Like the driven business professionals it chronicles, Misaeng pays attention to detail. It understands the importance of the little things, capturing its characters’ everyday epiphanies with the lapidary precision of a miniaturist. Some are painful, some sweet, some hilarious, some surreal, but all are written, acted, and filmed with care. The tight ensemble cast mixes promising newbies with skilled veterans to create a lived-in world that feels larger than the cramped cubicles that define it. There are also refreshingly few drama clichés as the show builds a love affair between a renegade manager and his star-struck young temp that, while completely platonic, is every bit as fraught and passionate as a standard romance.
While Chief Oh and Geu-Rae’s relationship forms the backbone of the show, the overall structure is fairly loose. This fits the slice-of-life style, but can make the drama a slow watch. It also means that issues and characters come and go, sometimes drifting away with little resolution. Individual episodes are gems of close observation and visual inventiveness, but don’t always build into a single compelling through-line. For me, the small moments resonated far more than the drama’s grander pronouncements about life, the universe, and everything. But, then again, maybe that’s the point. Perhaps a show about incompleteness can be forgiven for being more compelling in its fragments than for the bigger picture that it tries to draw.
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