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Note: I wasn’t watching K-dramas in 2011 (that was my anime and manga era), so my window to the “old days” has mostly been the archives at Drama Beans. Alas, that meant it took me a long time to discover “Protect the Boss.”
I think it’s possible DB didn’t pay “Protect the Boss” much attention because it came right on the heels of the massively satisfying thriller “City Hunter.” I wouldn’t be able to follow watching “City Hunter” with a light comedy either. But looking back now, “Protect the Boss” is a long sight better than most of the romantic comedies Drama Beans did recommend from 2011.
Or, possibly, as much as I love DB, we have differences of taste. It happens in all good relationships. A little disagreement will make us stronger. So while I look for a new drama to obsess about post-“Kill Me Heal Me,” I’ll share a few reviews of older things that remain interesting when, like me, you’re looking for good stuff in the “back catalog.”
Next up: I’ve been thinking a lot about Ji Sung and Hwang Jung-Eum’s uber-melodrama “Secret,” and I’ll post something on it.
“Protect the Boss” is fantastic comedy with a dash of unconventional romance.
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Protect the Boss comes impressively close to capturing the true spirit of a screwball comedy—a balance of high and low humor, sarcasm and sweetness.
This 18-episode romantic comedy about a feisty secretary (Choi Kang-Hee) and her hilariously immature boss (Ji Sung) emphasizes comedy over romance. Viewers looking for melodrama will be disappointed. But it’s original and refreshing.
A screwball comedy (named after an erratic, unpredictable baseball pitch) takes an irreverent view of love. The great Hollywood screwball comedies of the nineteen-thirties like It Happened One Night and His Girl Friday remain unsurpassed. Yet most romantic comedies contain screwball elements and the quirky, gender-bending style doesn’t feel stale when it’s done right.
As its title suggests, Protect the Boss starts with the quintessential screwball role reversal, pairing an incompetent hero with a take-charge heroine. The romance takes place through a battle of wits. The “weapons” of screwball comedy include clever verbal wordplay, but also an ample supply of goofy visual humor.
And the gorgeous main characters may look like sophisticated stars, but they act like kids. The screwball style suggests that the world is chaotic and absurd, but that ironically, silliness is a way to find joy in the confusion.
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On the surface, the “boss” Cha Ji-Hun (Ji Sung) and his secretary No Eun-Seol (Choi Kang-Hee) are stock K-drama characters. He’s an arrogant, third-generation heir to a conglomerate, and she’s a hard-working and unsophisticated girl from a family without means. A familiar framework.
But from there on out, we’re in screwball territory. The hero, Cha Ji-Hun, secretly has an anxiety disorder that hampers his future in business. His overbearing CEO father (played to blustering perfection by Park Young-Gyu) wants the unambitious Ji-Hun to inherit the company. But Ji-Hun has other plans: avoid germs, public speaking and crowded places, and sleep as late as possible in the morning. His main activity at the office seems to be reading comic books.
The new candidate for secretary, No Eun-Seol, is a former juvenile delinquent with a knack for hand-to-hand combat. As an adult she’s cleaned up her act and graduated from college. But her search for a professional job is hampered by a lifetime of weak grades and badly-paid part-time jobs. When she finally gets her first real desk job working for the prickly Cha Ji-Hun, she’s willing to endure almost anything to hang onto that employee ID badge.
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Broad comedy, screwball style: the hero (Ji Sung) and his father (Park Young-Gyu) clashing in the office elevator, the setting for some fantastic silliness.
Keeping her job will require No Eun-Seol to “make a new man” out of the feckless Ji-Hun—a major project. Ji-Hun’s relatively mild anxiety disorder isn’t holding him back so much as his lack of motivation. Much of the humor in early episodes arises from Ji-Hun’s scatter-brained attempts to avoid addressing his problems. Ji Sung exaggerates Ji-Hun’s timidity to perfection: when he complains that he’s afraid of the dark, for example, it’s hilarious not because of his anxiety but because of the wistful self-pity in his voice.
A comedy, even more than a romance, lives and dies according to the talents of its stars. Ji Sung and Choi Kang-Hee are outstanding at this kind of broad comedy, both of them quick with a quip, snarl or double-take. Their romantic chemistry is good, but their excellent comic rapport matters even more here. And the script provides them with great lines, like Ji-Hun’s unforgettable neuroscientific declaration of love, “You’re stuck in my limbic system.”
Ji Sung and Choi Kang-Hee’s talents for romance and comedy come together well in the romantic scenes. In one early “confession” scene, Ji-Hun admits to liking Eun-Seol in a rapid dialogue so full of double negatives that neither of them can figure out what he said. Then Ji-Hun suddenly sags in defeat and whimpers, “I like you,” in a hilariously woebegone tone of voice. It’s a wry send-up of love confessions, but it also has sincere emotion behind it, as does Eun-Seol’s immediate and characteristically honest rejection.
