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Pierce Conran

This article contains spoilers.
3/5 stars
Lead cast: Kim So-yeon, Yeon Woo-jin, Kim Sung-ryung, Kim Sun-young, Lee Se-hee
Final Nielsen rating: 8.58 per cent
The 1990s-set comedy drama A Virtuous Business has had a playful approach to its subject matter, which revolves around the sales of lingerie and adult toys in Geumje, a fictional conservative rural Korean town.
It is right there in its cheeky title; the Korean name of the series even involves a pun on the lead character’s name.


Kim So-yeon of The Penthouse plays former beauty queen and struggling mother Han Jeong-suk. Read her name with the given name first and you have the Korean word for virtuous (jeong-suk-han). The full Korean title of the series is Jeong-suk-han Sae-il-su, ie. “Virtuous Sales”.
This playful spirit percolates down to the show’s early scenes.
Scandalised townspeople upbraid Jeong-suk and her cohorts – bored housewife Oh Geum-hee (Kim Sung-ryung, Kill Heel), exhausted mother-of-four Seo Young-bok (Kim Sun-young, The Silent Sea), and young hairdresser and single mother Lee Joo-ri (Lee Se-hee, Bad Prosecutor) – for introducing an unseemly element into their community.
However, with their evocative reds and stimulating frills, the lingerie soon awakens the long-dormant desires of the long-married local woman. The toys and their unmentionable purposes elicit awkward laughter at first, but as the women’s defences are steadily eroded, they begin to look at them in a new light.

The trouble is, that is as far as the show dares to take things. The tantalising prospect of women wresting control of their bodies away from the patriarchs of their community with their stringent social expectations remains just that.
While the idea does not fully take flight, it does serve a purpose in that it brings together our four female leads; and when they are unfairly victimised, this gives them something to fight for, while we get characters to root for.
Yet here again the show eventually betrays itself. The patriarchy and conservative values appeared to be the antagonists in the series, but as we get deeper into the story, the negative traits initially ascribed to the male characters begin to vanish.
This is particularly true of Geum-hee’s pharmacist husband, Choi Won-bong (Kim Won-hae), who is presented as being very old-fashioned and staunchly against his wife’s new business venture.

As time goes by he becomes increasingly sympathetic, so much so that, by the end of the series, it appears as though he quietly suffered during his whole marriage because of Geum-hee’s secret.
Geum-hee’s big secret is the show’s big reveal. Detective Kim Do-hyun (Yeon Woo-jin, Daily Dose of Sunshine) appeared in Geumje at the beginning of the series, secretly investigating a series of old child abductions while searching for his long-lost mother, who turns out to be Geum-hee.
Before that reveal, however, Do-hyun tracks down the person responsible for the kidnappings – Cho Sun-ae, a local woman running a video store. Sun-ae drugs Do-hyun and puts him in the basement, where he almost dies when a fire breaks out, only to be saved by Jeong-suk in the nick of time.
Sun-ae thus becomes the show’s main villain. After experiencing the death of her own baby because she could not afford the treatment to save it, she kidnapped other children from poor families, believing that she was giving them better lives.

A woman with a broken family destroying other families? For a show that initially seemed to highlight conservatism in society, that is a rather ironic choice of villain.
The bitter taste left behind by that hypocritical about-face is somewhat softened by the revelation in the next episode that Geum-hee is Do-hyun’s mother.
Still, the impact of this development was surely lessened by the extremely convenient way in which it came about. After discovering he was not one of the abducted children, Do-hyun’s search for his mother went right back to square one. He then conveniently receives a package from his adopted mother in America, containing the baby clothes he arrived in, embroidered with his initials.

A few minutes later, Jeong-suk rifles through Geum-hee’s attic during a garden party and comes across a box containing another set of baby clothes with the same initials.
The reunion that follows is heart-warming, in no small part thanks to Kim Sung-ryung’s emotive performance, but the journey there felt truncated and disappointing.
While in the end, A Virtuous Business may not really have been about overcoming outdated social mores, it was never less than an enjoyable drama about women finding the courage within themselves and through each other to lift their heads high and proudly live their lives.
A Virtuous Business is streaming on Netflix.


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Kim So-yeon as former beauty queen Han Jeong-suk in a still from Netflix K-drama A Virtuous Business. Yeon Woo-jin and Kim Sung-ryung co-star.

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The Korean series on Netflix, which follows women who sell lingerie and adult toys, forgets its original message but is still a good watch


The Korean series on Netflix, which follows women who sell lingerie and adult toys, forgets its original message but is still a good watch.


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Review | Netflix K-drama A Virtuous Business review: comedy drama sidesteps its cheeky premise

The Korean series on Netflix, which follows women who sell lingerie and adult toys, forgets its original message but is still a good watch