In Netflix K-drama romcom Business Proposal, Kim Se-jeong and Ahn Hyo-seop take mistaken identity to another level
- In Netflix K-drama series, Kim Se-jeong and Ahn Hyo-seop shine as a couple who meet on a blind date, with Kim playing a stand-in for her friend
- In BBC First series Dalgliesh, Bertie Carvel plays the title role of a detective who investigates a murder at a nursing school – a P. D. James novel adaptation
You can spin out the joke of mistaken identity only so far. But regardless of the eventual distance, you can have a lot of fun along the way.
Romantic comedy-drama Business Proposal (Netflix) proves the point in its 12 first-series episodes of crossed wires, misunderstandings, blind dates with the wrong people, workplace embarrassment, annoying siblings and senior relatives who claim only to want what’s best for their young charges.
Anchoring the show is the energetic performance of Kim Se-jeong as Ha-ri, who inadvertently kicks off the confusion by bravely standing in for best friend Young-seo (Seol In-ah) on a date with an eligible executive.
He is Tae-moo (Ahn Hyo-seop), so smooth of feature he could have been airbrushed at birth. He is also heir to the food company owned by his grandfather, known as Chairman Kang (Lee Deok-hwa) – a stylish dresser topped by an immovable mop of hair suggestive of a meringue affixed with shotcrete.
So concerned is he about his grandson’s workaholism that he has arranged a series of blind dates with suitable young Korean women – much to Tae-moo’s irritation and to the despair of Young-seo, who really isn’t interested.
Persuaded to impersonate her friend, Ha-ri (already pining for an out-of-reach crush) puts on her most obnoxious persona – which backfires spectacularly when Tae-moo decides he is going to marry her in a sham arrangement, to stop all the grandfatherly hassle. Ha-ri, who could use the money her wealthy betrothed promises, has little say in the matter.
Her real problem lies in the fact that she happens to work as a product developer at the food company that will soon become Tae-moo’s and where he has been installed as CEO. Cue all manner of madcap ruses, excuses, disguises and near misses as she tries to avoid him on the stairs, in the lift, the corridor, the meeting room … desperate to not be exposed as a fake Young-seo.
The real Young-seo, meanwhile, has already had her cover blown by Tae-moo’s faithful assistant, Sung-hoon (Kim Min-kyu), for whom she has the hots. But Sung-hoon doesn’t immediately tell his boss, suggesting he might have nefarious plans of his own.
Either way, by the end of the series, which concludes on Tuesday, we’ll know if it’s really all just business for Ha-ri and Tae-moo – and no pleasure.
Peculiar poet
However crowded the oddball-detective genre might seem, there’s always room for another. So here comes Bertie Carvel as the latest incarnation of enigmatic Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh in Dalgliesh (BBC First, available through myTV Super and Now TV on demand).
Three two-part stories, adapted from the novels of P.D. James, begin with Shroud for a Nightingale, in which our brooding lawman has his hands full with a group of student nurses at a residential training school.
One of the girls – we’re back in the mid-1970s here – has apparently been murdered, gruesomely and ingeniously, in what turns out to be the encore to a crime committed in World War II. Nor is that the end of things that go bump in the night (or ablaze in a forest).
The intensity of the taciturn detective’s gaze looks like it could be enough by itself to frighten any killer into a confession; but it’s not as though he doesn’t have a certain style unrelated to the job, which makes him one of the more intriguing of those oddballs.
Dalgliesh is also a poet and an E-Type Jaguar driver, which, in 1975, ranks him alongside the flashiest footballers of the era. “A policeman’s lot is not a happy one …”? Gilbert and Sullivan, j’accuse.
