Kdrama Review: Jang Ok Jung: Live in Love (2013)

Jang Ok Jang, Live in Love
장옥정, 사랑에 살다
7/10 ♥

I’m not a huge sageuk fan, nor have I been entranced by or enticed to watch too many fusion sageuks of late, which is a tiny bit surprising considering I was a history major and 70% of the books on my shelf are historical non-fiction. It’s not that I don’t like watching history unfold on the small screen, but in my youth I spent a great amount of time reading historical fiction. Unfortunately, I was a huge fan of medieval European history at the time, and the majority of fiction about that era is written by women for women, which means that your heroines were almost always the same. 

You can get:

1. Royal women who are badgered and pestered by men whether or not they make good marriages, 
2. Minor noblewomen who by chance get to interact with (male) greatness, or
3. Mistresses, the latter of which is usually the most depressing and utterly exhaustive subject of storytelling. 

I got so burned out by the genre that I haven’t touched historical fiction in nearly a decade.

Bring it on Jang Ok Jung, concubine of an age! I wasn’t going to watch this one, I swear. But something about its pitch got a hold of me. I love a good ‘what if?’ historical retelling. What if, Jang Ok Jung (posthumously known as Jang Hui-bin) wasn’t the evil, conniving woman that history paints her as? What if she wasn’t totally about greed and power. What if it really was all about love between Lee Soon and herself, to hell with all else…?

Pshh.. This is well documented Korean history.

But that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be more to the story than history has to say. Or that the inner motivations of these highly visible personages were ever truly known by more than themselves or a few other people.

In other words, history always gives us this much leeway to make a romance out of nothing. If you want to approach Jang Ok Jung, Live in Love as infallible history, don’t. But if you’re in the mood for a sweeping epic love story set in historical period based more or less on real people– this might be a good drama for you.

We’re certainly not working with highbrow historical revisionism here, so I’m going to just go ahead and review it as historical fiction. The 2013 drama Jang Ok Jung, Live in Love is based off a 2008 novel of the same name by Choi Jung Mi. It’s basically chick lit, so don’t say you weren’t warned. In our drama version, Kim Tae Hee plays the titular role, and her lover is none other than Yoo Ah In who is finally back in hanbok (Thank you Drama Overlords! Thank you!) as the Crown Prince Lee Soon and later King Sukjong.

More mostly-non-Spoilery thoughts on Joseon History, the fictional world of Jang Ok Jung, and why it almost works.