“The Dream Life of Mr. Kim,” JTBC’s midlife-crisis drama now streaming on Netflix, actually has a much better title in the original Korean language: The Story of Manager Kim, Who Owns His Home in Seoul and Works for a Conglomerate. This overly wordy title is funny because it is actually a checklist of what is commonly considered success in modern Korean life, and the series wastes little time in painfully dismantling this illusion.
The Making and Unmaking of a Company Man
The show follows Kim Nak-su (Ryu Seung-ryong), a middle manager who has spent twenty-five years working proudly for a major conglomerate. He has done everything right: graduated from a good college, never missed a day of work, bought an apartment in Seoul, and sent his son to an elite college, all the while never missing a chance to mentally remind himself of these achievements.
Ryu’s Nak-su is an antihero, vain and often petty, the sort of friend and father whose misguided values lens distorts the way he sees all his relationships. But from these flaws the show reveals some very damning insights into Korean society. Nak-su is a product of a culture that equates masculinity with income, filial love with financial provision, and dignity with the possession of an apartment in the right zip code.
The series is merciless in showing how thoroughly he has internalized those values and how poorly they serve him when the going gets tough. Ryu’s performance powers the series through his slow and painful fall from grace as he fleshes out a fully developed Manager Kim that viewers will remember for a long time.
Corporate Korea as Stage and Trap
K-drama is no stranger to office satire, but “Dream Life” is unusually pointed in how it uses corporate Korea as both stage and trap. Critics have rightly described the series as a workplace satire and “mirror to every man’s middle-class mirage,” and the mirage here is not simply professional but moral.
A pivotal moment arrives midway through the series, when Mr. Kim and his boss come to fisticuffs over feelings of frustration and betrayal. Mr. Kim is told, bluntly, that everything he does is performance, that he doesn’t truly know how to work, only how to go through the motions of work. It’s a brutal accusation, and one that reaches far beyond the office, pointing to a gesture life that quietly defines every corner of Mr. Kim’s life.
Mr. Kim and his family have a meal in their Seoul apartment.
Of the seven deadly sins, pride is the worst sin, and Mr. Kim is deeply afflicted. The series examines just how much this deeply rooted sin can destroy even the most important relationships in life. Nak-su has sacrificed for his son’s education, as millions of Korean parents do, convinced that elite schooling will inoculate the next generation against all insecurities. Instead, he finds a child who is anxious and quietly suffocated by the weight of his father’s hollow pride and high expectations. When his wife expresses her desire to study for a real estate license, he pressures her to remain a genteel stay-at-home mom so that no one can question his ability to provide. Naksu’s family exemplifies a culture that asks everyone, not just men in suits, to contort themselves to fit a narrow definition of success.
The Quiet Horror of Being Pushed Out
One of the themes in the series is one known all too well to middle-aged men in Korea: forced early retirement. What makes “The Dream Life of Mr. Kim” feel particularly unsettling is how much it reflects reality. Every Korean knows a Manager Kim, and commentators have described the drama as a “grim mirror” of what older workers endure when they are quietly pushed out in their 50s, years before official retirement. The brutality lies in procedure: the anonymous HR memos, the bureaucratic euphemisms, the smiling insistence that this is all for the best. The violence is structural, cold, and full of quiet shame.
This is not a “healing drama” in the conventional K-drama sense, and it is often hard to watch. But it is therapeutic in its slow deprogramming of the false values that lead to poor decisions and a disastrous collapse of self worth in people who suddenly can no longer check off all the boxes of a successful life.
The darkness the series exposes is not only economic but also cultural. It is about a society that teaches its citizens to locate their worth almost entirely outside themselves: in job titles, school admissions, real-estate portfolios, and the performance of marital and parental duty. When those external markers fall away, what remains is terrifyingly unclear. In Korean culture, one’s title is synonymous with one’s identity, and the show spends twelve episodes asking, who are we without our titles?
In the end, “The Dream Life of Mr. Kim” does offer some grace, but it is hard-won and tenuous. The possibility of a quieter, more self-directed life glimmers at the edges, yet the conditions that crushed Nak-su remain firmly in place. The wounds are still raw, but the world moves on unchanged by the transformative experiences of Manager Kim.
Though the problems of early retirement and economic difficulty are real, the drama’s real achievement is to suggest that the dream was the problem all along. What it painfully reveals is not a single villain or scandal but an entire value system, one in which a man can do everything “right” and still find that the life he so proudly built belongs more to his company, his bank, and his country than it ever did to him.
