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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Family Outing" Episode 5

Why does this drama have so many characters? The more I watch "Family Outing" the more this question bothers me. There's a huge cast here, but time and time again the only ones we really explore in any serious detail are Joon-hee and Dong-seok. The greater part of this episode is just a huge, apparently pointless derail into Dong-seok's backstory, specifically his first love. Isn't there enough going on here without having to drag even more characters into it? Even the police officer apparently relates to all this personally somehow.

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Also, I rescind my compliment about the good foreigner acting. The goons from the United States are really bad, even in the context of comedy, although I don't know if I'm willing to give "Family Outing" credit that much credit in regards to how we were supposed to view the opening. And while I'm not a legal expert, I really do have to question the legal validity of an international contract that appears to have been written by hand in a language the signer could plausibly claim not to understand

The premise at least gets some brief screen time here, as Kkeut-soon explains the wacky rules involved in the competition designed to provide access to her money. Note that these bits are interlaced with rather serious hospital scenes, which center around other characters who are largely only periferally related to the storyline. I'll ask again- whose smart idea was it to clutter an already crowded, underdeveloped drama with even more characters?

The preview only makes all of this more confusing, because the implication is that there will be less focus on Kkeut-soon's missions and more on the Joon-hee / Dong-seok romance. To try and keep all of this in perspective, Joon-hee dreams of being a designer, is on the run from American hunters, has teamed up with Joon-ah for criminal shenanigans while also posing as a Kkeut-soon's lawyer for ominous reasons that are as yet unclear but in the short term allows her to execute Kkeut-soon's eccentric estate demands while having to fend off Dong-seok's general suspicions.

...Good grief that was a mouthful. And Dong-seok's storyline is almost as complicated. Kkeut-soon, too, although she's not receiving as much focus lately so it's easy to forget her. What I'm getting at is, any one of these characters has more than enough backstory to keep an entire drama running, and "Family Outing" is determined to explore all of them at the same time to increasingly little success. It bears repeating- the drama really needs to just try and do one thing consistently for awhile instead of jumping all over the place.

Review by William Schwartz

"Family Outing" is directed by Joo Dong-min, written by Kim Sin-hye and features Lee Jung-hyun, Jin Yi-han, Oh Sang-jin, Park Won-sook, Jung Han-hun and Park Jun-gyu.

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