SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Jugglers
(저글러스 / Jeogeulleoseu)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hello! Yes, it’s been maybe a week since my previous review but I went through this really fast. It was on my list for a while and I was looking forward to watching it. I have to say it brought back the fun of watching K-Dramas for me. After all the Netflix watching it was hard to find my way back to K-Dramas, but now that I kind of finished my Netflix binges, I am ready to tumble back into my previous addiction.
This was a nice throwback to a simple and cute love story drama.

In short, the 16-episode drama Jugglers is about Jwa Yoon Yi (played by Baek Jin Hee), who works as a personal assistant for a manager at a big advertising company. Yoon Yi has kept this job for 5 years although her boss is a jerk and makes her cover up his many affairs and keep his wife from finding out. Besides her diligent work as a secretary, Yoon Yi also manages a blog for other personal assistants with terrible bosses to vent their frustrations. When due to a misunderstanding her boss’s wife drags Yoon Yi out for having an affair with her husband, her boss does nothing to clear things up and Yoon Yi is fired. As it turns out, her boss is the one who uploaded a post on the forum framing her as the one who seduced him.
He leaves her behind and gets promoted to the chairman’s office.
In the meantime, Nam Chi Won (played by Choi Daniel) becomes a managing director at the same company. Due to a fire incident-trauma from his past he is closed off from others and doesn’t seem interested in making new friends. He is also once divorced and not looking for new relationships, even though his ex-father in law (also the Vice President of YB) (played by Kim Chang Wan) and the young director of YB, Hwangbo Yool (played by Lee Won Geun) try very hard to make him more social.
When Yoon Yi is jobless and there’s an open position at Chi Won’s assistant desk (although he specifically doesn’t want an assistant), an opportunity comes where, of course, Yoon Yi gets the job. The two met before in a not so friendly situation where he almost hit her with his car and she kicked him in the shins. So they don’t start off very well. But, as we all know from episode 1, this will change.

Apart from their growing bond, there are other storylines surrounding the so-called ‘Jugglers’ as Yoon Yi describes them in the first epsisode. The term ‘Jugglers’ is used to describe the personal assistants like herself who need to multi-task and fight for whatever their bosses require of them. The boss is incomplete without his assistant, and it is their duty to support him in his climb to the top, because after all, if the boss goes up, so will they.
In most cases, anyway.
I was curious as to why the drama was called Jugglers but it’s a nicely found term. Do I agree with their mindset of following their bosses whatever it takes even though their bosses are all awful and don’t give them any credit in return? Not so much.
I personally just got out of a job as an assistant for a boss who was insufferable, so seeing the bosses in this drama kind of gave me flashbacks. Luckily with me there was no kind of direct harassment involved, but the part where the assistants don’t get any validation but just nasty comments was very familiar. But enough about me.

The other Jugglers in the story are two of Yoon Yi’s friends, Ma Bo Na (played by Cha Joo Young) and Wang Jung Ae (played by Kang Hye Jung). Ma Bo Na, like Yoon Yi, has been the personal assistand for an executive director for years, but all he cares about is his own reputation. Bo Na literally works her ass off for him, but with one single mishap her boss would already yell at her for being a failure. When her boss gets closer to becoming promoted, her ambition takes over so much she’s even willing to go against her friends.
Wang Jung Ae is a young mother -honestly the first couple of eps I thought she was Yoon Yi’s older sister because she always called her and Yoon Yi called her ‘eonni’, but it turns out she’s the older sister of one of Yoon Yi’s high school friends? Or something? Anyways, Wang Jung Ae is a naive and airheaded 30-something housewife whose husband abandoned her and her teenage son for another family. Loan sharks are after them and she wants to be able to make a living for herself so she starts to look for work.
Yoon Yi then introduces her to Director Hwangbo Yool, because he is in need of an assistant as well. However, Yool is such a kid at heart that he’s already fired 88 assistants because they couldn’t handle his whimsical behavior. Although his conditions for an assistant are single and around age 20, Jung Ae uses the identity of her younger sister Mi Ae and starts working for him. As it turns out, her motherly warmth is exactly what Yool needs to mature. But she still has to keep her real identity a secret.

