Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha review

Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha is the comfort drama others get measured against, and it earns most of that. Shin Min Ah plays Yoon Hye Jin, a Seoul dentist who opens a practice in the seaside village of Gongjin after a clash with her boss, and Kim Seon Ho plays Hong Doo Shik, the unemployed jack of all trades the whole village leans on. The poster sells the couple, but the village is the real draw: grandmothers who run the place, a divorced pair still working side by side, a failed singer raising his daughter, a lonely old woman next door, and most of them get an arc that lands. Director Yoo Je Won shoots the coast like somewhere you could move to, and Shin Ha Eun's script is kind without being soft in the head. Kim Seon Ho gives Doo Shik a warmth that makes the show, and Lee Sang Yi keeps the rival from turning into a nuisance. The costs are real. Hye Jin opens snobbish and Doo Shik opens rude, and the first few episodes ask you to sit through both before the show lets them grow, which it does by the middle. Once they are a couple the romance turns sugary, and if cute wears you out you will feel every minute of the long episodes. The last third turns to the backstory the show has been hinting at, slows right down to deliver it, and the payoff is smaller than the build-up. The gossiping villagers can also be harder on an outsider than the show seems to notice. Watch it when you are tired and want something warm with a real community in it, and push past the first four episodes if the leads grate. Skip it if cute couples make you itch or you need a plot that moves.