Summary
A Virtuous Business gets off to a decent start in an efficient premiere that leans on the clash between Korean conservatism and sexual openness for comedy and drama.
The comedic hook of A Virtuous Business is fairly straightforward – the clash of conservative Korea and sexual openness. Lots of K-Dramas are sexy, of course, often thanks to the casting, but very few are sexual if you get what I mean. Episode 1 of this series gets that point across rather well.
I hope the vibe can be sustained here but to be fair, there’s no evidence to suggest otherwise. An empowering comedy-drama built around taboos isn’t the most common thing in the TV landscape – not since Netflix’s Doctor Climax, anyway – and novelty can be a powerful thing when it’s handled well.
Anyway, it’s 1992 and Han Jeong-sook is struggling to provide for her son, Min-ho. She’s behind on the rent, her husband can’t keep his temper or his drinking in check, and for all Jeong-sook’s toiling, she can barely keep the wolves from the door. It’s time for a change.
Jeong-sook works as a maid for Geum-hui, who is also struggling with her husband, Won-bong. There’s a burgeoning relationship of like-minded women bonding, here, but Jeong-sook has errands to run. She’s always busy – too busy to sit down for tea with a lonely woman.
What Jeong-sook needs is a get-rich-quick scheme, and that presents itself in the form of selling lingerie and sex toys door-to-door. It’s an outside-the-box idea, but in sexually repressed early-‘90s Geumje, there’s a market for it. Jeong-sook and Young-bok both answer an ad and, unlike the other applicants who balk at the sight of the products being displayed, they take a box of goodies and get to work.
A Virtuous Business | Image via Netflix
Jeong-sook wants to use Geum-hui’s house to store the goods, and while she’s initially reluctant, her husband being awful sways her. She gets a new haircut at the salon where Ju-ri works and had earlier put a man in his place for accusing her of dressing too provocatively. It’s like the Avengers assembling but with lingerie.
On the love interest front, enter Kim Do-hyun, a big-city blow-in whose presence in the small town of Geumje is puzzling to some – like Detective Na – and ideal for others, like Jeong-sook, who leaves her bag on a bus and has to be helped by him. Her thanks are undermined somewhat by what comes spilling out of the bag. It’s a funny moment, this, and gets right to the heart of what’s clever about this premise.
It isn’t as if juxtaposition is a new idea – it’s an extremely common dramatic principle – but it’s effectively conveyed in A Virtuous Business Episode 1 and melded with funny, sometimes quietly affecting character drama. Mishaps with Do-hyun continue later, too, when he responds to reports that Geum-hui’s house is being used as a brothel when it’s really just Jeong-sook and co. trying to peddle vibrators and such.
Do-hyun, who is already familiar with the contents of Jeong-sook’s bag, covers for them. However, this doesn’t stop Geum-hui’s husband coming home to find Ju-ri in her underwear brandishing sex toys, and news quickly spreads all the way back to Jeong-sook’s husband, who leaves her in disgust at her lewd new career, which he thinks will ruin his reputation.
To add insult to injury, Jeong-sook also catches him in bed with another woman, a death knell to their relationship and a symbolic new beginning for her as she’s determined to forge ahead in her new endeavors.
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