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Curiously, Ji-Hun is endearing despite having the emotional maturity of a litter of golden retriever puppies. It helps that he’s as cute and exuberant as a puppy. But it also helps that Ji Sung plays the role with sympathy. Ji-Hun is a comic character, not an outright jerk. In the earliest episodes, he throws a few tantrums, but as the series progresses, he looks increasingly harmless. When he wears his earnest expression, he looks as vacant and well-meaning as a chaebol Derek Zoolander.
Thanks to Ji-Hun’s many weaknesses, this is one romantic comedy that doesn’t need to fall back on contrived misunderstandings. The story initially grows out of the young man’s problems and Eun-Seol’s need for a job. A coincidental, disastrous meeting between the two at a bar provides a “meet cute,” but their real conflict arises from socio-economic and personality differences. Ji-Hun’s boyish and stumbling attempts to understand Eun-Seol’s world and become a reliable adult provide great material for comedy, while also showing he has a romantic streak.
The plot does include a drawn-out love triangle, which causes a number of comic confrontations between Ji-Hun and his cousin Moo-Won (played by Jaejoong). And late episodes introduce a typical family conflict over whether Ji-Hun can marry someone from outside the elite. But Ji-Hun’s coming-of-age is at the center of everything, giving the goofiness a heart.
Eun-Seol is nothing less than awesome as a K-drama heroine with moxie. Whether she’s going Michael Corleone on a sexual harasser or fixing a fallen skirt hem with an office stapler, this woman can take of herself. Choi Kang-Hee is superb with physical humor, producing a fantastic set of tough-girl facial expressions and postures. Even in a secretary’s high heels and skirt, Eun-Seol doesn’t really walk—she strides through the office like a gunslinger heading into a showdown.
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Eun-Seol is quick to stand up for herself against men. That includes standing up for her emotional needs. Eun-Seol doesn’t want to date at work and she doesn’t want to be responsible for her boss. She wants a “normal job.” She tells Ji-Hun she isn’t sure if she likes him “as a man or as a child I have to take care of.” Her insistence on a relationship of emotional equality makes me want to throw a parade in her honor.
She also earns my affection by taking a stand against the K-drama cliche of forced and stolen kisses, leading to funny moments as the hero tries to figure out this strange new consent thing. The new training works, though. Halfway through the series, Cha Ji-Hun executes a classic K-drama move, grabbing the heroine and dragging her somewhere—then immediately turns in concern and nervously says, “Is your arm okay? I feel like I pulled your arm too hard.”
If Eun-Seol has a weakness, it’s her discomfort with Ji-Hun and his cousin—and her intense but understandable desire for a “normal job” above all else. These cause most of her disagreements with Ji-Hun up till the final episode. But if she does want to date Ji-Hun, she’ll have to accept life as something more, or less than, a normal secretary.
The secondary characters in Protect the Boss also have comedic depths. The most important are Ji-Hun’s cousin and rival in love and business, Cha Moo-Won (Jaejoong a.k.a. Kim Jae-Joong), and the cousins’ childhood friend (and Ji-Hun’s ex-girlfriend) Seo Na-Yoon (Wang Ji-Hye). Eun-Seol’s friend Myung-Ran (Ha Jae-Suk) also adds to the strong cast as an aspiring pro wrestler with the heart of a true friend.
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Moo-Won can’t be pigeon-holed as the “nice guy second lead” or “bad guy second lead.” He’s better at business than Ji-Hun, but he’s equally self-satisfied. When he and Ji-Hun become rivals for Eun-Seol, they have a hilariously incompetent brawl. Neither has any idea how to fight—but they’re too stubborn to back down, even if it means rolling around on a restaurant floor pulling each other’s hair.
I still can’t figure out if Kim Jae-Joong is a good actor or not, but for this series it hardly matters. He’s really, really, really ridiculously good-looking. His face could almost have been scientifically engineered to reflect light towards cameras at the most beautiful angles. In Protect the Boss he has the perfect role for him. His character is an introvert who often hides his thoughts behind an impassive expression. He’s an ideal foil for the wild energy coming from Ji Sung and Choi Kang-Hee. And when he joins in the hijinks, it’s amusing to see the straight man lose control.
Moo-Won’s perfect face and perfect corporate career also make him the perfect second lead. Ji-Hon, with all his silliness and imperfections, seems more truly alive than the “godlike” and remote Moo-Won. Moo-Won fortunately does loosen up over the course of the story. One of the pleasures of Protect the Boss is watching both cousins become happier, better people.
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Ji-Hun’s ex-girlfriend, Seo Na-Yoon, tries for a couple episodes to be a bitchy heiress. She’s adorably incompetent at it, a world away from the evil ex-girlfriend this same actress played in Personal Taste. Na-Yoon is shallow and sheltered, but she’s not mean. Her attempts to run away from home and her growing friendship with Eun-Seol, and Eun-Seol’s lady wrestler roommate Myung-Ran (the awesome Ha Jae-Suk), form a quirky, satisfying secondary narrative.
