This Kdrama was an addictive watch that had me tuning in weekly to find out what will happen to its 4 protagonists. There aren't any clear good guys and bad guys in this show - there are simply people who do sometimes do honorable things and at other times do shady or evil things. Sometimes, you're sympathetic to the situations that the characters find themselves in. Other times, you're mad because how-could-that-character-be-so-manipulative-and-why-won't-they-be-honest-with-each-other. This is the series' greatest strength and greatest weakness: it tries to capture the nature of the human condition with a lens of looking at love and interpersonal relationship. However, to me, it fell just a little bit short of this goal. Still, it's worth a watch.

The acting was mostly top notch. The cinematography of this Kdrama had a muted, melodrama tone, so it demanded a similar flat-affect from its actors and actresses, with the appropriate outbursts of emotion when the situation calls for it. Of the leads, I found Moon Ga Young, Yoo Yeon Seok, and Geum Sae Rok to be the most effective at displaying this kind of style where most of the time, they are just acting like normal people wearing typical faces, but occasionally, they need to dial it up to 10 and display tender love or extreme indignation. The only person I took a little issue with was Jung Ga Ram: he seemed a little stuck in that passive look most of the time, and I didn't really buy his moments of tenderness, and felt that his anger seemed unnatural but that may have just been how his fictional character was written.

The music was appropriate for its setting and has a lot of those tracks with a coffee-shop feel. I don't think it will go down in history as a legendary OST, but it had some pretty catchy beats. In particular, I enjoyed 손을 마주 잡고 ("With Me"), which ended up as the signature lovey dovey track.

I think the reason this Kdrama gets a bad rap around these parts is because it's pretty atypical: it isn't a wish-fulfillment-type of romance where you're watching two gorgeous, fictional characters fall in love on screen. It tries to capture some of the normal pettiness that comes with real human relationships, which involves a lot of things that don't make sense to an omnipotent viewer: characters lie or manipulate for their own purposes. I think this also makes it a hard watch. But, if you enjoy muted melodramas, I recommend you give this one a try - it's not perfect, but I think it tries to stay true to the realism of its source material to deliver a satisfying show.