What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim (2018)

Quick Take: What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim (2018), starring Park Seo-joon and Park Min-young.  8.8/10.  16  60-minute episodes.

Synopsis:   Lee Young-noon is the Vice-Chairman of the Yumyeong Group.  He is handsome, brilliant, and very, very rich.  He is also narcissistic, full of praise for himself, and oblivious to others.  His long-suffering private secretary, Kim Mi-so, informs him that she will be quitting as soon as she trains her successor.   This shakes up the Vice-Chairman’s world and he embarks on a campaign to keep her by his side.

Review: The Vice-Chairman is demanding and insufferable.  Secretary Kim put up with him because she had to help her sisters with their education and then settle her father’s debts.  After nine years, she’s ready for a change.  Determined not to lose her, the Vice-Chairman tackles courtship as though he were strategizing a corporate merger.   He is successful winning her heart — of course, since he is handsome, brilliant, and very, very rich — but his fundamental self-adoration remains unchanged.    Secretary Kim forgives him for a lot, but at some point there ought to have been a reckoning.

Issues revolve around the Vice-Chairman and Secretary Kim becoming a couple, other relationships that develop within the office, and the specifics of a kidnapping that happened many years before.  This story didn’t need 16 episodes; it dragged after Episode 12.

Rewatchable - 2, Compelling - 3, Plot/ Story/Writing - 8,  Acting/Casting - 10, Production - 10, Bonus - 5.    Bonus points for comedy  and Park Seo-joon’s abs.

Notes:

Park Seo-joon

is best known for Kill Me, Heal Me (2015), Fight for My Way (2017), and Itaewon Class (2020). In 2021 he was chosen to join the Marvel Universe, and traveled to the US for filming in 2022. His character has not been released.

Park Min-young

played the lead in Healer (2014) as well as the title role in Secretary Kim, though I didn’t recognize her at first.  The characters are very different and she is excellent in both roles.   She has been acting steadily in Korean tv since 2007, and in leading roles since 2012.  She has also been cast in Chinese tv dramas.   Healer was especially popular in China.

Ahn Hyo-seop

does not appear in Secretary Kim, but in the 2022 series Business Proposal, Ahn seemed to be channeling Park Seo-joon in Secretary Kim. Same hair, same manner, in the same story of a wealthy CEO pursuing an employee only funnier. Ahn does it better. Skip Secretary Kim and watch Business Proposal instead.