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Pierce Conran

This article contains spoilers.
3.5/5 stars
Lead cast: Shin Ha-kyun, Lee Jung-ha, Jin Goo
Latest Nielsen rating: 9.54 per cent
Largely avoiding flash and melodramatic flourishes, The Auditors has been one of the most surprising K-drama successes of the year.


After beginning with modest ratings, the show steadily built a committed audience in Korea until it ended its 12-episode run just shy of the vaunted 10 per cent ratings mark during its thrilling finale, making it the fifth-highest-rated cable show of the year there to date.
The show has a theme ubiquitous in contemporary Korean drama: corporate corruption. K-dramas are designed to mirror life, ergo office fraud must be a fact of life in South Korea.
Whether that is truly the case is beside the point. Bad bosses and untrustworthy colleagues are a means to an end. They create a relatable and “unfair” obstacle for protagonists to overcome.
It is hard not to be sold on a story that champions the beleaguered average office worker when they are confronted with inept and corrupt management. Who has not been frustrated by a boss before?

Although many K-dramas indulge in this trope, it often serves as a temporary challenge to characters before they are able to focus on what really matters – friends or lovers.
In The Auditors, however, the means is the end. While at first this strategy ran the risk of appearing a limitation, time and again it proved to be the show’s strength.
We can thank the show’s clear and confident scripting for this, as well as its stolid star Shin Ha-kyun (Beyond Evil), who turns in another sterling performance as he transforms corporate auditing into an epic quest for justice, thanks to his unshakeable fortitude and a parade of steely glares.
The series sought to hoodwink us early on when it presented Hwang Se-woong (Jung Moon-sung, Divorce Attorney Shin), the temporary chief executive of JU Construction, as a righteous corporate leader who hires our hero Shin Cha-il (Shin) to uproot the weeds poisoning his company.
Cha-il, who specialises in joining a company’s audit team and eradicating those weeds – he calls them rats – until there are none left and it is time to move on, identifies Se-woong’s tousled-haired brother Dae-woong (Jin Goo, Descendants of the Sun) as JU Construction’s biggest rodent.

This is exactly how the first half of the series plays out, as we get to learn what makes Cha-il such a uniquely effective and magnetic corporate auditor.
We are treated to several interesting cases and given ample insight into his team dynamic, with the young and idealistic members of his squad – Goo Han-soo (Lee Jung-ha, Moving) and Yoon Seo-jin (Jo A-ram, Doctor Cha) – trying to get noticed by their coolly efficient superior, even as they recognise that the trait that makes him so good at his job is his ability not to form emotional connections with people.
It is precisely this quality that eventually allows him to see through Se-woong, the man who hired him. It is not that Se-woong did not want to clean up his company, it is that his warped vision of how to do so long ago crossed a line – he was the person responsible for his older brother being in a coma, having attacked him in a fit of rage.
Since then, he has strayed ever further from his moral core, justifying increasingly villainous actions in pursuit of his business goals, which he believes are for the benefit of the company.

Cha-il begins to see through his boss long before others notice his shortcomings. What comes as more of a surprise to him is the moral evolution of his target Dae-woong. They remain opponents very late into the series, long after they have begun to realise that they may in fact be on the same side.
With Dae-woong too much of a macho braggart and Cha-il far too reserved, they fail to ally earlier on, which surely would have saved the company a lot of trouble.
But then where would the fun be in that? Their cautious tiptoeing around one another generates tension throughout and leads to the wonderful moment in the grand finale where Cha-il accuses Dae-woong of being a murderer in a calculated ruse to reveal the real killer, his brother Se-woong.

Cha-il develops some affection for his colleagues, but he remains true to his nature. Once the “rats” have been eradicated, he hands in his resignation and moves on. Where he moves on to turns out to be a pier, where an actor in a cameo performance asks him to clean up the highest office in the land.
Second season teases are a dime a dozen these days, but this is one continuation we hope becomes a reality.
The Auditors is streaming on Viu.


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K-drama Auditors follows Shin Cha-il (played by Shin Ha-kyun) and his squad as they tackle corporate corruption which goes right to the top


Another K-drama based on corporate corruption? Surely not? But Auditors stands out with its solid plot and a strong performance from Shin Ha-kyun, who plays corporate auditor Shin Cha-il.


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Review | K-drama The Auditors review: Shin Ha-kyun is the Sherlock Holmes of corporate corruption

K-drama Auditors follows Shin Cha-il (played by Shin Ha-kyun) and his squad as they tackle corporate corruption which goes right to the top