The Affair Was Just the Beginning: Episode 1 (First Impressions)
by missvictrix
Edgy, playful, and oh so watchable, Coupang Play’s The Affair Was Just the Beginning sets a great tone with its first episode. This drama’s style can only be carried by actors who are able to anchor it, and luckily the casting here is pitch perfect. I’ve never loved Kim Hye-soo more.
Editor’s note: This is a first impressions post only. To chat about the entire drama, visit the Drama Hangout post.
EPISODE 1
Kim Hye-soo and Jo Yeo-jung as foils!? Plus Kim Ji-hoon?! (Sadly, sans ponytail). This cast was enough to get me to tune in despite not being a big fan of the edgy harshness of most of the Coupang Play productions I’ve seen so far. Let them surprise me, I thought. Let them change my mind. And indeed, the first episode of The Affair Was Just the Beginning is really creative and subversive — in the best way possible.
It all opens with our young married couple. A storybook narrator tells us the tale of “a dependable father” and “a graceful mother” — this is IM JAE-HONG (Kim Ji-hoon) and PARK KYUNG-HEE (Kim Hye-soo), respectively — and there’s already a hint that these characters will probably upend their descriptors later on in the story. But currently, they’re living in a rooftop apartment that’s flooding out. Rapidly. Jae-hong desperately scoops water off the floor while Kyung-hee tries to keep their baby safe. But in the almost farcical situation, Kyung-hee seems determined: “Let’s live a hell of a life,” she tells her husband. And so they do.
Making lemonade out of lemons, we see in quick montage how Kyung-hee took their dire living situation and made it into a fledgling DIY/home improvement YouTube channel. Over the course of 15 years or so, we watch their family’s channel grow, and their housing and financial condition continuously improve. By the time we catch up to them in the present, they’ve hit 1M subscribers, Kyung-hee is a hugely popular influencer who goes by “Captain Park,” and the family has just moved into a fancy dream house in an expensive neighborhood.
While Kyung-hee’s hard work and success as an influencer seem legit from what we’ve seen so far, the facade of their perfect family of three is set to crumble. First off, their daughter IM YE-JI (Jeon Shi-hyun) is in her disaffected teen era and doesn’t seem to appreciate where her family came from. Second, and more pertinent to the plot of the first episode, Kyung-hee and Jae-hong’s marriage is not as solid as they make it seem. On camera and in public they are a loving and hardworking duo in the entertainment industry, but all is not what it seems.
The drama does a great job of showing us with subtle signs and moments that something is not quite right. Despite being largely satirical, there are enough character moments in the drama to not only (importantly) make the characters feel dimensional, but to show us why Jae-hong is presumably a hardcore cheater.
Ever since their early success, he’s played second fiddle to his celebrity wife, always saying how she’s the reason they’re doing so well, and always sidelined by her. As a supporting actor, we even see how this impacts him on set when he’s laughingly told to enjoy his wife’s money without working for it; and later, in a particularly great moment of detail, every time he tries to sit down on set and practice his lines he’s in someone’s way and has to move. Not saying this means adultery is the answer — or explains it away at all — but I appreciated the extent the script went to to show us how Jae-hong’s ego is in the toilet. So later, when the tabloids blow up with news of Cheater A having an affair with a starlet, we fairly assume it’s him. In fact, the audience (who have seen text messages that Kyung-hee hasn’t) is less shocked/enraged than Kyung-hee herself when she finds a condom in his wallet and suspects the rumor really is true.
Another important player here is the family’s dermatologist neighbor AHN SOO-JUNG (Jo Yeo-jung). Kyung-hee is trying her very hardest to charm her way into this woman’s life once she finds out she’s connected to an investor Kyung-hee is desperate to get behind her channel. She convinces Ye-ji to befriend Soo-jung’s daughter, gets Jae-hong to use all his actor connections to turn Soo-jung’s skin clinic into a celebrity hotspot, and from what we see, will stop at nothing to keep pulling strings and increasing their success. That success is held together by their “perfect family” image, and unfortunately, that image is set to topple by the end of the first episode.
Because the runtime is only roughly 50 minutes, and the plot is quite zippy, we don’t actually get into that much meat of the story yet, especially with Soo-jung’s storyline and the husband (Kim Jae-chul) who supposedly walked out on her. Soo-jung is a bit eerie and strange, and I can’t tell yet if she’s meant to be the cute and reserved woman to juxtapose against Kyung-hee’s outrageous fashion and larger-than-life presence, or if she’s holding back some inner tornado she’s about to set loose on Kyung-hee’s family. (The fun of seeing how these character interactions unfold is why I like to watch as little promo material as possible!)
All in all, I enjoyed The Affair Was Just the Beginning more than I expected to. The production is fantastic and the whole thing is lively and vibrant. Because the drama has a lot of purposeful stylization to it — whether it’s through the storybook narration, imagined scenes, or sets that are over-lit and purposefully false-looking — the way the story is told is half the fun. And while I usually prefer a more straightforward style that doesn’t yank the viewer around too much, this direction really worked for me here.
Finally, as I mentioned earlier, Kim Hye-soo is so fun as the star of the show, dropping into this role immediately and making you root for Kyung-hee even when you wonder if you really should. Kyung-hee might be a little (okay, a lot) wacky and conniving, but even with her wild fashion sense and her shameless social climbing, Kim Hye-soo makes this character human and strangely lovable. And when is the last time we got to see her looking so shamelessly gorgeous?!
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