In the new Korean Prime Video series Absolute Value Of Romance, a high school student who moonlights as a web romance novelist, imagines four young male teachers at her school as the main characters of a new novel. Yes, it’s supposed to be lighthearted and funny.
Opening Shot: A scene where a woman in a wedding dress is deciding between two men.
The Gist: At some point, though, the romantic rivals decide that they’ve actually been pining for each other. That’s when one of them talks to Yeo Eui-ju (Kim Hyang-gi), the bespectacled teen girl writing the web novel that they’re acting out, that this development came out of left field and that she’s a hack. They even send the writing police to arrest her. That’s when Eul-ju wakes up.
Eul-ju writes BL (“Boy Love”) web novels under a pen name, and she laments that no one has read or commented on her serialized novel on the online platform she uploads her work to. Her little brother, who knows her secret, uses it to extort a bottle of Coke from her. As she walks back from the store with the Coke, she sees that in the house next door, four young men have moved in. She stares at their balcony, fantasizing about what their conversations might be like, especially for the purposes of her BL stories.
The next day, as she walks to school, she sees two of the roommates having a dispute. As she watches, she holds up her phone to see if a bug landed on her face. One of the men spots her and demands to delete the video he thinks she was recording. In the dispute, he tries to grab her phone and it hits the ground, cracking her screen.
When Eul-ju gets to her all-girls school, all the students are excited that four new teachers have been hired — all young and handsome guys. Yoon Song-ju (Kim Dong-gyu) teaches Korean; Jung Gi-jeon (Son Jeong-hyeok) is a PE teacher; Noh Da-ju (Kim Jae-hyun) teaches Japanese. It’s at this point that Eul-ju realizes the teachers are the four men who moved in next door, which is when Ga U-su (Cha Hak-yeon), the new math teacher, is introduced. Yep, Ga U-su is the guy whom she had the phone-breaking dispute with that morning.
Eul-ju wonders with her friend if she can avoid U-su, but that goes out the window when she walks into her classroom and sees that he’s her homeroom teacher.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Absolute Value Of Romance is in the same category as Korean teen romance shows like True Beauty.
Our Take: Absolute Value Of Romance is intended to be a fast-moving, lighthearted coming-of-age dramedy, and that’s exactly what we get in the first episode. Eul-ju openly wonders if her lack of romantic experience is what is hampering how she writes her web romance novels, but the presence of these four young teachers, especially the closed-off math genius Ga U-su, is going to inspire her to write her best work to date.
As the rest of her classmates fantasize about the four new teachers being their “last love,” as Eul-ju’s bestie calls one of them, it’ll be funny to see Eul-ju fall for them in a different way, using their interactions as fodder for her new novel. We’re sure she’s going to have more instances like we saw in the first episode, where she interprets their interactions as ones between lovers instead of it being four straight guys who are roommates, and that separation between her fantasy and the reality of the four teachers together will be fun to watch.
Performance Worth Watching: Kim Hyang-gi plays up Eul-ju’s writerly nerdiness, but we like how she translates her character’s thought process.
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: A split screen of Eul-ju and U-su as they both realize that they’ll be around each other all year.
Sleeper Star: Cha Hak-yeon is typically buttoned down as U-su, but that just means it’ll be more fun to see him warm up to Eul-ju (platonically, of course).
Most Pilot-y Line: The girls lean against the locked teachers’ room door so hard as the principal introduces the new teachers to the rest of the staff, they fall through and hit the ground like it’s a Three Stooges movie.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Absolute Value Of Romance is a lighthearted teen romance series that moves pretty well and sets up some funny situations between a secret teenage novelists and her new handsome teachers.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.