History of the Salaryman (or Salaryman) is a KTV drama that aired in the early part of 2012. The show revolves around the inner workings of pharmaceutical conglomerate and the people working within it.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
This show has all your usual story lines that come with these melodramas, but, it gets off to a bit of an unusually odd and lighthearted start. A good portion of the first half dozen episodes or so are handled with a good bit of comedic touch, sometimes hysterically so. It seems to almost border on being more of a parody at times, and I really was digging the fact this show was perfectly willing to not to take itself too seriously. From the off the wall show trailers & previews, to the theme music utilized, to the crazy homage's to other films & shows that seemingly come out of nowhere. It all makes for quite an amusing intro.
Your basic story finds our young hero, played by Lee Boem-Soo ("Lifting King Kong", "Over My Dead Body"), doing whatever he needs to raise money to provide for his sickly mother. He plays the earnest everyman who volunteers to enter an anti-aging clinical drug trial program as a test subject in order to earn some quick cash. He soon gets swept up in series of schemes presented to him that eventually leads to him work for the company that produces the drug he's the guinea pig for. While there, he meets the female lead; the outrageously obnoxious & bitchy granddaughter of the company president, played by Jung Ryeo-Won ("Castaway on the Moon"). She's terrific as the entitled, high maintenance, heiress who curses like a drunken sailor and leaves a trail of chaos in her wake with anyone and anything she encounters.
Our two main leads, who are polar opposites, get thrown together as a result of various circumstances. They bond, and she comes to have more respect & understanding for how things work in the real world.
Your other two young leads are played by Hong Soo-Hyun and Jung Gyu-Woon. The former is the lead research scientist turned secretary for the company, and, she is your resident gorgeous babe on the show; if scientists actually looked like her in real life, I would have majored in the subject. The latter is your obligatory KTV hunk that plays the up and coming corporate ladder climber with a hidden agenda. Both of them do a nice job in their roles, and together, they provide for a good bit of the comedic undertone that runs throughout the show.
These 4 young protagonists are brought together time and again under various personal and business relationships. From there, it's just a matter of time to see who will be with whom, what happens to the company, who's "good" and who's not, etc. In the meantime, the rest of the cast is busy plotting, undermining, and backstabbing each other via increasingly preposterous means.
Everything is moving along swimmingly from the start, then, this show slowly & surely starts to move away from what made it pretty enjoyable to begin with. What started off as a unique and interesting balance between humor and drama, soon became nothing more than a standard heavy dose of KTV melodrama fare! Eventually, the melodramatic back & forth stories become more and more ludicrous as the series progresses until it all just about spins out of control. It's a shame really!
This show is not awful, and there are several things to like here, but I can't help but think this was a wasted opportunity to be so much more than it was. I feel it would have been far better served if it stuck to its somewhat clever initial tone throughout the entire series.
Bottom Line: 6 out of 10 stars! Not without merits, and I liked a bunch of its parts, but the sum of its parts is lacking overall IMO. Ultimately, it just falls in step with so many other familiar premises that I've seen over and over again in this genre, and, it doesn't do this all that well either. Also, the BIG FINALE was as an absurd and anti climatic an ending as I've ever seen.
Watchable, but, feel free to skip it if you have other stuff to check out on the horizon that you feel is more promising.
