Romance across age and time barriers

It is the second Korean drama this year to send a Chosun nobleman hurtling through time to modern-day Seoul. It is probably the fourth series since the Chinese drama Palace last year to pair off a woman from the present with a man from the past.

But Queen & I is also the wittiest and niftiest time-travel tale to have made it to the screen in a while.

Typically, the genre is bounded by history, consequences and histrionics on one side and fish-out- of-water comedy on the other side. This drama by the cable channel tvN, however, plays with the particulars and narrative potential of time-hopping itself.

Initially, its visitor, a scholar (Ji Hyun Woo) with a magical time-shifting talisman, brings to mind the out-of-time royal in the recent Korean drama Rooftop Prince. He, too, has fallen from the past into the present, from a heavy historical drama into a light contemporary comedy.

He adapts more easily, though, not just to modern living but also travelling between parallel time zones: the past where he protects an ousted queen from her foes, and the present where he meets an actress (Yoo In Na) who plays the queen in a drama.

An adept time tourist, he is soon pulling stunts such as travelling by plane and slipping back into ancient Seoul to ambush an enemy, who cannot believe that a journey from Jeju Island can be made in hours.

It's fun, too, when he and the actress, who live near each other geographically and yet 300 years apart, drift into a curious long-distance relationship. Theirs is a topsy-turvy romance in which he, like a female ghost in a horror flick, leaves a Confucian quote in lipstick on her mirror before vanishing into thin air.

He buys her a car after selling one of his heirlooms but she can't quite be happy, unlike a regular romcom heroine.

She would rather believe that he is a conman who has stolen the car and who may stay with her in the present, than that he is a Chosun gentleman who might not have a future with her.

Truthfully, unlike in Rooftop Prince and the Chinese drama Scarlet Heart, the lovers here aren't well-drawn. You don't know them well beyond such basics as: He's the smart one and she's the dim one with a smartphone.

But they are so ordinary as to be relatable, even in an extraordinary time-skipping relationship.

The gap is eight years, not three centuries, between the lovers in the Hong Kong drama The Last Steep Ascent.

But how this TVB fantasy for housewives labours, just to bring the two together. It is based on a true story of a lad who eloped with a widow to the mountains in Chongqing, south-west China, in the 1950s and carved out more than 6,000 steps on a slope for her to walk to their home.

Just one thing bugs me about this remarkable romance, known as the "stairway of love to heaven" - what did his mother think of his elopement?

I think TVB must have worried about it, too, translating the tale from newsprint to screen.

To keep the story safe and shock-free for conservative, judgmental viewers, it kills off the parents of a herbalist (Moses Chan) and prevents their disappointment before he can go to town and get involved in the life of a housewife (Maggie Cheung Ho Yee).

She has three children and a husband, the boss of a medicinal hall. But fret not: He will not only die but also be revealed to be an adulterer.

One by one, the barriers to true love crumble, but the would-be lovers remain a picture of restraint.

Chan and Cheung breathe enough life into their characters, however, to be good company, just sitting there, sipping red bean soup, exchanging pleasantries and glowing under a street lamp.