Dating Agency: Cyrano review: Even with a kiss at the end, this date just didn’t end as well as I would have liked.

Dating Agency: Cyrano Details

Name: Dating Agency: Cyrano. Cyrano Dating Agency; Ggotminam, Yeonaejojakdan; Flower Boy Dating Agency; Flower Boy, Love Manipulation; Yeonaejojakdan: Shirano
Date: 2013
Country: South Korea
Episodes: 16
Time: 47 min.

RATING: 6/10

My Review of this series

Meet a team of super matchmakers. With a lot of creativity, persistence and above all precision they can make anyone fall in love with their clients. But although brilliant, the team seems to have some lack in emotions. Love doesn’t seem to touch them on a personal basis.

This changes when Soo Young joins the team. Filled with romantic thoughts and high confidence, she does not let these three men walk over her. It is more of the other way around. With a lot of (il)logical statements she talks everybody under the table. Only the team leader Byung Hoon does not easily give in. His pride and arrogance are beyond measurement.

Dating Agency Cyrano – Team

There is also the strange but sizzling hot restaurant owner called ‘Master’, having his bistro next to the dating agency. With his downright SM name and his affinity for knives, I wonder what the writers were thinking when creating his character. Master seems to have a warm heart, especially towards Soo Young. His mysterious past might or might not be intertwined with Byung Hoons.

The plot thickens with the build-up of the episodes. We get more information about each of the characters. In between the big plot, the agency receives clients and creates for them a personal stage to make them win over their loved ones.

I liked the subplots. I think it’s nice to see what Byung Hoon and its team can do. For example: we see a man pretending to be a detective to lure a bored librarian. We also get to know a cook with masochistic tendencies (still in the SM theme), who wants to make his worst enemy love him. It was very amusing to watch all these unlikely couples getting together. Some of the couples I enjoyed more than the other ones. The story about the nurse and the fireman didn’t really hit any heartstrings with me. Here the series started to get a bit slow, until it suddenly picks up pace very fast in episode 14.

The whole plot and interconnection of characters was kind of what I expected. It was clear from the start who Soo Young would choose as her love interest. But that didn’t bother me much. I also appreciated a heroine that could stand on her own two feet and who had her own opinion. Sometimes she was on the edge of getting irritating, but her niceness and cuteness did save her from a negative judgement.

Soo Youngs body was a bit weird. I don’t know what went wrong. Was she too skinny or were the outfits just not right for her? She had a lot of shots were she looked awkward.

In the end they tried to give the story some plot twists, but to be fair: it didn’t do any good. It actually lowered the quality a lot. It goes from merely realistic to over the top weird. Characters start to act dumb, reasons for certain choices are not explained, the romance doesn’t really get off the ground either… and I even started wondering if I should still root for the male lead, because he just didn’t seem to love her at all. I’m normally very consequent in my couple choices. This is something that never ever in my whole drama watching career has happened.

I could think of more than 10 different ways which would have given this drama a good ending. They seemed to have picked the absolute worst option. For me the drama went from a solid ‘good’ to a ‘just okay’.

As Murphy said: if there’s more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will end in disaster, then somebody will do it that way.

Still, the idea itself: a dating agency which stages a whole play is kind of funny. Of course it is not completely original, as it is based on the Cyrano Dating Agency movie (2010). What’s with all the remakes in dramaland anyway?

The acting is okay. I’ve seen better and I’ve seen worse.

Should you watch this?

It has a nice and fluent plot up until episode 14. It is a bit predictable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not enjoyable. It is a shame the ending is messed up. But at least we get a kiss eventually. They had some really fun ideas. If you get bored with one of the subplots you can easily skip parts of them, without losing the storyline. The series kept me curious up to some level and I watched the episodes with ease. The romance was nice, but could have been a lot better.