I want to say something about the casting, because that’s something I really liked. Recently I’ve been enjoying watching dramas about contemporary work life for some reason because they give real insight in the ambitions and reputations and pretentiousness and harassment and other things we’re not supposed to talk about but are a seemingly indispensable part of working at a company, I guess.
I knew Baek Jin Hee only from Missing Nine where she played a character that couldn’t have been more different from Jwa Yoon Yi. It was really nice to see such a different side of her. I didn’t even recognize her as the same person at first. Because she’s tiny and with a very petite posture, you would think she’d pose well as a little shy girl, but the confidence and bubbliness that Yoon Yi exuberated made her character really fresh and modern. There were moments when I found her a bit selfish or tsundere, but it didn’t make her unlikeable. It differentiated her from the typical K-Drama heroine who just does whatever the male leads tell her to do.
Okay, and this is my first and foremost reason why this drama was on my list in the first place: I love Choi Daniel to bits. It’s been ages since he last appeared in something and he just recently came back from the military (THANK YOU) and I just love him. Ever since I saw Baby-faced Beauty I can’t help but smile whenever he appears on screen. So yeah, that was a big pro for me. And he also showed a different character than before. Cold and distant, but as soon as he opens his heart he becomes the adorkable giant teddy bear that he is. I’m sorry, I’ll try to contain myself.
There were a lot of actors that I didn’t know, but that made it even more refreshing to watch. When I know actors and you know their acting styles I automatically start looking for patterns.
My favorite side characters were definitely the Video Editing and Advertising teams because even though they were background characters, their timing and humor just made the series for me.

I would like to give some comments on a few things that I found a bit lacking or debatable. First of all, Nam Chi Won’s troubling past which seemed like such an important asset to his story. When Chi Won was really young, he and his family got into an accident which only he survived. For some reason people were bitches and everyone talked bad about him, how only he survived, that he was better off dead like his family, and no one wanted to have him. These memories still haunt his dreams and play a part in his secluded behavior. Nevertheless, a very kind uncle took him in. When Chi Won was a teenager, a fire broke out in their rooftop apartment and his uncle helped him escape but got stuck himself and was unable to get out in time. The one person he had left that had felt like family to him was now gone as well. As a result Chi Won has developed a great fear of fire in whatever form, even lit candles on a birthday cake.
Discovering this truth about him, getting to know his past is what drives Yoon Yi closer to him in the first half of the series.
It almost looks like Chi Won has a form of PTSD at certain moments. However, once the two of them get together, this whole story -the story about Chi Won’s past and fear of fire and his sad family history- is completely wiped from the next half of the series.
Honestly, when in the last episode they make a remark about how not scaring away from fire anymore, I’d almost already forgotten his fear of fire. It was as if everything that once bothered him was literally washed away and forgotten when he fell in love with Yoon Yi. And maybe that was the point, but I found it a bit weird that that was it for his character development. It just ended there, never to be even mentioned or shown again. And also how Chi Won’s whole character seemed to change suddenly from cold and distant to super smily and lovey-dovey. He’s suddenly smiling all the time and being giddy, which didn’t seem like the Chi Won from the first couple of episodes at all. But hey, maybe that’s what being in love does to you? I don’t know, but the change was kind of sudden.
Talking about finished storylines, this also includes the whole coincidence story of Yoon Yi now living in the same house where the fire broke out and Chi Won moving back in. I mean, I thought his reasons for moving back in (because this was before he was fully interested in Yoon Yi) would play a more important part in terms of his character development, that he would face his past or something. But it wasn’t mentioned again after the storyline of them falling for each other was completed.
On that note, I think this is an important division we can see in this series: it’s clearly divided into two parts. The first part is simply the love story between Yoon Yi and Chi Won. Once this first chapter is concluded, the second part moves onto the cooperation and action needed to ‘defeat’ the two nasty bosses. And there was no more character development in that part except maybe for Bo Na, because her father is introduced, but it didn’t really contribute to her character as ‘development’. It just felt like a tiny insight without much necessity. A parental character using sign language is always a bittersweet asset, but nothing was revealed about Bo Na’s upbringing that made it feel necessary for her father to be deaf. If it was such a defining element of the way she was brought up, she should’ve gotten more than that in my opinion. Because now I didn’t have enough proof of her goodness and positive resilience to empathize with her fully. Even after they made up I was just confused about their (Bo Na and Yoon Yi’s) friendship. Thinking like a normal person, it seemed weird for Bo Na to choose her jerk boss’s side over her friendship so easily. It wasn’t just ambition and fighting for her way, she actively helped in sabotaging Chi Won and Yoon Yi’s reputations. She just suddenly became this rivaling frenemy, kind of bitchy even, which really puzzled me because forever being the willless shadow behind a manically laughing douchebag or cherishing your best friendships shouldn’t pose that big of a dilemma. But maybe I’m underestimating the pressure executed on these assistants. The mere fact that so many women (because as this drama depicts it’s all female assistants for male bosses) would give up years of their lives to run meaningless errands and making meaningless efforts for someone who doesn’t even look back at them while telling them what to do is just very dissatisfying.

