Crash Course in Romance · Season 1 · Episode 1 · 14 January 2023
S1E1 You and I, the Intersection of Two Universes
THE MOMENT Choi Chi-yeol walks into a side-dish shop looking for the one variety of side dish that actually made him eat during a competition - and the encounter is both absurd and oddly touching.
The premiere sets up both worlds in parallel: the hagwon ecosystem rendered with satirical precision, and Haeng-seon’s banchan world as its unpretentious counterweight. The two leads’ antagonistic first meeting works because neither character is positioned as obviously right.
Full episode analysis below. Spoiler-light verdict above.
Updated
Crash Course in Romance’s premiere establishes its dual world structure immediately: the Korean hagwon ecosystem - the high-stakes private tutoring industry - rendered with satirical precision, and Nam Haeng-seon’s (Jeon Do-yeon) side-dish shop as its unpretentious counterweight. Writer Yang Hee-seung’s script sets up the two worlds as more than backdrop: the exam preparation culture and the ordinary food economy represent different value systems that the show will use to interrogate the costs of the Korean education machine. The antagonistic first meeting between Haeng-seon and celebrity tutor Choi Chi-yeol (Choi Si-won) works because neither character is positioned as obviously right about how they live. The eccentric moment where Chi-yeol appears in the banchan shop in search of a specific side dish was immediately identified by Korean viewers as the show’s charming central joke: a man of extreme discipline who is undone by a very ordinary craving.