K-drama preview: On the Verge of Insanity – Jung Jae-young, Moon So-ri lead middle-aged workplace drama
- On the Verge of Insanity looks at the lives of middle management staff at a fictional South Korean consumer electronics giant
- Starting with a mass lay-off, the series examines corporate manoeuvring and sexual harassment
The Korean dream is pretty clear and has been set in stone for years: go to a good school, land a job at a big company, get married, move to a new flat in a good school district, and have kids. But if you get that far, what’s next? MBC’s new workplace drama On the Verge of Insanity, starring Moon So-ri and Jung Jae-young, gives us a peek at what lies beyond the end of the rainbow.
For the most part, Korean dramas are a young person’s game. Characters are young and attractive and navigate the highs and lows of their lives in bright and colourful worlds suffused with K-pop soundtracks. As such, modern Korean workplace dramas tend to look like Start-Up or She Would Never Know.
More grounded than its peers, On the Verge of Insanity focuses on middle-aged employees who try to navigate the complex and treacherous world of mid-level management in a gigantic fictional home appliance corporation called Hanmyung Electronics, a stand-in for local corporate giants such as Samsung or LG.
The show introduces its characters in a rather tense and bleak scenario – a mass corporate lay-off. Human resources manager Dang Ja-young (Moon So-ri) has the unenviable task of welcoming a nervous line-up of employees into a makeshift office one by one, as they wait to hear if they’re being kept on or asked to voluntarily resign.
Among the employees waiting to hear about his fate is a 22-year company veteran, engineer Choi Ban-seok (Jung Jae-young). He already has another job lined up if he gets the chop, but he doesn’t seem too thrilled about it either way.