Which Drama Is Going to Be a Hit (1)
I looked back and forth between the two synopses. My foresight wasn't about to snap on at the perfect moment, was it?
I skimmed a few pages. Still nothing. Damn it. It grated on me that the ability refused to show itself just because I wanted it to.
Even so, I couldn't quite let it go, so I asked Chief Jo.
"Would it be all right if I read both before I give you an answer?"
"Ha—cocky, this one. Tell them to pick with no pressure and they always hedge anyway, scared whatever they choose will flop... Fine. Sit and read. We've got a meeting with the CEO, so we'll be here about an hour."
I dropped into the chair at once and opened the synopses.
First, Timeslip.
An action thriller about a profiler murdered while hunting a serial killer, who timeslips one year into the past. The heroine was a detective in the violent crimes unit, closer to the hero's sidekick than a co-lead. The romance was faint, but she was proactive and brilliant, and on the synopsis alone she was tremendously appealing.
Then there was The Little Mermaid Who Came Ashore, a romantic comedy adapted from a hit webtoon. A mermaid who comes ashore in search of a handsome prince falls for a sharp-tongued conglomerate heir—obvious, and still the kind of story that always sells. More than anything, the heroine Son Chae-young would be playing was layered and lovable.
Unlike Andersen's little mermaid, who chose to dissolve into sea foam rather than hurt the prince she loved, this drama's heroine was a headlong, adorably foolish type who would even stoop to stalking if it meant having the male lead.
On the synopses alone, both of them pulled at me. Someone had poured real care into these pages. They'd have to raise investment and lock down casting off this material, so the packaging was probably inflated a little—but the writers and directors already had several hits to their names. I didn't need to worry about a strong start collapsing into nothing. If the shows came out the way the synopses promised, even the weaker of the two ought to manage a solid mid-tier hit.
The problem was that both of them looked good.
Timeslip was aimed at a younger audience, the sort of project people would praise as a smart, well-made drama. Honestly, with material like that, so long as the content held up, ratings a little under expectations still wouldn't stain an actor's filmography.
The Little Mermaid Who Came Ashore could reach a wider crowd, thirties and forties included. And as a romantic comedy, it had the advantage of being a heroine vehicle, with her alone at the top of the bill. The original webtoon was already popular, so the buzz would run high too.
I could see why Son Chae-young and Chief Jo were stuck. They couldn't do both. They had to choose one, and that choice was genuinely hard.
Which of the two would do better?
"Well? Is there one that grabs you?"
Son Chae-young asked, slipping off her sunglasses.
The moment I met those brown eyes, the world lurched.
The future.
No—more precisely, another future. Not the clear one with Director Park and Reporter Song, but a bad-connection future choked with noise, the same kind I'd gotten when I looked at Sung Do-won.
My vision swam, so I focused harder than I ever had. Where was this? Where had I ended up?
My future self was working a pair of chopsticks. My mouth and throat were pleasantly hot. All right—I was eating. The image was hazy, but on the table I could make out a bowl of kalguksu, knife-cut noodle soup, the restaurant's name printed on it, along with napkins, side dishes, and a water glass.
A restaurant, then. Across from me, a man and a woman sat eating the same noodles.
Huh?
Faces I knew... young staff from the PR team. They were sociable enough that we still traded bits of news between agenda items in meetings, but I'd never eaten with this particular pair. The woman's hairstyle was close to the one I recognized. Not the distant future, then?
Both of them wore long-sleeved T-shirts, and the coats hung over the backs of their chairs weren't heavy. Fall, or spring. Too light for what people were wearing now, so next spring? Next fall?
God, my eyes were going to fall out of my head. It felt like staring at a Magic Eye picture. If I could just glimpse a phone screen, I'd at least know the month and the day, but my future self kept his gaze on the noodle bowl and his chopsticks moving. And in the middle of all that, the kalguksu was seriously good.
"I'm dying, I'm so tired. I haven't even slept, and now this."
The PR woman's voice was sharp with irritation. I looked up.
"Why? Did something happen?"
"Son Chae-young won't stop hounding us. Some power blogger wrote that she tanked the drama, and she whined at us to get it taken down. Then a roundup of first-quarter 2016 dramas called hers the worst of the bunch, and she whined at us to take that down too. Delete this, sue that guy... What are we in PR, gods? You think we can just make that stuff disappear? If I could do all of that, why would I be working here? I'd be at the Blue House."
Son Chae-young's drama this time was going to flop.
