Review: “A Good Day To Be A Dog” Is An Adorable Rom-Com With Many Flaws

A Good Day To Be A Dog is a very unique Korean drama starring two of my favorite actors, but I dropped it halfway because it became boring.

Here’s the cast:

Park Gyu Young – Han Hae Na
Cha Eun Woo – Jin Seo Won
Lee Hyun Woo – Lee Bo Gyum
Yoon Hyun Soo – Choi Yool
Kim Yi Kyeong – Min Ji Ah

I also want to mention that I am being very liberal by classifying Cha Eun Woo as one of my favourite actors because so far I’ve only successfully completed one of his dramas (True Beauty), and the other two I have given a shot had storylines that sort of tapered off by the midpoint, and I gave up (Islands and this one).

That’s not to say he’s not a very good actor, because he genuinely is, and he always serves the face (and the vibe and all the other sweet and nice things), but in my opinion, he always manages to pick the weakest scripts to act.

As for our girl Park Gyu Young, she’s a fantastic actress, and I’ve always loved her acting and her trademark short hair, so giving this drama a chance was a no-brainer and I especially appreciated how it almost felt as if they came out of the webtoon. But tbh, while I loved some episodes, I really hated others.

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So, this drama is a romantic comedy set primarily in a school, and our leads are teachers who have the odd get-together and greeting once in a while, but she’s under the impression for the longest time that he hates her. In reality, he actually likes her, but when he hears her talking one day about how she’s uncomfortable in his presence, he starts giving her the cold shoulder.

Meanwhile, she likes his friend, who is also a teacher in their school (Lee Hyun Woo), and one day she finally decides to confess her feelings, but she’s drunk and she ends up confessing to our guy who is wearing the other teacher’s jacket.

So, this is basically the setup for the entire drama, and while this sounds fairly uncomplicated, the twist, or rather, should I say, unique selling point of this drama is that she turns into a dog whenever she kisses a person, so she hasn’t had her first kiss, and she’s like thirty-something.

The thing is that there is a family curse that follows both the males and females in her family, so whenever they kiss another person, they will become dogs, and then they will keep on becoming dogs every night from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. until the person who kissed them kisses them in their dog form. If they are unable to get the person who kissed them to kiss them in their dog form after 30 days, they might remain as dogs forever.

And just as you’re expecting, of course, she ends up kissing him, and while it should be sort of straightforward from here because all he has to do is kiss her, the thing is that he is deathly scared of dogs, so he avoids them, and when she tries to suss him out to determine if she could make him like dogs, she gets closer to him, and she starts liking him.

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I am giving you a very high-level summary of this drama because while all this is underway, there are also some other things happening. For example, there is her initial crush who has a vendetta against both of them (surprisingly) and there is also the drama with her parents, her sister, their family friend, and also with her colleagues.

By the time I stopped watching this drama, they had gotten together, and they spent two episodes being sickeningly in love, and while I would have loved to watch them bask in their newfound affections, I felt it was entirely too slow because it had all become somewhat insipid and a little dry.

I didn’t make a resolution at the beginning of the year, but I definitely decided to drop things that I wasn’t enjoying instead of sticking through until the end because of some misguided sense of loyalty, so I left this, but there’s a chance I might go back to it.

If we’re talking about the high points of this drama, I’m going to have to say that their chemistry is amazing. A Park Gyu Young and Cha Eun Woo pairing is something I would never have even imagined, and why I’m always in awe at casting directors because it’s a skill to be able to just see two people and know that they would make a perfect match in a drama.

Another thing I found absolutely beautiful about this drama is the colour palette. I really love it when you watch a drama and you can tell the costume designers worked closely with lighting and the set creators because everything simply worked together in a very beautiful way.

In fact, so many times our main couple would coordinate their colours, and it would look so vibrant and so well-fitted that it was just simply beautiful to look at. And this was actually very unexpected because the drama primarily takes place in a school, and you probably would not expect a school to be that atmospheric, but it definitely delivered on the aesthetics.

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And I also have to say that I genuinely enjoyed this storyline because it sounds a little weird on paper, but it definitely works in a way that just totally makes sense. It is also the funniest nod to those rather tense werewolf stories, and that was super fabulous because Gyu Young’s brand of humour has always been refreshing.

Something else I totally appreciated about the drama was the family and the side characters because they definitely added their own flavour and spice to things. I always like dramas where the female lead or the male lead has a very involved family, and her sister and her parents are always in the picture, which I loved a lot.

As for our male lead, I liked that he had his goofy but kind cousin with him at all times, and that just made it all the more precious. I assume we find out more about his family and whatnot in the final episodes, but I never got there, so perhaps when I give it another chance in the future.

Onto the things I didn’t like: At the top of the list has to be the generational link between the both of them. This is something that in recent years has become easily one of the most popular tropes, and it isn’t a personal favorite, so it has been a little annoying to watch some of the recent releases.

For example, there is Destined With You, which had a similar trope, and rather coincidentally, I also dropped this drama by the time we got to the midway point, so I might have missed the whole drama, but it definitely doesn’t feel like I missed anything.

Something else I didn’t like was how I felt like the story was too packed with different plotlines. This is something I feel was them trying to overcompensate for because the primary storyline is incredibly fluffy, so because of that, we got the bullying storyline, we got the storyline about the dogs, we also got the storyline about their connection in the past; it just felt a little too much.

So, on the whole, the story felt very busy, but it isn’t the worst I have watched because I genuinely enjoyed the bits I watched, and I’ll recommend it to anyone who wants to give it a chance, but they should know that it tapers off by the midway point.

So please give it a chance and watch it and come back and let me know what you think about it. Tell me if you love it or if you hated it and if you think I’m being a little too critical with my review.