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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Kim So-yeon, Yeon Woo-jin, Kim Sung-ryung
Latest Nielsen rating: 4.5 per cent
Kim So-yeon, who portrayed the queen bee villain of The Penthouse, is a wilted flower in the rural, 1990s-set women’s drama A Virtuous Business until a bold business venture allows her to blossom once again.
Han Jeong-suk (Kim) was once the beauty queen of her hometown, Geumje, and married her first love, Kwon Seong-soo (Choi Jae-rim).


But life is very different for her now, as she looks after her young son and does an array of odd jobs to keep her family afloat while her husband gets into fights, loses jobs and drinks away the meagre savings Jeong-suk keeps trying to stash away.
Jeong-suk comes across an ad for a potentially lucrative job selling lingerie door to door, but her timid nature causes her to quickly throw away the paper it appears in.
Yet when Seong-soo loses yet another job and the landlady comes-a-knocking for the overdue rent, Jeong-suk fishes the ad out of the trash and takes a big step out of her comfort zone.
In a cameo performance, Ra Mi-ran plays the heavily made-up Mrs Kim of Fantasy Lingerie, who seduces Jeong-suk and fellow Geumje housewife Seo Young-bok (Kim Sun-young) with her spiel.
They leave with big bags filled not just with racy lingerie, but also adult toys, which are bound to bring scandal to the quiet town.

Scandal ensues after their first botched sale event, but they nevertheless find two allies in the shape of prim housewife Oh Geum-hui (Kim Sung-ryung), whose pharmacist husband is one of the pillars of local society, and young single mother and hairstylist Lee Ju-ri (Lee Se-hee), whose revealing fashions make her comfortable with the skimpy inventory.
Based on Brief Encounters, a miniseries from the British broadcaster ITV, itself based on the book Good Vibrations: The True Story of Ann Summers by Jacqueline Gold, A Virtuous Business focuses on small-town hypocrisy in a place that likes to bill itself as “a nice town to live in”.
Although set in the 1990s, which affords the story all the colourful trappings of nostalgia for that era, the story could just as well be set in the present. While South Korea has developed in leaps and bounds over the past few decades, it remains a staunchly patriarchal and conservative society.
Then again, that is precisely why the setting works here. It is safely presented as a story of a bygone era, but it actually feels current and relatable. Judging by the solid early ratings, it seems to have hit the mark.

Like another series, Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, which debuted on the same day, A Virtuous Business is a show about women which stars mainly women. Yet it cannot help but include a stock K-drama male figure in the form of the brooding out-of-town detective Kim Do-hyeon (Yeon Woo-jin).
Do-hyeon appears to be based on a detective character from the original series, but this remake gives him a mysterious background and secret investigation board with headshots of everyone in town, which ticks a few too many K-drama cliché boxes.
Do-hyeon is set up as a love interest for Jeong-suk, with their meet-cute featuring a trip-and-catch that sees Jeong-suk wind up in Do-hyeon’s arms. During her fall her bag has expelled its naughty contents, which a bemused Do-hyeon helps her to gather up.
The potential romance gets a major boost when Jeong-suk catches her louse of a husband cheating on her with one of her best friends.

Yeon is always a pleasure to watch – just look at last year’s Daily Dose of Sunshine – but for a show about female empowerment and going against patriarchal norms, how useful is his character here?
During a very busy weekend for new Korean dramas, which saw the debut of the aforementioned Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, the compelling murder mystery Doubt and the Stranger spin-off Dongjae: The Good or The Bastard, A Virtuous Business more than held its own.
While the period costumes and perms are fun, the show falls short of most of its competition from a style perspective, with a fairly rudimentary mise-en-scène by the standards of prime-time K-dramas.
However, where it excels is as a women-fronted drama poking fun at Korea’s stubbornly backward society, which struggles to shake off its conservative and patriarchal norms.

The men in Geumje expect to be the breadwinners, with Jeong-suk’s very masculine husband Seong-soo in particular struggling to have a wife who earns money despite his clear inability to do so.
A wife earning a living is one thing. It is quite another for an insecure husband to grapple with a wife who makes money by selling adult toys to his neighbours.
But if this “virtuous business” is to thrive, the people of Geumje will have to be a little more open-minded.
A Virtuous Business is streaming on Netflix.


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Kim So-yeon as housewife Jeong-suk in a still from A Virtuous Business.

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Kim Sun-young (left) as housewife Young-bok and Lee Se-hee as single mother and hairstylist Ju-ri in a still from A Virtuous Business.

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This 1990s-set drama sees a group of women begin selling racy lingerie and adult toys door to door, shaking up their quiet rural town


This 1990s-set drama sees a group of women begin selling racy lingerie and adult toys door to door, shaking up their quiet rural town.
