My Only Love Song

My Only Love Song (마이 온리 러브송) is a 20-episode South Korean fantasy romantic comedy produced by FNC Add Culture and released worldwide on Netflix on 9 June 2017, with every episode dropping at once in roughly half-hour installments. Directed by Min Doo-sik and written by Kim Soo-jin, it stars Gong Seung-yeon as Song Soo-jung, an arrogant top actress, and Lee Jong-hyun as On Dal, a man of the Goguryeo era who will do almost anything for money.

The premise is engineered for collision. When a shoot for her new historical drama goes badly, Soo-jung storms off into a battered old van — nicknamed Boong Boong — which turns out to be a vehicle in the fullest sense: it carries her through a time portal out of her air-conditioned celebrity life and into the actual ancient kingdom whose costume drama she had been resenting. There she meets On Dal, the legendary "fool" of Korean folklore, and Princess Pyunggang, the woman history says he is fated to marry. Soo-jung, who knows how the legend ends, suddenly finds herself inside it.

Across its run the series works as a fish-out-of-water farce that gradually deepens: a woman who traded sincerity for stardom and a man who priced everything he touched are both forced to discover what they would refuse to sell. The tone begins broad and deliberately campy — modern slang against Goguryeo dirt roads, product placement against palace intrigue — before letting real feeling accumulate underneath the jokes, until the question of whether Soo-jung can, or should, go home becomes the story's true engine.

Beneath the slapstick, My Only Love Song argues that status is a costume and love is the thing underneath it. Its two leads are introduced as people defined entirely by exchange value: Soo-jung is a brand, managed and marketed, whose worth is measured in fame; On Dal is a hustler whose every gesture has a price tag. The series strips both of their currencies — hers is worthless in the sixth century, his is exposed as a defense against being nobody — and asks what remains.

The time-travel conceit sharpens the point. Soo-jung has read the ending of the Ondal legend the way a modern viewer reads a synopsis, and the show uses that irony to interrogate whether a life can be reduced to its plot summary. What the creators seem to be saying is that people are not their assigned roles, whether those roles are handed down by a script, a talent agency, or a thousand-year-old folk tale — and that choosing someone, freely and against your own interests, is the only authorship anyone really gets.

The most contested element of the series is its conclusion. Multiple reviewers reported that the very end of the final episode left viewers confused, and that ambiguity supports several readings that the show never adjudicates.

My Only Love Song arrived at an inflection point for Korean television. In 2017 Netflix was aggressively moving from licensing existing Korean series to branding them as originals, and this show — a completed FNC Add Culture production picked up by the platform, as Dramabeans reported that June — became part of that early wave. Its structural choices reflect the new distribution model: twenty short episodes of roughly half an hour, released all at once for binge viewing, rather than the two-hour-per-week rhythm of terrestrial Korean broadcast. That format experiment matters more in retrospect than the show's individual reception, since it prefigured the shorter, bingeable Korean series that streaming would normalize over the following years.

Culturally the series sits inside two well-established Korean traditions. The first is the fantasy time-slip sageuk, a genre that lets contemporary anxieties about class, gender, and celebrity be played out in period costume. The second is the folk legend of On Dal and Princess Pyeonggang, a story so familiar in Korea that using it is closer to adapting a fairy tale than to writing historical fiction. By recasting the legendary fool as a money-obsessed hustler, the show performs a small act of cultural irreverence, reading an ancient morality tale through the lens of a market economy where everything, including affection, has a listed price.

Its reception was modest rather than landmark. The series settled at 6.9/10 on IMDb and drew a warm but qualified response from English-language K-drama criticism, which praised the leads and the comedy while flagging plot holes and a confusing conclusion. It did not become a global phenomenon in the manner of the Korean Netflix titles that followed, but it retains a place in the platform's Korean catalogue as an early, lightweight, formally experimental entry — and as a curiosity for fans of Lee Jong-hyun and Gong Seung-yeon, whose We Got Married pairing gave the show a built-in audience.

Reception was warm but clearly qualified, and remarkably consistent across English-language K-drama criticism and fan reviews. The series carries a rating of 6.9/10 on IMDb, positioning it as an enjoyable minor entry rather than a standout.

What was praised. Almost universally, the leads. Reviewers described the chemistry between Lee Jong-hyun and Gong Seung-yeon as insanely great, singling out kiss scenes and skinship that felt natural rather than forced, and crediting the casting as a genuine success. Many attributed this to the pair's earlier stint as a fictional couple on We Got Married in 2015. The comedy also landed: critics called the show light, easy, and unashamed of having fun, with the fish-out-of-water gags about a modern celebrity stranded in Goguryeo doing much of the heavy lifting.

What drew criticism. The writing. Reviewers pointed to weird plot holes and character decisions that did not really make sense, and the tone was a common sticking point — the series opens very campy, over the top, and ridiculously cheesy, which cost it some viewers before the emotional layer arrived. Several reviews describe a distinct turning point at which feelings enter the equation and previously skeptical viewers found themselves hooked, suggesting the show's biggest structural problem is a front-loaded barrier of camp.

The most contested moment is the finale. Multiple reviewers reported that the very end of the last episode left viewers feeling confused, and that confusion remains the single most discussed aspect of the series among audiences.

Overall verdict. A charming, disposable, well-cast romantic comedy whose leads are better than its script. Viewers who accept the campy opening and treat the plot loosely tend to report a genuinely enjoyable binge; those who need narrative coherence, particularly at the close, tend to come away frustrated. As a short-form streaming experiment it is more interesting for what it attempted than for what it achieved.