K-drama Good Job: Jung Il-woo, Kwon Yuri in series that’s part Batman, part Sherlock Holmes, all toxic masculinity
- Starring Jung Il-woo and Kwon Yuri of Girls’ Generation, Good Job follows a CEO/private detective who teams up with a plucky young woman with a special power
- There’s a bouncy energy to the series that makes it an easy watch, but it both points the finger at and embodies the same problem: outdated K-drama gender roles
The overweening male lead is alive and well in the new Korean drama series Good Job from ENA, which debuted with the unenviable task of occupying the time slot in Korean broadcast schedules vacated by Extraordinary Attorney Woo a week earlier.
Jung Il-woo and Kwon Yuri of K-pop group Girls’ Generation lead the new series, which may trigger déjà vu for viewers familiar with 2021’s period drama Bossam: Steal the Fate, which featured the same two leads.
Jung plays the brilliant and suave Eun Sun-woo, the head of the Eunkang Group, Korea’s largest corporation. He is also secretly a private detective who specialises in going undercover with the help of elaborate costumes and make-up, assisted by his trusty lawyer assistant Yang Jin-mo (Eum Moon-suk).
The case he’s busying himself with at the moment concerns the grisly death of his mother 20 years ago. Her priceless diamond necklace, named the Queen’s Tears, has suddenly resurfaced and thus finally provided him with a lead to uncover what really happened on that rainy night.
Sun-woo attends the auction for the Queen’s Tears in a wheelchair, buried under thoroughly unconvincing old man hair and make-up. The disguise doesn’t get him very far as he instead punches his way through a dozen guards on the way to the office of the auction house’s CEO.
