Story: Han Jung-oh (Jung Yu-mi) struggled to find a job as she found that companies were more inclined towards hiring male workers despite having a better grade than them. Yeom Sang-soo (Lee Kwang-soo) was an intern at a company selling water, hoping to become permanent staff after getting his family and friends to invest in his company. However, this company was actually a scam, so Sang-soo was suddenly found jobless as well as his family’s money gone.
To get out from their situation, both Jung-oh and Sang-soo opted to join the police force. They first needed to study hard to pass the examination, before undergoing tough training at the police academy to become police officers. During their training, they encountered a super strict instructor Oh Yang-chon (Bae Sung-woo), who was a lieutenant of the police force and previously solved several violent crimes. Jung-oh and Sang-soo were assigned to Hongcheon Police Precinct Office as patrol officers, where they reunite with their instructor Yang-chon, who was demoted due to an unfortunate incident.
Comments:
This drama focuses on the lives of police officers in a police precinct office, unlike the many glamourous or bloody (*cough* Voice *cough*) detective stories we usually watch in K-dramas. Jung-oh’s and Sang-soo’s stories before joining the police force are rather familiar in other K-dramas that portrayed the difficulties young adults faced in Korean society. In fact, I think Jung-oh and Sang-soo are rather lucky to become police officers fairly quickly, as there are many more spending years attempting to just pass the examinations to become civil servants.
As highlighted in the phone conversation between Jung-oh and her mother, police officers are not highly paid; they barely have much left of their salaries after paying for the necessities. Moreover, their job is definitely not as glamorous as what dramas often portray. The patrol officers had to pick up drunkards from the street, drove them to the police station, where the new patrol officers were asked to take care of the drunkards and cleaned up their vomits(even with bare hands if the wipe cloths are not enough to go around, Yuck!).
When handling with demonstrators, the police officers can be commanded not to fight back even when beaten up by demonstrators, or to forcefully separate the demonstrators even if the demonstrators are just female students. It is rather painful to watch them having to dutifully act according to the commands, even if they are not willing to. Hopefully, we can see heart-warming scenes in future episodes that make the sacrifices made by these patrol officers worthwhile.
Live is not entirely about just daily encounters for the patrol officers at the police station, it will also include how these patrol officers balance their work and family. In the first two episodes, we were already introduced to married couple Yang-chon and Ahn Jang-mi (Bae Jung-ok) and their two troubled children. Somehow, Yang-chon’s passion and responsibility as a police detective had strained his relationships with his wife and children. Furthermore, there was Jung-oh growing up in single parent family with her father denying her existence, and Sang-soo’s older brother leaving the family to work in Australia.
The topic of corruption seemed to be included in this drama as well, where Yang-chon was accused of being drunk, causing his soon-to-be retired colleague to drown while trying to save Yang-chon. But in reality, Yang-chon tried to save a man who walked into the water (although his colleague indeed drowned when he jumped into the water, thinking Yang-chon was in trouble in the water) after the two police detectives had just arrested the culprit in a case the higher-ups wanted to cover up.
Overall, I think this drama is watchable. We can expect there will be many heart-wrenching and heart-waring stories, as this drama is written by Noh Hee-kyung (Dear my friends), as well as Sang-soo’s (or rather Lee Kwang-soo’s) trademark series of unfortunate events!
The cat that watches TV 