Unlock My Boss (Review)
(사장님을 잠금해제; aired from December 7, 2022 to January 12, 2023; 12 episodes)
Unlock My Boss is a K-Drama comedy centered around technology, in which it is very similar to Start-Up from 2020, although not that heavily saturated with tech jargon. Exactly like in Start-Up, the main plot points include developing self-driving car technology and personal assistant. I guess, if we have a show about tech, we have to have self-driving cars and personal assistants, no way around it.
The premise of the show is that Kim Seon-joo (Park Sung-woong), a tech CEO of a company “Silver Lining,” becomes trapped in a smartphone because of an accident. A random unemployed guy (Chae Jong-hyeop as Park In-seong) finds the phone, and thanks to that becomes a temporary CEO instead of Kim Seon-joo. Kim Seon-joo (as the smartphone) and Park In-seong work together to find the solution for Kim Seon-joo’s predicament. They get help from Jung Se-yeon (Seo Eun-soo), Kim Seon-joo’s secretary, who becomes In-seong’s love interest.
Most of the show revolves around corporate conspiracy which led to Kim Seon-joo’s accident. Main protagonists have to find out who is behind that intrigue cautiously navigating within the Beomyoung Group (of which Silver Lining is subsidiary). Fortunately, corporate details of the fictional companies in the show are mostly easy to understand, unlike in some other corporate conspiracy dramas (e.g., Reborn Rich). The secondary arc focuses on budding romance between In-seong and Se-yeon, but really the show puts this arc in the background, and quickly resolves it in final episode — so don’t expect full romcom arc here.
One of the main advantages of the show is character development of In-seong. He starts up as a typical “looser,” unemployed, no skills, no perspectives (although he is an aspiring actor, which is skillfully woven into the show). In the course of the show, he has to learn how to become a CEO, gains confidence and skills, and finally becomes a person admired by his friends and coworkers. Also, the show heavily centers around family values: we explore various family dynamics of all three main protagonists (and yeah, as expected, in the end they all become one big happy family, as in the most K-Dramas). So, while the plot and main arcs are not terribly original, they are mostly satisfyingly presented and developed.
The lack of originality is perhaps the biggest weakness of the show. Most of the plot is easy to predict, also because it repeats well-known K-Drama schemes. Both the tech and corporate settings are nearly identical to other K-Dramas dealing with similar topics, so, for example, the show has its own set of corrupt corporate execs, like in almost every drama these days. The arc about development of the self-driving car is blatantly taken from Start-Up: apparently the show writers were unable to come up with some other idea.
Also, the main premise of the show, i.e., a CEO trapped in the smartphone, is yet another version of the “body displacement” arc very often found in K-Dramas (so changing bodies and souls, time travel and waking up in a different body, switching identities, and so on). However, in Unlock My Boss it mostly serves as a gimmick, Kim Seon-joo as smartphone is all-knowing advisor for the two other protagonists, and literal Deus ex machina solution for all their problems. Kim Seon-joo gets some of his own character development, but the plot twist at the end generally invalidates all of that, perhaps unintentionally. In general, it is one of the weakest implementations of similar arcs I found in K-Dramas.
In sum, while the show has charming protagonists and is fun to watch, it doesn’t change the fact that it is not very original and is broadly based on established motifs found in the other K-Dramas.
Unlock My Boss on Wikipedia and MyDramaList
