What a view | Netflix K-drama Run On is contrived and convoluted – but which romcom isn’t?

Love is often a marathon … but sometimes it’s a sprint, making it the perfect after-training pursuit for a group of South Korea’s feted young track stars in Run On (Netflix, series one now streaming, new episodes weekly).

Ki Seon-gyeom (Im Si-wan), not yet the best athlete of the bunch but clearly the chosen one for narrative purposes, is all beat-the-stopwatch drive and focus when he has his running shoes on.

Away from the stadium, however, he’s as serene as a Zen master levitating over a millpond, while his future love interest, Oh Mi-joo (Shin Se-kyung), inadvertently ends up a flustered grouch every time she meets him. Not that she knows who he is: his achievements have eluded her and it takes an electronic billboard of monster proportions for her to cotton on to his fame.

When the pesky butterflies of romance aren’t fluttering, Mi-joo is a talented interpreter and translator of film scripts for foreign audiences, single-mindedly chasing the big-movie opportunities she knows her skills should be bringing in.

Barring her way, though, is her resentful former professor, who has the power and contacts to humiliate Mi-joo by forcing her to take a temporary job with an agency representing sports stars. And – surprise, surprise – she finds herself interpreting for Seon-gyeom. Contrived? You bet, but this is a romcom drama, after all.

What it isn’t is one-way, point-scoring traffic: Mi-joo makes the most of the misogynistic professor’s mortification when his toupee flies off mid-drunken diatribe. The rich, scheming and entitled echelons of society can’t see past their odiousness and despite the best efforts of publicity-junkie managers and stylists, some athletes just can’t be bought, or dazzled by flattery and excess. Would that were true of the real world.