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Pierce Conran

This article contains major spoilers.
2.5/5 stars
Lead cast: Park Hyung-sik, Huh Joon-ho, Lee Hae-young
Latest Nielsen rating: 15.4 per cent
Over 16 episodes, the corporate melodrama thriller Buried Hearts has stuffed a lot of plot into our eyeballs, but what exactly was the story?
Seo Dong-joo, the protagonist portrayed by Park Hyung-sik (Happiness), was a loyal corporate lackey of the Daesan Group who was unfairly brushed aside by corporate rivals, only to return and kick off a meandering campaign of revenge.


The series also began as a tender love story and would later morph into a tale of his secret corporate lineage. But in its attempts to be all these things by distracting us with new twists, the show wound up being none of them.
Just as Dong-joo drifts off into an uncertain future on his yacht at the end of the series, Buried Hearts feels lost and unsure of itself.
The show awkwardly pitched itself between the melodramatic see-sawing of The Penthouse, a prime-time soap opera where the plot reversals were more important than the overall story, and the character-driven arcs of the grand revenge tale Reborn Rich.
Buried Hearts’ best twist does stem from Dong-joo’s secret family history, but rather than stick with it, the show ties it off almost immediately for a quick emotional high.

Throughout the midsection of the series, we are aware of an old picture featuring members of the Daesan Group family and a young boy who may or may not be Dong-joo. We expect the boy to be Dong-joo, but the surprise is who his father is.
In addition to the picture, Dong-joo also has repressed memories of a crash, when he was riding in a car with Yeo Sun-ho (Joo Sang-wook) – the son-in-law of Daesan Group chairman Cha Gang-cheon (Woo Hyeon), Dong-joo’s boss, who is married to Cha Duk-hee (Kim Jung-nan) – and Chu Gyeong-won (Shin Go-eun), Dong-joo’s mother.
After a few hypnotherapy sessions, Dong-joo is able to remember what happened: after being deliberately hit by a truck, the car was rammed off the road by Huh Il-do (Lee Hae-young, Bloodhounds), who would then become Duk-hee’s second husband.
Having a K-drama lead revealed to be a corporate heir is not unusual, but the snag here is that Dong-joo was in a long-term relationship with Yeo Eun-nam (Hong Hwa-yeon), the daughter of Duk-hee and Sun-ho.

Granted, any melodrama worth its salt could retroactively fix this by having Eun-nam revealed to be adopted.
Thankfully, Buried Hearts takes the more interesting route. Il-do, the man who has repeatedly tried to kill Dong-joo on the orders of the villainous power broker Yeom Jang-sun (Huh Joon-ho, Bloodhounds), is actually Dong-joo’s father, but he did not know that when he tried to kill him as a child.
This all comes out into the open around the time the haggard Il-do – wonderfully played by Huh, easily the best performance in the show – picks up a gun and attempts to kill Dong-joo again.
Jang-sun himself reveals the connection to both father and son, which does not make a lot of sense, and we get about half an episode’s worth of a tortured father-and-son reunion before a killer enters Dong-joo’s house and Il-do sacrifices himself to save his son.

That thread tied up, we return to the main thrust of the show – Dong-joo tangoing with wine aficionado Jang-sun, whose 2 trillion won (US$1.4 billion) slush fund he successfully stole earlier in the show.
After several foiled plans to dispatch Dong-joo and retrieve the money, Jang-sun angles to take over the Daesun Group by installing Ji Yeong-su (Do Ji-won) and Ji Seon-woo (Cha Woo-min), the mistress and illegitimate heir of the chairman, who is suffering from dementia.
Yeong-su and Seon-woo seemed perfectly pleasant when they were running a bakery earlier in the show, but now they turn into money-grubbing monsters. The coda even features Seon-woo pushing Gang-cheon’s grandson off a roof to his death.
Dong-joo foils Jang-sun again and gets his ultimate revenge by locking him up for a year in the vault of Daesan, to which only Dong-joo knows the code. Fed a daily burger and surrounded by all the money he had hoped to amass, Jang-sun stews in defeat.

After being released, Jang-sun goes to a real prison and Dong-joo, seemingly with nothing left to do, kisses Eun-nam goodbye and motors off on his yacht to spread his father’s ashes.
And with that, Dong-joo has buried all his hearts and we can finally get off this melodramatic merry-go-round.
Buried Hearts is streaming on Disney+.


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This corporate revenge thriller Korean drama tries to juggle too many moving parts and twists, and ends up a confusing mess


This corporate revenge thriller Korean drama tries to juggle too many moving parts and twists, and ends up a confusing mess.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}This corporate revenge thriller Korean drama tries to juggle too many moving parts and twists, and ends up a confusing mess

This corporate revenge thriller Korean drama tries to juggle too many moving parts and twists, and ends up a confusing mess