Other secondary story arcs include CEO Cha’s fight against his sister-in-law to make Ji-Hun his successor, and Cha Ji-Hun’s entertaining attempt to work as a part-time barista. The corporate skulduggery plotline doesn’t always make sense, but it moves along briskly. It’s not necessary to understand the ins-and-outs of company governance to enjoy watching the director and cast make fun of snobbery—not just in the elite but also in Eun-Seol’s stridently anti-elitist father.
The cast is strong, with the secondary characters bringing out the humor in their parts well. The ubiquitous character actor Kim Young-Ok (of almost everything, including Coffee Prince, Boys over Flowers and Marriage not Dating) anchors things as Ji-Hun’s grandmother, who keeps the family in line by threatening to leave all her money to charity.
Visually, the series is bright and summery. The soundtrack’s cheerful pop songs are pretty generic, but the incidental music is excellent, with a jazzy, somewhat retro feel that reinforces the whimsical humor.
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Eighteen episodes is too long, but”Protect the Boss” does consistently deliver well-executed romance even as the comic energy flags late in the series.
The challenge for Protect the Boss, as for so many K-dramas, is to keep the plot moving.
The final third of the series runs thin on plot and then further suffers from a two-episode extension. At 18 episodes long, it’s impossible to avoid the feeling that we’re moving in circles. Characters re-open debates we thought settled. The heroine changes her mind back and forth for increasingly inscrutable reasons. In the final third of the series, I find myself yelling at the screen, “C’mon, people!” There’s even a bit of crying, which seems out of place here.
Curiously, even with 18 episodes, we learn very little about Ji-Hun’s late older brother, whose death made Ji-Hun heir presumptive. Protect the Boss avoids melodrama, and a Dead Brother is definitely melo, not comedy. I interpret the lack of moping and guilt over the brother as another sign of how Protect the Boss emphasizes the future, not the past, even if it does insert some angst in those later episodes.
The most important thing in a romantic comedy—even a comic one—is ultimately the quality of the romance. And when the lovers aren’t staging a quarrel to eke out another episode for the producers, they make a convincing pair of sweethearts. Though it takes negotiation and emotional growth, No Eun-Seol and Cha Ji-Heon do bring out the best in each other.
Protect the Boss doesn’t offer many tears. If you’re looking for melodrama, you’ll want to skip the first, say, 14 episodes. Like the old screwball comedies, this is the story of a relationship built on laughter—our laughter as viewers, and as the story develops, the laughter of a hero and heroine learning not to take themselves too seriously. ♥
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Overall: 8/10
Writing: 8/10
Acting: 9/10
Production/Directing: 8/10
Korean Title: 보스를 지켜라 / Boseureul JikyeoraFull cast information is at Asian Wiki and Drama Wiki.
Also recommended: Though many K-dramas offer heapings of silly humor, Protect the Boss is almost melodrama-free, making it unusual among K-dramas. It’s also relatively unusual in its screwball approach to gender relations. The feisty heroine with a hero who quickly figures out how lucky he is—that’s not a common formula, though we saw it recently in Healer and Kill Me, Heal Me, and though a few K-dramas have played around with gender confusion, like Coffee Prince did.
Of course, outside of K-dramas, go watch the great nineteen-thirties screwball comedies right now if you haven’t seen them. (Here’s another list from the “golden age.” I can think of a dozen more, but you get the idea.)
The cast of “Protect the Boss” are busy stars with a ton of recent work to their credit. As I write this review in 2015, Ji Sung has just finished knocking everyone’s socks off in Kill Me, Heal Me, and Choi Kang-Hee has just completed Heart to Heart, in which she takes her turn playing a character with an anxiety disorder.
During the same week, Kim Jae-Joong wrapped up playing lead in the thriller Spy. I gather it was disappointing plot-wise, but did offer many satisfying hours of Jaejoong. I can’t say much about Heart to Heart—I stopped watching—but in the episodes I’ve seen, Choi Kang-Hee was excellent in this unusual role.
And back in 2013, Ji Sung played a radically different kind of guy, the manipulative and emotionally damaged heir in Secret, the melodrama to end all melodramas—an example of his range as an actor.
Elsewhere on this site, I’ve written about Ji Sung’s awesomeness in Kill Me, Heal Me. It’s as different from Protect the Boss as two comedies can be, but like Protect the Boss, it gets a lot of charm and energy from Ji Sung’s abilities at physical humor and his willingness to do anything for a part.
Trailers: K-dramas might get more attention here in the States if we had good trailers for them. But every show does yield a crop of good fan made videos. Below I’ve posted a seven-minute collection from YouTube: four good fan videos that include humor and romance (and Ji Sung and Jaejoong) plus one short scene from a Drama Fever advert. No spoilers.
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