Do you enjoy being depressed? Then watch this drama. Do you feel like there's no hope for humanity? Then watch this drama. Maybe that's a bit harsh, but that's how I felt watching "Time", a drama that pretends to be a romance but is actually a series of non-stop frustrating sads. If you are looking for something extremely "Emo" to add to your watchlist, you've found it! Normally I am a fan of melodrama, but the unrelenting bad mood feeling this drama gave me seemed unnecessarily bleak. I only kept watching because the beginning seemed kinda promising. Initially, I expected a beautifully tragic romance, but I got a disheartening revenge plot instead.

This drama revolved around the quintessential jerk of a chaebol Cheon Soo Ho, played by Kim Jung Hyun, and the optimistic but always struggling Seol Ji Hyun played by Seo Hyun. I thought Kim Jung Hyun was great and initially liked Seo Hyun, but eventually, their chemistry got traded in for a convoluted revenge story that I just didn't like. I felt like the story wasted the development of a great character, Cheon Soo Ho, and instead focused on turning Seol Ji Hyun into an unconvincing mastermind who kept giving everyone the side eye so much that I forgot I initially liked her character. Maybe a better actress could have pulled off Seol Ji Hyun's transformation but as the star of this story she was pretty boring, and unimpressive.

The side characters were fine. Hwang Seung Eon and her super purse and Kim Joon Han as the worst ex ever were really good, with a relationship that became even more interesting than the main couple, but because of the overload of melodrama, many of the characters became too two dimensional. By the end, I had no real interest in any of them.

I suspect that the last few episodes were not what was originally intended because they seemed so thrown together and tried to overcompensate with the drama. Soo Ho made me sympathize and even boo hoo cry the more I learned about him, but once Soo Ho was no longer the focus I lost any lingering interest in this show. I just finished it to see how it would finally end, and to see if the ending would justify the depressing tone. Maybe some people found the end inspiring, but I did not. I felt like all the suspense lead to a pretty boring conclusion. There were a few themes about classism and trust that could have been interesting, but the story was just too cliché for me to invest any real feelings into it.

Overall if evil CEOs, terminal illness, rich people behaving badly, betrayal & revenge sound like the makings of a great drama, I'd say there are other dramas that do those things much better than this. But if you feel like brooding over how unfair the world is then maybe this is the perfect drama for you. As for me, I'd recommend just waiting for whatever drama Kim Jung Hyun has coming up next.