History of a Salaryman Korean Drama Review

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I'm just going to get this out there from the very beginning: the main couple in History of a Salaryman never kisses--not even once.  If you can handle that and want to know why you should probably watch this show anyway, keep reading.  If you can't handle it, feel free to stop reading and browse facebook now.  If you're angry at me for spoiling it, I apologize.  I felt like you had a right to know!

The Plot

Okay, so the main couple never kisses, but that's because this show isn't really a romance.  It's a satire, and a pretty decent one at that.  It's stuffed to the brim with kdrama cliches, but it winks at them just enough to get away with it.  I knew almost nothing about this show when I started to watch it, so the fact that it was simultaneously exactly like and yet strangely different from other dramas kind of threw me for a loop at first.  I wasn't always sure how I felt about it, but for the most part, it was clever and fun.

In the second half of the show, the writers seemed to lose sight of the satire and bought into the melodramatic kdrama cliches a little too seriously.  To me, those moments were the weakest parts of the show. In fact, I think that this is one of the rare kdramas that might have worked better as a shorter recurring series, kind of like Vampire Prosecutor.  They basically split the drama in half in terms of the central conflict, anyway.  The first half dealt with the murder, and the second half switched to Mo Ga Bi and her crazy ability to seduce every single male on the planet. With two shorter shows instead of one long one, they could have included some more satire into the second part to give it better pacing without ruining the narrative buildup.

 Can someone please give an award to this woman for Least Convincing Maniacal Laughter Ever?  Because that was just painful to watch.

The drama's biggest strength, in contrast, was in the details.  Like Cha Woo Hee riding around the lab on a Segway.  Or the Oldboy references sprinkled throughout the homeless sequence.  Or the grandpa's toupee. It's all in the little things, ya know?

A word to the wise: Most of the time, I like to skip the previews at the end of each episode because I don't like to ruin the surprise.  For this series, it's worth it.  Each episode has an extra little scene at the end, and sometimes they reference these scenes in future episodes. 

The Leads

As I said, I knew almost nothing about this show before I watched it.  I actually chose it because Orion recommended it as an example of a capable female lead with a backbone and an unapologetic attitude.  Orion wasn't wrong.  I didn't exactly love Jung Ryeo Won in My Lovely Sam Soon (I know, she had cancer, but still.  I'm a monster.), but she killed it in History of a Salaryman.  Her character didn't take crap from anyone, and when everyone underestimated her (including the male lead), she used their lack of faith to her advantage.  I love that.  She was ridiculous and selfish and mean, and yet she didn't cross over into becoming cartoonish, which can sometimes happen with these kinds of female characters (*cough*My Fair Lady*cough*).

She also gets 50,000,000 points for having the best English I've ever heard on a kdrama. By far.

Even though she became softer and more human as the series progressed, I also appreciate that they didn't completely snuff out her personality. I sometimes get tired of heroines whose only apparent faults are a lack of fashion sense or being too shy.  Baek Yeo Chi wasn't a perfect person by any stretch of the imagination, but her nasty temper and her penchant for swearing only made me like her more.

I wasn't quite as sold on Lee Bum Soo as Yoo Bang.  Correction: Lee Bum Soo played the part just how it was meant to be.  It was Yoo Bang in general that got on my nerves a bit.  He's a great person and all, but his laugh drives me a teensy bit crazy.  He seems like the kind of guy who you don't want to invite to dinner parties because he takes every joke just a little too far.

Maybe that's why the romance between these leads took a back seat to the rest of the story.  For a while, it felt like the plot might have worked better if the four primary leads swapped their love interests.  Yoo Bang really understood Woo Hee in a way that Hang Woo didn't (more on that in a bit), and a Baek Yeo Chi/Hang Woo romance would have been hilarious to watch.  That being said, I'm actually glad that things worked out the way they did.  It was nice to see Baek Yeo Chi and Yoo Bang flirting and hugging without the awkwardness that you often see in kdramas.  At some point, their friendship turned into romance, and I strangely didn't feel all that disappointed that we missed the big moment of confession because these two characters aren't the overly dramatic type, anyway.

That's not to say that this show was entirely devoid of romance.  The other end of our love square (Woo Hee and Hang Woo) was constantly building a romantic relationship through cute little scenes. Here's the problem, though: I can't help but wonder why on earth Woo Hee wants to date Hang Woo.  I mean, she's a smart, capable, attractive scientist.  Sure, Hang Woo is handsome and powerful and sometimes carries her home drunk (BUT ALSO SOMETIMES ROOFIES HER), but...he also has the personality of a dishrag.

