Lee Jun-hyuk is of course best known for his work in the Stranger franchise as the irrepressible Seo Dong-jae. There’s no doubting his acting chops and despite his striking good looks, he has chosen to make a career playing the Everyman — ordinary working men slogging it out at the coalface. His last workplace drama, Love Scout saw him as the efficient personal assistant to Han Ji-min’s recruitment specialist. There his character was good at his job even if he didn’t see eye to eye with his boss in the beginning.
In The Ordinary Jackpot, Lee Jun-hyuk dons the suit and tie yet again for the role of an indentured corporate slave of an organization that manages retail and distribution networks for international luxury brands. There’s no such a thing as a 9 to 5 job in corporate South Korea certainly not for an ambitious, highly competent team leader in the sales division. On the surface, Gong Eun-tae’s career is taking off with gusto. He is the youngest and most successful team leader in sales. He’s so good at what he does that his company proposes he (and his team) take on a new challenge — a brand that has failed once in the South Korean market and is wanting to make a comeback. Eun-tae is the colleague who is one of the earliest to get to work and one of the last to leave. Which explains why he’s still single. At the start he doesn’t even go out with his team for meals.
As if he doesn’t have enough on his plate, a more senior colleague (Seo Hyeon-woo) is working as his subordinate. There’s an unspoken tension between them. Neither really likes the other’s approach to work but neither wants to be the first to speak up. It feels like both men are sitting on boiling pot with the lid about to burst wide open.
The resentment continues to build yet the Eun-tae perseveres day in, day out with no other plan but to obey his masters grudgingly. He’s afterall worked hard to get to where he is. Furthermore his family sees him as a cash cow that can bail them out at the first sign of trouble. That is until he wins a 1.3 billion won lottery which is just under a million USD/ 1.3 million AUD at the time of writing. He thinks about investing it in real estate and realises that while 1.3 billion won sounds like a lot of money, it isn’t in Seoul (or any major capital city in the world for that matter). That amount of money isn’t enough to change his life forever but it gives him a burst of quiet confidence he hasn’t had before to move the needle ever so slightly at work.
Eun-tae’s situation is painfully relatable. He works hard for the stakeholders but all he seems to be rewarded with is more work and other people trying to ride on his coattails for their own personal gain. The rough and tumble of office politics is well and truly alive but there are aspects of Eun-tae’s management style that needs tweaking. A leader should lead and like a lot of capable employees Eun-tae is not especially good at it.
It’s surprising on some level how good this is considering it is “just” a workplace story although of late I find myself enjoying more and more dramas of this genre. Of course it isn’t only about office politics. Like The Art of Negotiation, this is about what drives people and what it is they are looking for in life. Workers aren’t really looking for jobs but a way of life with a measure of independence. Jobs are the primary vehicle. They want to feel like they’re making meaningful choices to better their lives and not be malleable pawns in someone else’s game.
Apart from Lee Jun-hyuk, I really like Seo Hyeon-woo in this. He’s been a character actor for much of his career and he’s wonderfully cast here. They have a nice synergy as opposite types. He’s a more extroverted deputy to the introverted Eun-tae. They complement each other almost perfectly as they go about building the team overcoming one obstacle at a time. The younger members of the team have to learn their jobs the hard way undoubtedly but their enthusiasm to be successful is pleasing to watch. By the end of the fourth episode, it’s clear that there are other forces at play that won’t make any of their jobs easy. Small wins are often accompanied by different challenges that need to met head on.
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