A first-quarter 2016 drama fit the timing perfectly. Sign now, shoot through the winter, and it would wrap inside next year's first quarter. What had she picked, for it to fail like that? Neither of these looked like a smash, but neither had looked like a total bust either.
"The show flopped, so people are saying it flopped. How are we supposed to stop that?"
The male staffer set his chopsticks down with a clack and piled on.
"That's what I'm saying. If it'd flopped in moderation, we could've spun it somehow. How do you dress up a drama that bottomed out at three percent?"
What? Three percent?!
With cable and general-programming channels turning out dramas that sold themselves on variety, terrestrial ratings had already fallen hard. These days, clearing twenty percent was a smash, and even ten was judged a passable mid-tier hit. Even so, three percent on a terrestrial network was a little...
No—so which of the two was it?!
My mouth went dry. If the vision cut off now, I was truly finished...
"It really did look fine when it was just the synopsis. You saw it too, didn't you, Sunwoo?"
"When all I had was the synopsis, I thought it was a moderate hit at the very least."
Right. I'd thought both of them were moderate hits at the very least.
The woman let out a sigh.
"The scripts came out decent at first, too. Ratings were climbing through episode three. It got wrecked because of the original's hardcore fans."
The original!
The tension let go all at once. If it had source material, then it was The Little Mermaid Who Came Ashore.
"The fans of the original kept throwing their weight around—you didn't do the source justice, this is garbage. Production and the writer and director swore they'd take in every note, tore the scripts up three times, and that's what killed it. They should've held the line. They let the die-hard fans yank them around."
"I heard the writer's nerves got ground to dust. She even got threatening emails from the original's fans."
"Ugh... If I'd known it would turn out like this, I would've picked the other drama."
All right. I should tell her to take Timeslip.
"Hey. Son Chae-young was stuck between the mermaid one and Timeslip, remember?"
"Oh, right. She was."
"What was there to agonize over? Both of them were gonna bomb like this."
What?
"Timeslip started off well too, but... if only the writer and the director hadn't had an affair."
What did he just say?
"Because of that, the director's wife stormed the set and raised hell, the writer and the director both got replaced, and for a thriller it didn't even pay off half its setups. That one's going to be remembered as a legendary flop, too."
How did a mess like this even happen? I was agonizing between two options, and both of them were busts?
Could anyone be this unlucky? Then again, if this was how it was going to play out, maybe both of them failing was better than passing on Timeslip only to watch it become a smash and eat myself alive with regret.
My future self drained the noodle broth in one satisfying pull, then spoke.
"At this rate, you can't pick a project off the synopsis alone."
"That's what I'm saying. You don't know until you take the lid off. Look at that Hong Joo-mi drama that blew up on cable this time. Everyone who read the synopsis said it was childish and stale."
A show that had blown up?
My ears pricked. What she had said drove into my head like a nail. Writer Hong Joo-mi. A cable drama. Everyone who had read the synopsis had called it childish and cliché.
"The script really did all the work. That's why they say a drama lives or dies by the writer."
"And the cast cashed in because of it. The thing even exploded in China, so the leads and the supporting actors all woke up Hallyu stars overnight."
"There were articles about the casting struggle, it being a rookie writer's show. We got calls about it too. We only turned it down because of the schedule. God, we should've grabbed it..."
"Who knew it'd blow up like that? Don't think about it. You'll only make yourself sick."
"The one we thought would be a smash was a bust, and the one we thought was nothing was a smash. When we're picking projects, I wish someone would just tell us which one is going to hit. Maybe from now on I should go to a fortune-teller and have them choose..."
"Excuse me?"
The world full of noise snapped back into focus. Son Chae-young was looking at me from right in front of my face.
"I'm asking if something grabs you. Between the two."
I looked down at the synopses in my hands. Timeslip, and The Little Mermaid Who Came Ashore. Both of them busts... ratings of three percent...
How was I supposed to say any of this without sounding like a complete lunatic?
If I told them both synopses were bad, all I'd prove was that my eye was bad. Honestly, the synopses really were good, and the people in front of me were the experts—they'd know that better than I did. Talking as if I'd turned into some prophet, saying Timeslip would be ruined because the writer and the director had an affair, and that The Little Mermaid Who Came Ashore would be ruined because the writer got dragged around by the original's hardcore fans and rewrote the script three times, felt like digging my own grave if I looked any further ahead. It sat wrong with me.
Even so, I couldn't just stand there and watch her walk into a drama I already knew would fail. The information was too valuable to waste, and as a fan of Son Chae-young's acting, it stung.
I steadied myself and opened my mouth.