A Warmed Up Love had a promising start. We open episode one with our female lead, Kiki, sharing the difficult trajectory her life has taken, going from a popular J-pop idol to a nobody struggling with purpose and identity. It's very grounded and believable while still having touches of humor and lightheartedness (she's sharing her burdens with a customer service employee who doesn't know how to respond to a heartfelt confession seeing as her job is dealing with customer complaints, lol.) It's a really great opening on what sort of person Kiki is, the struggles she faces, and it immediately hooked me. Mori Nana is also fantastic at capturing what a young woman is really like, an ability she keeps going for at least the five episodes I watched.

But while I loved Kiki and wanted to see her succeed, there's very little going on around her in the story that I found either compelling or believable.

For starters, I was completely uninterested in all the business drama. It boils down to people fighting for control of a company because of money and greed, but the drama paints it as some sort of emotionally resonate plotline about believing in the power of sweets and a fight to make quality products and doing what's best for the company. This was kind of hard to believe when no one on the board actually cares about any of these things, not even the male lead. Yes, part of his character trajectory was obviously going to be him 'overcoming' his sweets trauma and learning to care about creating delicious and comforting sweets, but this sort of storyline has already been done so often (and truthfully, better), that I didn't care.

Of course, it doesn't help that Takumi is essentially a cardboard cutout with no real personality. This is due to a combination of minimal acting on Nakamura Tomoya's part and a serious lack of characterization in the writing. Takumi is incredibly bland, his only real personality trait, aside from being stoic and determined in a boardroom, beings that he hates sweets, and for the majority of the five eps I watched, he either had little to no facial expression or a fake smile that screamed acting from a mile away.

I was also completely unmoved by the romance. With Takumi's lack of personality and how believably young and inexperienced Mori Nana's portrayal of Kiki is, I found the age-gap to be distracting and unnecessary. The writers also do little to no work creating compelling reasons for either of them to like each other. For Takumi, it's clearly the typical 'my love interest speaks her mind and is earnest' approach, and Kiki is certainly forthright and determined in her opinions and view of life. But while I don't inherently dislike this romance trope, it's also not interesting or fleshed out at all in this drama. As to what Kiki would find attractive about Takumi, I could never tell. To reiterate, he's as bland as a piece of toast.

Truthfully, her crush on him is a level of intense I found unbelievable. Near the beginning of the drama, Kiki discovers her boyfriend is cheating on her and then in the same moment, he dumps her, pinning the blame for his cheating on her. This would be devastating to most people, but Kiki's reaction is rather subdued. We don't know much about their relationship before that moment, so maybe there is a good reason for her to not be as devastated as you might expect, but then she immediately develops a crush on Takumi, and when she learns that he may still love his ex, she's distraught. She literally sobs in a stairwell. There is a serious discontent between these two responses. Her boyfriend cheating on her and then dumping her is no more thana small blip on her life timeline, but when her boss who's much older than her and whom she knows next to nothing about might love someone else, it's a tragedy?

My last real complaint for this drama is that while I get her interest in sweets and in reviewing them online, and I can totally see how that might transition into a legitimate job of taste-testing products to see which ones should be sold in a store, I could never get behind the idea of how reviewing sweets would give the female lead the requisite skills to actually make them herself. No one even bothers to find out if she knows how to cook. Now, I've been known to overlook details like this in other dramas, so this wasn't a make-or-break issue for me. But when all of the most important elements of a story don't work for you, even the smallest issues are a frustration.

It always leaves me frustrated when a drama starts out thoughtful and introspective before turning bland and uninspired, and that's exactly what happened with A Warmed Up Love. I can certainly see other viewers liking, or even loving, this drama, so I won't say no one should watch it. But man, if you're not going to carry that thoughtful heart all the way through a story's conclusion, then why even start?