Another recurring thing that honestly baffled me, maybe it sounds silly but DOES NO ONE OWN A PENCIL SHARPENER? All these people in the office using actual knives to sharpen their pencils… I don’t know about you guys but there’s a perfectly simple and way less dangerous method to sharpen a pencil. It’s called a pencil sharpener. There’s an actual tool for it, people. And you won’t have to risk losing a finger when using it.

Let me go back to the relationship between Hwangbo Yool and Wang Jung Ae (although she’s posing as Wang Mi Ae). I think this is one of the more interesting relationships in the series. At a certain point I started finding their bond more fun to watch than Chi Won and Yoon Yi’s. Because the build-up in Chi Won and Yoon Yi’s relationship stops as soon as they get together. After that, they’re the perfect couple. No fights, no arguments, just happy lovey-dovey stuff, snuggling up to each other, pecking kisses in secret etcetera. Their relationship didn’t change after it was established.
However, the relationship between Yool and Jung Ae was constantly changing. At a certain moment I was actually wondering whether or not it would still become a romance, but in the end the mother-son parallels were too obvious. It didn’t need to happen for their bond to be beautiful.
Hwangbo Yool lost his mother at a young age and has since been bossed around by all the old men in his family (and the board of directors of YB). Rebelling against this, he comes to work on his motorcycle, he only comes to work to eat and he drives his assistant crazy by asking her to run the most ridiculous errands. He acts really carefree, but he’s secretly plagued by trust issues because he feels like he doesn’t truly have anyone he can completely trust and like his assistants, everyone leaves him in the end. I think Yool is one of the more layered characters in the series. Of course, at one point the truth about Jung Ae comes out – she’s not who she says she is – and he momentarily loses all trust in her. He yells at her and says a bunch of mean things and we see Jung Ae just crumble away with guilt, but she doesn’t get a chance to defend herself. In her defense, Yool doesn’t know what happened with her husband so if he’d known that he might have not fallen out to her like that. In the end he does reflect and decide not to hate her and insists she now comes to work as Jung Ae, not Mi Ae.
Wang Jung Ae seems to be the breath of fresh air necessary because she does everything she’s asked (although that might also be because she’s not that smart and she assumes everything’s just part of the job). However, she’s the first assistant who’s not driven mad by Yool’s behavior and she grows on him when she starts showing more effort and guts. At times she manages to soothe Yool when no one else can, for example when it’s his mother’s death anniversary and when she cooks him meals. Yool is taken aback by his warmth and I think it does somewhere remind him of his mother, the way she takes care of him. That’s why eventually he opens up his heart to her and lets her into his private house and stuff. As I said before, Jung Ae’s warmth might’ve been exactly what he needed to mature.
If Yool’s the most layered character, Jung Ae is definitely the character with the most character development of all. We see her turn from a clumzy, naive woman who knows nothing of the world except household chores into a confident Juggler. And all she did was be true to herself. It’s because she is naive and airheaded that she turns out the way she does. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It may take you to good places if you’re surrounded by the right people.

