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Pierce Conran

This article contains mild spoilers.
Lead cast: Kim Hye-soo, Jung Sung-il, Joo Jong-hyuk
Expectations are a fickle thing. Sometimes something comes along that you struggle to appreciate because it is not at all you expected it to be.
For K-dramas, this can happen because of someone involved in it, the genre it falls into or, as is most often the case, because marketing led you to believe it is something it is not.


Take the Disney+ drama Unmasked currently airing. On the surface, this is a vehicle for leading actress Kim Hye-soo and centred around investigative journalism and the search for truth among the lies and corruption of society.
However, the series is considerably more effective as an office drama exploring work relationships and the bitterness that can stem from being judged by your background rather than your actions, as well as how people can be shaped by their jobs for better or for worse.
This is not to say that the show is not an investigative drama with a social edge. The elements for that are all there, but they are very messily patched together. In short, as a procedural it just does not work very well.
We expected a show about a dogged reporter – Kim’s Oh So-ryong – exposing the nefarious elements of society through her hard-hitting television news programme “Trigger”.

Instead, we get a mishmash of treacly dramatic scenes spiked with jarring moments of incongruous violence. The show’s murky episodic storylines masquerade as indictments of the inequities that plague the real world.
Take, for example, the corpse of a child with their eyes gouged out or a barrage of murdered and abused cats. Worst of all is the poorly thought-out allusion to the 1995 Sampoong Department Store collapse, the peacetime disaster with the highest death toll in Korean history.
So-ryong and her producer Han Do (Jung Sung-il, The Glory) happen to be right beside a construction site as a major structure collapses. In the chaos that ensues, So-ryong is brought back to a traumatic episode from her past – the “Sun Plaza Mall” collapse 20 years earlier.
The tragedy of the fictional Sun Plaza Mall, a stand-in for Sampoong, is shown on the news. Unfortunately, Unmasked sees fit to fill the screen with a very obvious piece of AI art.

During the Sun Plaza Mall incident, a female school bus driver is wrongfully accused of putting children in danger when she was actually rushing a pregnant woman to hospital. A bus driver in the current construction site collapse is also being scapegoated by the corporation that is actually at fault for cutting corners.
So-ryong is none other than the daughter of the Sun Mall Plaza bus driver, and the baby that was born that day is now a young intern on her staff.
Poignant though that backstory may sound, it is played in such a haphazard way that it comes off as hackneyed and half-baked.
The Trigger team has major ambitions for its investigations and, while their viewers may bless the show with high ratings, Unmasked’s viewers may find the prosaic events happening in Trigger’s ramshackle office more interesting.

Han Do is the reluctant new producer who takes time to warm to his job, but thanks to his background people put up with his antics.
Reality is very different for So-ryong’s long-suffering junior producer Kang Gi-ho (Joo Jong-hyuk, Extraordinary Attorney Woo). Despite being capable, motivated and loyal and having stuck it out on the team when others bailed, the network’s executive suite balk at his lacklustre university degree.
This a fairly typical K-drama struggle but, within a show filled with larger-than-life caricatures, it is Gi-ho who comes across as the most honest and relatable character.
Thanks to his continual professional disappointment, Gi-ho has developed a major chip on his shoulder which coexists uncomfortably with his happy-go-lucky demeanour.
When people openly look down their noses at him, he is no longer able to see clearly, and is prone to making mistakes – after all, he is only human.

Now that Unmasked is into its home stretch, the show’s episodic element has begun to converge with its overarching story.
The long-gestating case of Cha Seong-wook, an actor who disappeared 20 years earlier, is picking up steam and appears to be connected to none other than Koo Hyeong-tae (Shin Jung-keun), the network boss who used to be on the Trigger team but may have changed more than just his taste in fashion after rising swiftly through the ranks.
Unmasked is streaming on Disney+.


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Kim Hye-soo as reporter So-ryong in a still from Unmasked. While the show’s attempts to portray hard-hitting journalism fall flat, its exploration of office relationships shines.

Kim Hye-soo as reporter So-ryong in a still from Unmasked.

Joo Jong-hyuk (left) as junior producer Gi-ho and Jung Sung-il as producer Han Do in a still from Unmasked.

Kim Hye-soo (left) as reporter So-ryong and Shin Jung-keun as network boss Hyeong-tae in a still from Unmasked.

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A show intended to portray investigative journalists’ derring-do is at its best when exploring office relationships


A show intended to portray investigative journalists’ derring-do is at its best when exploring office relationships.
