The TV series "Misaeng: Incomplete Life" gives deep insights into South-Korea's working world and the difficult transition to get there.

Korea made film history in 2020. Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite became the first foreign-language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Until then, most people probably thought this was simply impossible, since even for outstanding non-English-language films, the “foreign-language Oscar” was considered the highest honor they could hope for. Parasite is a scathing cinematic critique of the growing inequality in Korean society: drama, horror, thriller, comedy, satire. A genre-defying, innovative, brilliant film.

Equally difficult to categorize, and likewise exploring inequalities, is the multiple award-winning and hugely successful Korean TV series Misaeng: Incomplete Life from 2014. The series tells the unusual story of Geu-rae’s entry into—and rise within—a major international trading company. Until then, he had been dependent on odd jobs to support himself and his mother, but somehow the young Go enthusiast manages to hold his own against the other interns at the company. He has only a high school diploma, while all the other interns can present degrees from prestigious universities. He does not speak English, whereas the others are fluent in several foreign languages. A particularly nice example is the scene in the pilot episode in which, whenever a client calls, he asks his fellow intern Young-yi for nonverbal help because he cannot understand the international callers. He literally drags her—without it becoming suggestive—to the phone, where she responds eloquently in a different foreign language each time.

With his exceptional social skills, he ultimately manages to stand up to the highly hierarchical, extremely discriminatory, and fiercely competitive Korean office environment. When, against all expectations, he is taken on permanently by the sales team, one briefly finds oneself in a modern-day cinematic fairy tale. As a whole, however, the series is difficult to categorize: social romance? Satire? Office comedy? Drama, or perhaps even documentary? A little bit of everything, but in any case, it offers a great deal of insight into the recruitment practices and everyday madness of Korean companies. Anyone looking for illustrative material on the bullying by superiors that is deeply rooted in Korean workplace culture will find plenty of it in every episode—quite disturbingly so. The Koreans have even coined the neologism “gapjil” for this phenomenon (the Japanese use “pawa-hara,” derived from “power harassment”) and only recently enacted a law against it.