Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mad For Each Other’ On Netflix, A Slapsticky Korean Rom-Com About Two People In Crisis Who Keep Finding Each Other

K-dramas aren’t just known for their swoony romantic moments. There’s just enough comedy — at least sweet moments — in most of them to help cut the constant “meet cutes” and scenes of people with saucer-eyes for each other. But the Korean romcoms that are more com than rom have their own issues, namely the fact that what people in South Korea may find hilarious just doesn’t play well here in the U.S. A good example is the new Netflix series Mad For Each Other.

MAD FOR EACH OTHER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A radio host says “It’s raining all over the country today,” as we see scenes of a rainy Seoul.

The Gist: Noh Hwi-oh (Jung Woo) is a guy who has problems controlling his anger. Anything can set him off, from the fact that he can’t get out of the bus before it moves to getting wet due to a wrecked umbrella he finds at the bus stop. He hates rain and pretty much everyone who surrounds him. When he goes to his psychiatrist, and she asks him if he’s angry, he says he’s fine, then launches into a tirade about all the work he’s done. He also has fresh bruises on his knuckles. She writes down that he’s suffering from “Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder.”

Lee Min-kyung (Oh Yeon-seo) has her own issues. She walks in the rain with massive sunglasses on and a flower in her hair. She has PTSD, delusions, OCD and more, according to the same psychiatrist that Hwi-oh goes to. And she spends all day thinking that this angry man (Hwi-oh) is following her, even though he was in front of her during their first encounter.

It’s more of a coincidence. They go to the same psychiatrist, as we said; when she sees him, she attacks him with her umbrella. When she walks into a convenience store, he’s there eating a noodle cup. She warns the cashier about him, and when he comes up to say that the noodle cup has no chili sauce, she’s ready to hit the silent alarm on him. Then, as the noodle cup quickly makes its way through his system, Hwi-oh runs to his apartment to get to the bathroom; little do either of them realize they live right next to each other.

Hwi-oh doesn’t make it to the bathroom, mainly because his grouchy dad was sitting on the toilet and refused to get off. It’s not a stretch to see where Hwi-oh gets his anger from, but his mother thinks it’s because she gave him the wrong first name at birth.

As Min-kyung takes her carefully-organized recycling out with her, she spots a stray dog, whom she chases into the parking garage. Hwi-oh, coming back from the public baths, cuts through the garage and spots her. Of course, Min-kyung thinks he’s following her again. He has no idea why she’s screaming at him or yelling “Help” into the CCTV cameras. He especially has no idea why she then jumps on the hood of his car and starts bounding on it.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Mad For Each Other is in the k-romcom vein as Crash Landing on You, except the people falling for each other are both in the throes of their respective mental health crises.

Our Take: You know those moments in your favorite k-drama that are supposed to be funny but are more slapsticky than anything else? And those scenes play over a plinky soundtrack that screams “PLEASE LAUGH AT THIS SCENE”? That is pretty much the entire first half hour of Mad For Each Other, and it didn’t really make us laugh, despite the presence of umbrellas-as-weapons and explosive diarrhea, two usual sure-things for us.

Seriously, though, most of what passes for the “com” part in this romcom is mostly slapstick and physical humor. Which would be fine if it was funny, but it mostly isn’t. At the outset, we’re introduced to these two emotionally broken people, with little to no context as to how they got that way, so there is no humor in character at this point; just scenes of Hwi-oh getting angry that he tripped over his slipper and that Min-kyung kicked it into the street, or Min-kyung carefully ripping a label off a box and tearing it to pieces. There even seems to be a bit of a mixed-up timeline in the first episode, which then makes it hard to place just what happened when.

But, also without context, what has made these two people so broken makes them into caricatures instead of rounded characters. After Hwi-oh has his accident, the talks he has with his parents make him make mores sense. It could be a combination of his father’s grumpy disinterest and his mother’s overprotectiveness, but it least it shows something of a source for all of his anger. Min-kyung is simply paranoid and delusional; we know there’s trauma in her life, but we don’t know what it is of yet.

So, all we’ve got is to make jokes of their respective mental illnesses and goof on how they seemingly find each other all the time, despite having no awareness that the other existed until that day. Laughing at mental illness isn’t exactly in vogue these days, and it’s a shaky foundation on which to build a character, and humor about that character, anyway. We hope the writer, Ah Kyung, dives deeper into these two people’s lives so we can get at the heart of their issues, and also get a better idea of how the two of them will keep finding each other, and finding themselves falling for each other.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Hwi-oh is screaming, Min-Kyung is jumping on his car and she’s screaming, the dog is scared and we’re wondering where this goes.

Sleeper Star: None.

Most Pilot-y Line: If you’re going to attack someone with your umbrella, at least open it first!

Our Call: SKIP IT. While we like the idea of seeing two people fall for each other after hating each other at first, we’re not sure the jokes in Mad For Each Other are our cup of tea, despite the performances from Oh and Jung.

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.

Stream Mad For Each Other On Netflix