Netflix’s new South Korean dramedy A Virtuous Business is based on the British mini-series Brief Encounters, a real-life story of a woman who overturns social norms when she starts selling sex toys in her quiet town. This version includes the same type of the broad, cartoonish comedy embedded in many Korean shows, which actually works here to help keep the tone light and fun, even though at its heart, the series is a serious examination of sexuality, pleasure, and feminism in a patriarchal society.
Opening Shot: It’s 1992. People walk through the seaside city of Geumje which is bustling with activity at its outdoor market and teenagers rush to go out for after-school snacks and meet up with friends. Some of the other local women talk about the local beauty pageant and one of it’s past winners, Jeong-suk, a young woman known for her beauty but who passes them walking with a big bag of toys, as she is now reduced to selling stuffed animals on the street.
The Gist: Han Jeong-suk (Kim So-yeon) is a former beauty queen who had everything going for her once, but after marrying Kwon Seong-soo (Choi Jae-rim), a man who jumps from job to job in between fights and swigs of booze, she finds herself barely scraping by, selling toys and working as a maid to make rent and support their young son Min-ho.
When Jeong-suk is forced to decide between feeding her family or buying her son a backpack for school, she laments the way things are and applies for a job advertised in the local paper selling lingerie. Geumje at this time is a mix of conservative men who all hold women to prim and proper standards; unmarried women, especially single mothers, are frowned on, and good looks are held in high regard. In short, it’s a man’s world. All the local women in town are tend to humor the men and act the part that’s expected of them, but they’re presented as being more open-minded and a little desperate to break out of that mold, just waiting to be liberated but unable to make it happen. Jeong-suk herself is pretty conservative and gets flustered whenever there’s racy sex talk around her, which is why it’s out of sheer desperation that she pursues this job.
When she arrives to what’s essentially an open call job fair for the lingerie company called Fantasy, a group of other women are there, including a fellow mom from Min-ho’s school, Seo Young-bok (Kim Sun-young). It turns out, they won’t just be expected to sell the company’s lacy, barely-there lingerie, but sex toys, too. When most of the other women see all the sexy underwear, they leave, but the company president, Mrs. Kim (Ra Mi-ran), can see the desperation in Jeong-suk and Young-bok’s eyes and tells them that selling sex toys has made her a wealthy woman. These women need to make money, so they agree to the job.
The first obstacle Jeong-suk faces is where to sell her wares. She’s given a box of products and has to have a Tupperware party type of gathering but she has no place to hold it, so she asks the woman whose house she cleans as a side hustle, Oh Geum-hui (Kim Sung-ryung). Geum-hui is the wife of a pharmacist who’s a total chauvinist, but her house is big and beautiful. At first, Geum-hui is scandalized by the thought of selling lingerie and vibrators out of her house, but she’s so fed up with her husband’s expectations of her that she basically says “screw it, let’s do this.”
The first sales party is a little bit of a disaster. Jeong-suk’s prudish reputation precedes her, so all the women are shocked to see her selling crotchless panties and vibrators. The wife of a man who run’s the town’s social club arrives unexpectedly and she wears her propriety on her sleeve, making everyone else uncomfortable and unable to show their enthusiasm or interest. But after most people clear out, one of the women in attendance, the local hairstylist named Lee Ju-ri (Lee Se-hee) who dresses in short skirts and flirts to manipulate men, buys a nightie and a vibrator.
Before they can celebrate the sale though, the police show up. Someone has reported that there’s a brothel in the house, and the new detective, Kim Do-hyeon (Yeon Woo-jin), who grew up in America and doesn’t share all the same conservative values as the other men in town, has come to investigate. Do-hyeon is an outsider, just as many of these women feel like outsiders in their own community, which is why he doesn’t view what Jeong-suk is doing as scandalous. But Jeong-suk’s husband does, and when he finds out what she’s up to, they fight. He feels like he’s the reason her life is miserable, and he kicks himself out of the house and goes to stay with their close couple friends. The next day when Jeong-suk goes looking for him, she finds him in bed with her best friend.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? A Virtuous Business features a group of women challenging societal norms about sex and femininity, empowering themselves, and strengthening their bonds of friendship. It’s reminiscent of NBC’s Good Girls if it mashed up with Calendar Girls.
Our Take: A Virtuous Business is a little bit of everything: a drama, a comedy, a thinkpiece on women’s empowerment, and a period piece full of scrunchies that manages to reveal how much and how little things have changed in the last 30 years. While Jeong-suk is the focus of the show, her story, combined with the other women’s stories on the show feels like a sexless Sex and the City; each of the four central women we meet in the first episode represents a different archetype of a woman longing to express herself.
As an American, it’s genuinely interesting to see what Korean culture thinks of Western life; the show’s first episode actually gives a deep dive into the history of sex toys and sex shops via a fun flashback about their origins. America is seen as a more sexually free and progressive place, something the Korean women on the show seem cautiously eager to catch up to, while the men wish them to stay in their place. This is further emphasized by Do-hyeon’s presence as the “outsider” detective who grew up in the States. While at first glance he’s just the hot new guy who flusters all the women in town, he also represents the sole man on the show who seems receptive to women’s equality, which obviously makes him the one you want to root for. (Even though he showed up kinda mysteriously and for reasons unknown.)
Sure, A Virtuous Business speaks in tropes and stereotypes and reflects a very black and white society where men are MEN and women should know their place. While this show is meant to reflect what life was like three decades ago, it’s not as if we’ve reached gender parity, so with that, it appears to wink at the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The show manages to reveal how far we’ve come, and the work we still have to do as women, with a clever hook. Make that a clever wand. A magic wand. You get it.
Sex and Skin: Sex is the main theme of the show, as the people in this city evolve and have their notions about what women’s roles in society and in the bedroom challenged, but we only see one sex scene that doesn’t show anything.
Parting Shot: Jeong-suk goes looking for her husband Seong-soo at their friends’ house. When she walks in, she sees him having sex with her best friend.
Performance Worth Watching: Each of the characters already feels really well-rounded and fully formed, but as the repressed housewife longing for change, Oh Geum-hui, played by Kim Sung-ryung, seems poised to be the one character who will really break out of her shell.
Memorable Dialogue: “You’re the one selling underwear? What an unexpected twist from someone as proper as you!” one of the local women at Jeong-suk’s first sales party says when they realize she’s the host.
Our Call: STREAM IT! A Virtuous Business manages to be both serious and silly and perfectly balances both. Everyone likes an underdog story, but pairing underdogs with vibrators? Who knew that would be the winning combination?
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.