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Lee Yeon-hee as PR specialist Park Yoon-jo in a still from “Race”. South Korea’s pressure-cooker office culture and generational divide are examined in the Disney+ K-drama.

Disney+ K-drama Race: Lee Yeon-hee, Hong Jung-hyun lead office drama with a modern mindset

  • Lee Yeon-hee stars as a PR specialist floundering in her career, while Hong Jung-hyun is thriving in his – but both suffer from long working hours and cronyism
  • The Disney+ K-drama explores South Korea’s pressure-cooker office culture and generational divide when it comes to work attitudes
Following Kiss Sixth Sense, Disney+ dips back into Korean office dramas with Race, a 12-part series headlined by Lee Yeon-hee (The Package) and Hong Jung-hyun (My Absolute Boyfriend).

Park Yoon-jo (Lee) is a driven public relations specialist. Despite her skills and passion, she is struggling in her career because she works for a small agency, rather than in the PR department of a major firm.

Her best friend Ryu Jae-min (Hong), who she has known since middle school, is also in the PR business – but he has landed on his feet and scored a prized corporate gig, working as a team leader in the PR department of the giant family-run cosmetics corporation Seyong.

Yoon-jo works day and night as she tries to hunt for new clients and big contracts to give her and the PR Joa company she works for a leg up.

Jae-min is well-liked in his department but working for his boss Song Su-tae (Jo Han-chul) is no picnic, especially when it involves being sent to a factory on the other side of the country on his day off when he is supposed to be camping. But like many indefatigable Korean salarymen and women, when work calls, he answers.

During the precious little time they do have off, Yoon-jo and Jae-min often commiserate about their work woes, though at least Jae-min has no complaints about his salary. They generally do so in the bar of their fellow middle school friend Heo Eun (Kim Ye-eun), which is ironically called Utopia.

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The pressure-cooker office culture in South Korea has inspired popular series such as Misaeng in the past, which explore evergreen topics such as bad bosses, unreasonable working hours and rampant cronyism.

While Race explores much of the same territory, the show also strikes on a novel element that is currently a huge talking point in the country: the generational divide.

Korea’s economy grew by leaps and bounds for decades, allowing it to swiftly rise up the ranks of developed countries, at a clip that its social evolution could not hope to match. Now that the economy can take a breather – relative to its last half-century of progress at least – it is time for those social norms to catch up.

Hong Jung-hyun as Seyong PR team leader Ryu Jae-min in a still from “Race”.

This has created a massive divide in society, as the young people born in the economically advanced era of Korea have vastly different expectations from the society they live and work in.

One word that has quickly taken root in Korea in recent years is “wo-la-bel”, a contracted version of the English expression “work-life balance”. Young workers no longer want to be slaves to their companies. They expect to clock out on time, have holidays and be able to enjoy them without being called in by superiors on a whim.

This way of thinking sets up one of the early confrontations in Race, which kicks off with Yoon-jo in full stress mode preparing a promotional party for one of her demanding clients.

Moon So-ri (front) plays a PR specialist in “Race”.

In a long take, the camera whisks us around a wide roof near Seoul’s City Hall, with staff busily milling about. But one person is missing: Yoon-jo’s new employee Shin Ji-hyo (Baek Ji-hye), a recent Seoul National University graduate.

Ji-hyo, currently enjoying herself at a fancy pool party, insists that she was given the day off and refuses to come in. The two face off the next day in the office, as Ji-hyo, who turned off her phone and showed up late, emphatically shares her modern views on work-life balance, before quitting and storming out of the office.

Adding insult to injury was that the previous day’s event was supposed to target youths born in the 1990s, only they failed to show up, save for Yoon-jo and her best friend, who were born in the early ’90s. Though born the same decade, late ’90s baby Ji-hyo and her ilk are a world apart from them.

Lee Yeon-hee in a still from “Race”.

Yoon-jo is committed to her work and willingly puts in the hours for projects she believes in. She cannot understand Ji-hyo’s lack of commitment. But then again, Yoon-jo is also blindly playing by old rules championed by an old system.

That old system comes back and bites her when she loses out on a major opportunity at Seyong. She has diligently put together a presentation for the auction process to a major contract, but little does she know that it is all for show. The contract is destined to go to Earthcomm, a company with chummy ties to Seyong.

Yoon-jo actually bumps into Seo Dong-hoon (U-know Yunho), the team leader at Earthcomm, the morning of the presentation. It will not be their last meeting.

U-know Yunho as Earthcomm team leader Seo Dong-hoon in a still from “Race”.
Recently seen in Netflix’s Queenmaker, Moon So-ri rounds out the main cast in this return to office dramas. She is once again playing the head of a department, though she switches from HR in On the Verge of Insanity to the PR team here.

Although technically she has not taken on the post during Race’s opening episodes, she is begged to take it on by her old college nemesis, the Seyong heiress Lim Ji-hyeon (Kim Hye-hwa), who travels all the way to New York to coax her.

These four PR specialists, from different generations and with different views on work and what it means to work for a company, will clash, thrive and perhaps even fall in love under the same corporate roof.

Race is streaming on Disney+.

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