A Good Day to Be a Dog: fantasy romcom K-drama with a fluffy twist

Lead cast: Park Gyu-young, Cha Eun-woo, Lee Hyun-woo, Yoon Hyun-soo, Kim Yi-kyeong

Latest Nielsen rating: 2.8 per cent

The Korean fantasy romcom gets an extra shot of cuteness in the cuddly new confection A Good Day to Be a Dog, based on the webtoon of the same name.

As the show reiterates several times, the rules are as follows: members of the family turn into a dog one minute after being kissed and return to human form at 6am. Following this, every day at midnight they will turn back into a dog and remain in that form for the following six hours.

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This carries on for 100 days and, if the curse has not been lifted by then, when they transform back into a dog the change is irrevocable – a fate that befell Hae-na’s uncle, now an ageing golden retriever.

The only way to lift the curse is to be kissed again by the same person, but only while in their dog form.

Thought-provoking television this most certainly is not, but the show does not pretend to be anything more than fluffy and chaste entertainment.

Instead, it doubles down on its simple premise and beefs up its dreamy K-drama credentials. As such, Hae-na’s bright and sunny school is almost exclusively staffed by incredibly young and beautiful teachers.

During a work dinner between all these impossibly attractive instructors, Hae-na gets a little too much Dutch courage and endeavours to confess to Bo-gyeom who, in addition to his other positive attributes, loves dogs. Trouble is, he has lent his jacket to Seo-won, and in her drunken state she cannot tell the difference.

She smooches the befuddled Seo-won and, realising with her horror what she has just done, she rushes off into an alley, where she turns into canine form.

Hae-na is mortified to return to school the next morning, but her temporary embarrassment is the least of her worries. She now needs to find a way to get Seo-won to kiss her after midnight while she is in her dog form, a challenge that becomes even more daunting when she discovers that he is deathly afraid of dogs.

More concerned with delighting its audience than making sense, the premise of A Good Day to Be a Dog is purely a means to an end.

It is a new spin on the tried-and-true fantasy romantic comedy, not far removed from those featuring Korea’s mythological nine-tailed fox while also retooling the Disney trope of a princess kissing a frog – itself a variant of an old fairy tale.

Just like those shows, which include My Girlfriend is a Gumiho and Tale of the Nine-Tailed, this series places the roots of its fantastical premise in Korean history and suggests that the teased relationship between Hae-na and Seo-won is fated to be.

During brief flashbacks to the Joseon era in these opening episodes, Park and Cha also play characters who knew each other at that time, suggesting that their present-day protagonists are reincarnations of those historical figures.

Pets are all the rage in South Korea, but this was not the case until quite recently. Even today, dog meat is still a delicacy enjoyed by some, a fact that is acknowledged by the show when Han-ae misunderstands Seo-won.

She asks him if he likes dogs and he responds that he loves eating them. He actually means that he enjoys eating crab – the words for both animals in Korean sound the same.

Until that misunderstanding gets cleared up, Cha’s puppy dog eyes will have to face off against an actual puppy – a well-matched cuteness battle if ever there was one.

A Good Day to Be a Dog is streaming on Viu.