OVERALL RATING>: 7.8/10

Watched this drama with some expectations seeing that the rating was pretty high (for school dramas). At the end I felt like I didn’t watch anything very new though. I then realised why - this show is a mix of different storylines from different school dramas.

I actually quite liked the fresh approach it was going for initially - a boy who has eating disorders and is therefore quite chubby. That started off pretty well and pretty cutely. However, the male lead only stayed chubby for about 5 episodes before he changed into a suave and good-looking ML. It was also like his personality completely changed and he became immediately confident. I did like that the female lead was quite strong and not babyish. She held her ground and grew throughout the show.

I thought the show was a bit too long - this should have been wrapped up in about 20-24 episodes at most, but there was too much filler.

As I mentioned earlier, this wasn’t anything very different from other school dramas. The FL proving that she hadn’t copied during an exam is exactly the same as in Master Devil Do Not Kiss Me. The fast forward to the future at the end of the show reminded me of both With You and A Love So Beautiful. The friendship between the leads reminded me of those two dramas as well. However, in My Calorie Boy, the ending came out from absolutely nowhere. The last 4 episodes of the show were a letdown, but particularly the last episode. The ML shows up all of a sudden and feels entitled to step back into the FL’s life after ghosting her for so many years. He shows up at her workplace, and doesn’t even care to ask if she has moved on. He comes in with the full entitlement that she will just forget everything that happened prior to that. And let’s not even talk about the last few minutes where they kiss in front of everyone. It was just so random. Although many people were upset with the ending of With You, the ML didn’t just show up expecting the FL to accept him. He had such a low opinion of himself that he didn’t want to burden her. She was the one who wanted to be let into his life. Sadly, that’s not the case for MCB.

I am writing this review months after watching the show and somehow I don’t even remember that much of it. It goes to show that it wasn’t really THAT memorable. I did like some moments - like when the FL cries seeing how the ML is starving himself, or when we find out that the mean teacher has his own problems (taking care of a disabled daughter). Those were touching moments. However, aside from those, the forced emotional moments (such as the ML’s mother randomly abandoning her son and husband and the ML’s father dying) just seemed there for the heck of it. I felt like it was trying to capture the trauma that the ML had to go through (like in With You), but it just never deals with it in a logical way the way With You does.

Because of this, my actual rating is actually somewhere around a 7.8/10. It had potential to be really different, but unfortunately it squandered that opportunity.