Postmortem of THE REAL HAS COME.

After Turkey entered the fray in World War I Winston Churchill had a brilliant strategic idea: Seize the Gallipoli Peninsula, steam the Battleships of the Royal Navy through the Dardanelles and across the Sea of Marmara to bombard Istanbul and force Turkey out of the war- thereby assuring that Russia would be able to ship its grain to the world, save its economy and prevent the total collapse of the Russian war effort (and probably prevent the Bolshevik Revolution). It was a brilliant idea that could have succeeded but failed due to poor planning, dilatoriness and truly idiotic execution. This is my best analogy for what happened to THE REAL HAS COME.

This show promised to address some of the reasons for Korea’s low birthrate (the very lowest of any industrialized country at only .7 births per woman). It pointed out the problems of archaic ideas about family, the burdens of having children and even the problem of male infertility. It pointed to the irrational treatment of unwed parents. For the first 25 episodes THE REAL was very real indeed and was truly exploring those things. But there were problems even- like the jarring replacement of the actor playing one significant character in the seventeenth episode. But more fundamentally there were simply too many couples or potential couples while fer too much time was allotted to the central couple. A Weekender is an ensemble drama which is built around a central couple but cannot concentrate on them to the near exclusion of the side characters who interact with them and with each other. But from the beginning of THE REAL HAS COME that is exactly what was happening and that is part of why audience share never rose to the normal level far a weekender. Too many side characters with too little screen time made it nearly impossible to for the audience to become invested in those other stories and so many people simply tuned out.

At its midpoint the show became steadily less realistic and lost its focus.

Then came the colossal blunder: A one year time-skip. That stunt completely destroys the whole point of a weekender- a long story where we see people and relationships grow and change over an extended time frame. What happened in the stories of all the side characters during that time? We really don’t know because we did not see it. But what I do know as an absolute fact is that from the point onwards THE REAL became completely unreal. Much nonsense was spouted by our principal players which bore no relationship to either reality or the law as we were treated to the most unrealistic custody struggle ever devised for a drama.

Part Two of this post mortem is set forth below