At least that’s what they called it on Netflix. Because I got mildly obsessed and did some googling, I gather that the Korean title would translate to Falling for Innocence (the lead character’s name, Soon-Jung, translates to ‘Innocence;’ or it doesn’t, because we can’t fully rule out the possibility that there is an elaborate con out there, run by the internet equivalent of a Korean Cartesian demon, to make me think that is a better translation of the title, when actually the ‘real’ title [if this is, in the Korean Cartesian demon world, even a real show] is actually something about bananas and giraffes and a three legged tree-climbing, Moroccan goat).

I have a bit of a pattern of getting into silly soaps, especially when my better half is away, as she has been for the last four months.

As much as I loved the show, staying up late and showing up sleepy to work in order to binge watch, it’s also highly problematic in its treatment of women. Without going into great detail, an evil corporate raider falls in love with a secretary and switches sides to save the company. There was a slight stigma against relations between secretaries and management, but only slight. That wasn’t the bothersome part; what ate at me was the constant assumption that a man must always be in the superior role in the workplace. Whenever there was an opening for a senior position at one of the corporate interests, a woman was never considered. Sure, she could wield some power through her institutional knowledge, but never was it even conceived during the show that a woman could be in charge. The male lead was upset because his father had founded the company, but his uncle and others had summarily kicked his father out. But Soon-Jung’s father had been a vice-president of the company and while the guy grows up to be a big time exec with a financial firm, she grows up to be a secretary in the same company where her father was been VP. Where’s the nepotism? At the very end, there was  beautiful moment when the writers could have down a twist and made her CEO (while still keeping the happy ending that I desperately wanted, and which I still got, but with a side of male privilege), but… I was about the write ‘they balked,’ but they didn’t, did they? They didn’t balk, because it didn’t even cross their mind.

But here’s the theme song anyway: