them is where they are in their respective careers. Hyun-oh is a star announcer while Eun-ho, despite 14 years of painstaking work, is still struggling to make a name for herself.
Although they no longer get on very well, the pair are quickly forced to share the screen when they are assigned to host the same news segment. Eun-ho is very vocal in her disdain for her ex, while Hyun-oh slyly seems to be doing his best to help her, whether she realises it or not. ä

Meanwhile, Eun-ho’s colleague Moon Ji-on (Kang Sang-joon, Doctor Slump) is more direct about his feelings for her, and plants a kiss on her lips quite early in the show.
So far, so normal, until Shin appears on screen with a very different appearance and demeanour, sitting on a therapist’s couch. This is Joo Hye-ri, and she has just been explaining her strange dreams about a TV announcer named Eun-ho who looks just like her.
Hye-ri is not a TV announcer, but she does work for another broadcasting network – Media N Seoul – as a parking attendant, and she happens to have a crush on a handsome young evening news anchor named Kang Joo-yeon (Kang Hoon, A Time Called You).
With slouched shoulders and a long fringe covering her eyes, Hye-ri spends much of her time crouched in a ball, whether poring over a book while she secretly saves Joo-yeon’s parking spot, or hiding in a corner of her booth whenever he clocks out and comes to pay his parking fee.

After giving us a glimpse of Hye-ri’s life for a while, the show slams both worlds together when she returns home one night to find Hyun-oh, the man from her dreams, waiting for her. Now we learn the truth about Eun-ho and Hye-ri from her therapist: they are in fact one and the same.
Eun-ho, who gets up at 4am every day to go to PPS, has multiple-personality disorder, a result of a past family trauma. Hye-ri is a personality that she has dreamed up, but one who does not just exist in her head.
Eun-ho returns home from her shift, which ends at 2pm, and wakes up at 4pm as Hye-ri, who heads to her parking attendant job at Media N Seoul. Given how much sleep she gets, it’s hardly any wonder that Eun-ho isn’t well.

Beyond Hye-ri’s brief meeting with Hyun-oh, the two worlds of Hye-ri do not really collide in the first week’s episodes of Dear Hyeri. But surely Eun-ho’s subconscious will not be able to keep the worlds of her personalities apart for long?
Given that Hyun-oh still seems very present in Eun-ho’s life, that Ji-on is actively pursuing her, and that Joo-yeon and Hye-ri start to get along well after she spontaneously saves him from some violent protesters, we could be in store for many romantic fireworks.
Despite the presence of Twenty-Five Twenty-One director Jung Ji-hyun at the helm, Dear Hyeri is surprisingly lacking in style and colour, which may in part be due to the monochromatic TV station locations, but it bounces along at a steady clip.
Playing two very different personalities that contrast tough and cute, and assertive and diffident character traits, Shin gets to show her acting range, although in differentiating them she occasionally overdoes it, a by-product of having to juggle the intriguing but tricky concept almost entirely by herself.

Let’s see how well she manages to keep all those balls in the air over the coming weeks.
Dear Hyeri is streaming on Viu.


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Shin Hye-sun as Joo Eun-ho in a still from Korean drama series Dear Hyeri, in which she also plays her doppelgänger Joo Hye-ri. Lee Jin-wook and Kang Hoon co-star.

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Kang Hoon as Kang Joo-yeon (left) and Shin Hye-sun as Joo Hye-ri in a still from Dear Hyeri.

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Shin plays two roles – Joo Eun-ho, who has multiple-personality disorder, and Joo Hye-ri, her alter ego – in a complex but watchable K-drama


Shin plays two roles – Joo Eun-ho, who has multiple-personality disorder, and Joo Hye-ri, her alter ego – in a complex but watchable K-drama.
