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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Park Shin-hye, Ko Kyung-pyo, Ha Yoon-kyung
Latest Nielsen rating: 5.7 per cent
Fresh from dispensing justice in The Judge from Hell, Park Shin-hye returns to screens to infiltrate a corrupt corporation in the 1990s-set workplace drama Undercover Miss Hong.
Park plays dogged financial investigator Hong Keum-bo, who scores a big win at the opening of the series in a case that lands some of her colleagues in hot water.


Keum-bo, who goes by nicknames such as “Pitbull” and “Witch of Yeouido” – Seoul’s financial district – earns a promotion for her efforts, though few male colleagues are willing to work with her.
Her next target is a reputed slush fund controlled by the “Heart of Yeouido”: Hanmin Securities.
She catches an early break in the case when President Kang Myeong-hui (Choi Won-young, The Murky Stream), the son of Chairman Kang Pil-beom (Lee Deok-hwa, Jeongnyeon: The Star is Born), decides to turn whistle-blower and feed her information when he can no longer turn a blind eye to Hanmin’s corruption.
But after this promising start, Myeong-hui suddenly dies in a car crash. Keum-bo is demoted at work and narrowly escapes abduction by hired goons.
Her supportive supervisor Yun Jae-beom (Kim Won-hae, The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call) suggests that she go undercover as an entry-level female trainee at Hanmin, a plan she reluctantly accepts.

Following a makeover courtesy of her sister Jang-mi (a cameo from Yuna of K-pop group Itzy), she transforms herself from a 35-year-old professional into a 20-year-old trainee at Hanmin Securities.
There, she works alongside two other women also forced to hide their identities: ditzy fellow trainee Kang No-ra (Choi Ji-su, Crushology 101), who is actually Chairman Kang’s daughter, and prickly admin worker Go Bok-hee (Ha Yoon-kyung, Extraordinary Attorney Woo), who spies on other executives for her boss.
Things get more complicated for Keum-bo when the show veers into a more traditional K-drama lane, throwing a pair of potential love interests in her path.
First is Albert Oh (Cho Han-gyeol, The Winning Try), the layabout grandson of Chairman Kang who enters the series channelling Jung Woo-sung’s iconic role in the 1997 film Beat, riding a motorcycle in a denim jacket, arms aloft.

While Keum-bo is able to brush him aside for the moment, more pressing is the arrival of Hanmin’s replacement CEO Shin Jung-woo (Ko Kyung-pyo, Love in Contract), who happens to be her old flame – cue lots of hiding behind desks as she avoids bumping into him.
Given that Undercover Miss Hong is set in the summer of 1997, anyone familiar with modern Korean history should be able to anticipate the arrival of the IMF Crisis – the financial meltdown that decimated South Korea’s economy at the end of 1997.
Unlike Typhoon Company, another recent 1990s-set drama, the crisis does not feature in the opening episodes here; however, the narrative is clearly barrelling towards it, which will probably add dramatic heft to Keum-bo’s investigative grit.
Early in the show, Keum-bo sits reading an English newspaper by a news-stand, as a radio broadcast discusses brewing economic concerns as well as the reopening of the Seongsu Bridge, following its collapse in 1994 – one of Korea’s most traumatic man-made tragedies.

The mood is optimistic, and when the radio channel changes to a pop song of the day, Keum-bo casts her eyes over to a phalanx of young women strutting along the street in the fashion of the day, Bok-hee among them.
Little do all these characters know about the financial meltdown just around the corner and the many Korean safety-related disasters to come – proving that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The series also tackles gender equality in the workplace, where the female employees are all glorified servants, serving at the beck and call of their feckless male counterparts.
The fact that Keum-bo, Bok-hee and No-ra must all hide their identities at Hanmin, where they pursue the wishes of people or institutions they cannot trust, shows the difficulty of pursuing ambitions and having careers for women in 1990s Korea.
This double standard even extends to Keum-bo’s personal life, as her parents, who run a humble fried chicken restaurant, would rather she get married than continue her fancy job.

All these historical and social allusions are there if you want to unpack them, but at this stage it is not clear if Undercover Miss Hong is particularly invested in them.
What it seems more interested in is rose-tinted nostalgia and broad performance styles – including Park’s, which calls to mind her turn as a demon magistrate in her previous series.
The series runs the risk of being incongruous or even disingenuous. Taken purely as entertainment, however, the opening episodes do deliver breezy genre pleasures in a colourful package.
Undercover Miss Hong is streaming on Netflix.


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Park plays a financial investigator infiltrating a corrupt firm in Undercover Miss Hong, a ’90s-set drama that also tackles gender equality


Park plays a financial investigator infiltrating a corrupt firm in Undercover Miss Hong, a ’90s-set drama that also tackles gender equality.


Netflix K-drama Undercover Miss Hong: Park Shin-hye tackles corruption in workplace drama

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Park plays a financial investigator infiltrating a corrupt firm in Undercover Miss Hong, a ’90s-set drama that also tackles gender equality

Park plays a financial investigator infiltrating a corrupt firm in Undercover Miss Hong, a ’90s-set drama that also tackles gender equality