Business Proposal (2022)
Review of Business Proposal / 사내 맞선 (2022)
If I’m going to be honest here, I had zero interest about Business Proposal when I first heard about it. It was way back before it originally came out, which now seems like an eternity ago, and then it came out. I had previously seen the male lead, Ahn Hyo-seop, in Abyss, which was a drama I honestly did not like a lot. I wrote a review about that drama, which you can read here.
Then the female lead is Kim Se-jeong of the IOI fame, which was unsurprising that she ended up crossing over into acting instead of exclusively being a singer. She has the face and personality for it, that’s for sure.
Then, when I actually started watching this drama, I thought I hated it at first. It seemed too over-the-top and corny for my tastes, a reminiscent show that reminded me of early 2010s Korean dramas that I used to gobble up as a teenager.
But I kept watching it, and I will say it grew on me about four episodes in. It is now one of the few K-dramas I’ve actually watched all the way through without feeling the need to skip an episode.
Let’s begin this review!
An employee working at a Korean food company (Bibigo) falls in love with her boss after pretending to be someone else.
The premise above is a Korean drama classic. We have the trope of the poor girl and rich boy, then the case of mistaken identity. The poor girl rich boy doesn’t seem too extra in this drama, especially as Ha-ri’s family seems fairly self-sufficient.
It isn’t like a drama where the money from the male lead would make or break her entire living situation. They seem solidly middle class, owned a fried chicken restaurant, and said restaurant always has a few customers here and there.
Shin Ha-ri, the eldest daughter in this family, gets pulled into a sticky situation by her best friend Jin Young-seo.
Jin is the daughter of a chaebol and is essentially filthy rich, but around the first two episodes she breaks off from her father completely and goes to live an independent life from the wealth she has lived within throughout her childhood.
Ha-ri and Young-seo’s dynamic is pretty good throughout the show, but it doesn’t compare to the dynamics between Young-seo and her pairing.
Ha-ri has a full-time job at Bibigo, one of Korea’s premier food companies that sells around the world, as a recipe developer. She’s noted to have a keen sense of what works in a recipe, but she also harbors a crush on her of her good friends, who is a chef.
He’s dating someone else, but this all becomes irrelevant after Ha-ri pretends to be Young-seo on a blind date. Turns out the blind date is the CEO of the company that Ha-ri works for, and when he finds out the truth, he puts her under contract to pretend to be his girlfriend.
Cue the trope of falling in love after said contract. This drama is kind of strange in the fact that the CEO seems to fall in love with her first, then when Ha-ri realizes it, she then begins to fall in love back.
He’s a pretty good male lead in this one, as he spoils her with designer clothes and fancy dinners to places she would never be able to afford otherwise. Another classic trope is that he has dead parents—they died in a car crash—and he now has a fear of the rain because of it.
I think it was a really good thing that this show was only twelve episodes, as it wrapped up pretty neatly. I don’t think I could’ve handled another four episodes like many other Korean dramas are because not much actually happens in this show.
There are no stakes in the plot, so the conflict is driven solely by the fact that people can find out about their relationship.
The people in question are the CEO’s grandfather, Ha-ri’s parents, and the employees of the company. Another B-plot consists of her former chef crush finding out about the contract and then trying to be a savior, but then he disappears pretty quickly.
The biggest B-plot, however, is the relationship between the CEO’s secretary and Young-seo. They meet because of Ha-ri, and then Young-seo moves in right next door to the guy. The romance between them seems more mature and adult-like than the main couple, which is interesting for a Korean drama.
There are some pretty steamy moments between these two, which come across as very entertaining because of how mild-mannered the secretary is depicted in the story. Then his mother is revealed to be a nun, which makes this even richer.
Overall Thoughts
All in all, it’s a cute drama. There isn’t much substance to it, which is to be expected.
It was adapted from a webtoon of the same name, but I honestly can’t really speak as to whether it was faithful to the original source material. I was pleasantly surprised by the second couple (which I honestly found more interesting), but there is so little conflict to drive the plot of this story forward that at times it can feel a bit repetitive.
It’s good that it ends on twelve episodes because of that since it would’ve had to invent a magical subplot that wouldn’t make any sense.