There is one more person in Yoon Yi’s group of friends, Park Kyung Rye (played by Jung Hye In), who is not a Juggler – or used to be but quit because she couldn’t handle the boss (there’s a mention of it somewhere). I thought her look was very cool, very androgynous. She works at a local coffee bar that all main characters seem to frequent. Kyung Rye is the friend that’s just always there, mediating. She’s not on anyone’s side, she just wants everyone to get along. She’s always there at the girl gatherings, when either Yoon Yi or Bo Na is feeling down, she comes to the rescue when Jung Ae’s identity is about to get exposed, she helps sabotaging the nasty bosses etcetera. She always everywhere, the cool and funny friend. But she didn’t get her own story, which I think was a pity. We don’t learn anything about her except for outside stuff. I would’ve liked to get more story from her character.
Same goes for Oh Chang Soo. Oh Chang Soo (played by Min Jin Woong) is Yoon Yi’s ex-boyfriend who starts working in her team and keeps making effort to win her back, although she despises him. His introduction was hella random. We did not see him before, he was not mentioned in Yoon Yi’s memory or flashback yet he was introduced as if we were supposed to know who he was. Even when he is introduced, we don’t get any evidence of how Yoon Yi knows him and only through dialogue find out later that they used to date. But they made him such a present love rival that it would’ve made more sense to me if they’d given him a proper introduction. As in, show us the history between him and Yoon Yi before re-introducing him, like with her former boss. It would’ve made more sense to me if they’d shown the guy from episode 1 who used to be Yoon Yi’s boyfriend, then at least it would’ve been like ‘ohh that guy again’. But in this case the guy was introduced as an unknown former boyfriend that was never mentioned before, and his efforts were so fruitless that in the end he just became a bit of a comical character. Which is a shame because Min Jin Woong is a good actor. (I only know him from Drinking Solo where he was also the comical character but with a sad layer behind the jokes.)

And now, let me move on to the villains of the hour, the two nasty bosses who get their asses handed to them in the end. Bong Jang Woo (played by Choi Dae Chul) and Cho Sang Moo (played by In Gyo Jin). Bong Jang Woo is Yoon Yi’s previous boss who dumps her after a self-inflicted scandal and moves up to the chairman’s office. When he returns as a managing director, Yoon Yi is well into her relationship with Chi Won. For some reason Bong insists on having Yoon Yi back as his assistant. When he does, he just starts treating her like he did before as if nothing had changed, still asking her to secretly buy lingerie for the women he was seeing and stuff. It was painful to see how Yoon Yi was thrown around by the company in the last couple of episodes. Luckily, she now had Bong’s wife on her side and they make a plan to reveal his behavior to the press by calling all his previous assistants who went through the same thing.
I knew the actress who played Bong’s wife but I just can’t seem to remember from where. I believe I saw her in the role of a housekeeping lady but I can’t remember which drama it was. Anyways, her name is Jung Young Joo and she slays. Yoon Yi nicknamed her ‘Misery’ and whenever she called there was this doom-sound ringtone which was hilarious.

This drama had multiple sequences in slowmotion that kept recurring. One of them was when Misery walked into the room, it would be in slowmotion with some hiphop song in the background. Another case would be people making their way out of the office and epically putting on their coats as they walked. One of my favorite sequences was when the entire Video Editing team did it in a wave and for a second it seemed like the Advertising team would follow, but then it was just one person who wanted to look cool, lol.

Cho Sang Moo wasn’t so much a harrasser as someone who played dirty. From Bo Na’s perspective, he used to play fair and she used to respect him for the way he worked his way up by himself, but at a certain moment he started pulling strings and blackmailing people.
In the end, when he’s out to oust Chi Won and Yoon Yi for good, Bo Na’s conscience finally catches up with her and she decides it’s been enough. She then sacrifices her whole career to help Yoon Yi expose him and he’s sent to jail.
The only thing that confused me in the end was why they suddenly wanted to make him look like a good person after all. The whole series long he’s the wicked boss who only cares about his own promotion to director, he doesn’t look back at Bo Na even for everything that she does for him, and then at the end Bo Na visits him in jail and suddenly he’s like ‘you were always so great I should’ve respected you more, you’re better than me’ blabla. They still tried to show a more human side of him in the end but for me that wasn’t really necessary because all we’d seen from his as a character was greed and self-centeredness so why would we suddenly need to see him as a good guy? If he was he should’ve acted like that in the first place. I don’t know, it came a bit out of nowhere for me.

Anyways, overall I enjoyed watching this drama, it was like a stroll down memory lane – the style was kind of typical romance K-Drama but the setting was modern and contemporary. It’s interesting how it showed women’s strength through a position where it’d seem they have no strength at all. I hope it serves as an inspiration for personal assistants struggling with his life in reality.
I will move on now to another drama I’ve been eagerly waiting for.
Until next time!