There, I said it.

All Hang Woo did for 95% of the series was glare handsomely at the camera.  Seriously, if there were a drinking game about all of the situations where Hang Woo does nothing but glare, every viewer would be drunk enough to get a piggyback ride home by the end of episode 2.  Here's just a minor sampling:

Glaring on the phone

Glaring at a party

Glaring in the shower.  Yes, he has a mirror in his shower.  Is this a regular thing that I somehow don't know about, or did he have a mirror specially installed so that he could glare at himself?

More glaring in the shower, but with clothes on!

To make matters worse, Hang Woo and Woo Hee never have an actual meaningful conversation until AFTER he proposes marriage (which, I must say, was an even lazier proposal than the one in Secret Garden, and I'm glad that Woo Hee didn't entirely let him off the hook for it).  If you're keeping track, you'll notice that Hang Woo only pays attention to Woo Hee if less than 20% of her body is covered in clothing, if other men are ogling her, if she is so drunk that she's incapacitated, or some combination of the above factors.  To be fair, Woo Hee has her own share of faults and doesn't always let him get away with his games, but you have to wonder why she bothers in the first place.

And now a small piece of advice from Vivi's Dating Corner:

If a guy consistently acts like a total dirtbag and you see him not only trying to ruin your friends' lives but also doing things like smiling when little old ladies get dragged off by his hired thugs, THAT'S A DEALBREAKER.  And no, being nice for five minutes at the end of 22 episodes doesn't make up for it. 

Conclusions

I wouldn't necessarily recommend History of a Salaryman to the casual kdrama watcher.  It can be hard to catch some of the in-jokes if you aren't familiar with the culture.  At 22 episodes, it's on the longer end of comedy kdramas, and the payoff isn't there if you're primarily interested in romance.  If you're familiar with kdrama cliches and want to watch some witty writing and solid female characterization, then give it a shot!

Thirsting for More: Vampire Prosecutor Review

Look at this poster:

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If you love Twilight or other vampire-themed movies, you might see this and think, "Huzzah!  Finally, a k-drama that combines my love of vampires with my love of Korean television!"

Then there are people like me.  As I said in my introduction post, I never really hopped on the Twilight train, and I'm somewhat ambivalent about vampires in general.  Why does being undead make them so angsty all the time? Why are they always lounging around mansions in slightly unbuttoned shirts? Don't they get bored?  I think it's meant to play to the whole "mysteriously sexy" persona, but to me it just feels like they're trying too hard. Nobody wants to see your glowing white chest, okay?  Give me a straightforward zombie any day.  They don't try to seduce you.  They don't stare at you uncomfortably as they try to decide whether to kiss or kill you.  They just want your brains.

Does sitting like this become more comfortable once you're dead?

That's why, when I first saw the poster for Vampire Prosecutor in my Netflix suggestions, I groaned out loud. "Look!  He's a vampire!  AND a prosecutor!  Look how sexy and tormented he will be!"  K-dramas tend to lean on the broody side anyway, so imagining an extra broody hero sitting in his lair sipping blood and staring tormentedly into space for 12 episodes didn't seem all that appealing.

Then I finished watching Queen of Reversals and faced a major k-drama crisis.  I tried the first episode of 2 or 3 basic rom coms, and I just couldn't get into any of them.  That's when I remembered a friend of mine recommending this show a while ago, and I decided to give it a try for a change of pace.  So here's what I learned:

DON'T BE A JUDGY-PANTS.

For the first few minutes, I thought, "I don't want to watch this stupid vampire show."  Then, for the first few episodes, I thought, "Hey! This is a pretty decent crime procedural! I will just watch it gradually as I eat dinner and stuff!"  And then, I don't know how or when it happened, but suddenly that sentiment morphed into "WHAT IS THIS WIZARDRY AND WHERE CAN I FIND MORE OF IT??? MORE! MOOOOOOOOORE!"  

What Won Me Over

The Episodic Nature

This show, despite initial appearances, isn't really about a vampire who happens to also prosecute crimes.  Instead, the focus is really heavy on the crime solving aspect of the show, and the vampire stuff is pretty peripheral for probably the first 9 episodes (and there are only 12 episodes total in the season).  In fact, I felt like Min Tae-yeon didn't even need to be a vampire in order for the show to work at first.  Sure, he could see some stuff by drinking blood, but most of the time it wasn't even useful to solving the crime. Instead, they relied on good old fashioned teamwork and ingenuity most of the time.  Some of the early episodes had obvious solutions, but the more intricate crimes in the middle episodes were really interesting.  

This format worked for me because I happen to love crime shows with strong ensemble casts. It may not work for people who 1. want a ton of vampire lore (I still don't really understand much of the vampire rules in this series.  They can die by getting shot? Does sunlight not bother them?) 2. want a lot of romance, or 3. hate gore.  There is quite a bit of blood here (as well as disturbing themes like child molestation), so it's not for people who get queasy easily. I would compare this series to Bones in the sense that it is filled with witty characters, some grisly but interesting crimes, and there is some hint of romance, but it isn't the point of the entire show.  

Only one of these people is a vampire.
The rest are just good at catching murderers.

Even though I didn't care about the vampire stuff much, one of my complaints about this show was that the vampire elements were pretty fragmented at first.  We would get maybe one significant conversation about the underlying mystery each episode, but those conversations were so vague and scattered (maybe this was also a translation issue?) that I really felt like I had no idea what was happening until the last couple of episodes.  Be patient.  Everything will make sense in the end!

The Female Lead

This is another one that took me by surprise. When Lee Young-ah showed up as Prosecutor Yoo Jung-in in episode 1, I thought,  "Great.  Another peppy-but-awkard female sidekick with a stupid bowl cut."  Don't be fooled, my friends!  This character surprised me with the many levels of her personality and her ability to convey them all persuasively just through her facial expressions.  In one episode she would be bossing around gangsters, and in the next episode she would blush naively when teased about boyfriends.  Somehow, all of the many sides of her personality worked together to create leading lady magic.  Okay, maybe it's just new-drama-love euphoria talking here, but she might be my new favorite female lead of all time.  That means more than Secret Garden's Gil Ra-Im.  Somebody pinch me.  Am I talking crazy talk?

                              

                                       She makes an awesome sarcastic "Stop giving me crap, you murderer!" face.
                                          It completely makes me forgive her bowl cut.

The Humor

I was surprised at how many times I laughed while watching this show.  I thought it would be straightforward and dramatic all the time, but sometimes it was outright hilarious!  The credit for the humor mostly goes to the supporting characters, Detective Hwang Soon-bum and intern Choi Dong-man (once he got rid of the crimped hair).  Their interactions with each other and with the rest of the cast were unexpectedly fun.

Even Tae-yeon had some humor to him.  Yeah, he spent a lot of his time looking cool and aloof like any good vampire would, but every once in a while a little smirk would appear and he would join in on the fun.

Awww look at our little vampire smiling and stuff!

A Little Bit of Nitpicking

I already mentioned the fragmented vampire story and the lack of explanation on how vampires work in this world, but the other major plot holes came from the crime procedure.  Let me give you a little quiz to illustrate my point:

1. You are a prosecutor who wants to gain information from some thugs.  You:

A. Tell them that you are a prosecutor.  Since they don't want legal trouble, they will give you info.

OR

B. Walk up to their group antagonistically without saying anything and then hope they attack you one by one so that you can beat them all up before asking for information.

2. You have evidence that someone is a murderer.  You also happen to be a vampire.  You:

A. Get a search warrant and bring a team to find additional evidence that will be admissible in court

OR

B. Break into the house, almost strangle the suspect (who knows your face) with one-handed vampire strength, and then sneak around looking for stuff.  Oh yeah, and you don't wear gloves.

3. You have discovered the hideout of a serial killer who may or may not also be a vampire.  You:

A. Call for backup so that you can storm the place and get evidence

OR

B. Drive to the remote location by yourself and wander around with nothing but a gas gun for protection.

If you answered B to all of these questions, you are apparently qualified to be a member of Korean law enforcement!  Now, I know that Korean law and American law aren't identical, but since they mentioned things like search warrants and police brutality, I can't help but wonder why they weren't more careful in their process. If this were Law and Order, every single thing they found would be inadmissible in court!  

The Verdict Is In

Overall, the only true downside to this show is that I amcompletely addicted and now have to watch the second season.  Why would I do this to myself?  I watch k-dramas for immediate closure, and now I'm stuck with this craving I can't stop for the rest of eternity--just like poor Tae-yeon.  Except at least my craving involves less blood.