Rookie Historian

Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung | Official Trailer | Netflix
This series is a historical drama set in Korea around 1820. The series isn't complete, or at least not all episodes are available just yet. Naturally, it's mostly a love story, but we also have palace intrigue, bits of comedy from some of the supporting cast, acres of fancy cloaks, spectacular buildings, and some real insight into how people think. We're enjoying it.

Our girl, Hae Ryung, family name Goo, lands a job as one of the first female court reporters. They call them historians here, but court reporting is what they do. They take their notebook and pen-and-ink case to official meetings in the palace and transcribe what is said, holding their writing brushes vertically and drawing pictographic characters lickety-split.

One of the subplots involves a 20 year old secret connected to the Catholic church. Digging around, I turn up a massacre of Catholics in 1801, which fits our time frame. The secret hasn't come out in the series yet, so we will have to wait and see how well the show correlates with the very scant history I found.

Another plot excursion involves smallpox inoculations. Seems the standard method of treating outbreaks of smallpox at this time was to quarantine the villages where the outbreaks occurred, but there is one woman (associated with the Catholics somehow) who knows how to perform inoculations. The king has sent his number two son to the area to reassure the people by performing some ritual. The prince gets wind of this inoculation business and decides to be the guinea pig in a public demonstration. It's easy to think now that it would be a simple matter, but back then, when it wasn't well understood, it would take some real intestinal fortitude to do such a thing.

So mostly we have a very attractive couple making goo-goo eyes at each other, but every once in a while they display some real courage in situations that would have any normal person shaking in their boots. I mean, situations where if the king is in a bad mood you could lose your head.