My Bias, My Boss follows superfan Nam Da-reum, who ditches a safe job to work at her longtime K-pop bias Lee Chan’s fashion start-up, only to end up reporting to his prickly CEO best friend Kang Ha-gi. As workplace rom-com chaos unfolds, the real emotional core becomes the bromance between Ha-gi and Chan, whose chemistry and history overshadow the central love triangle.
Picture spending the better part of a decade being crazily obsessed with a celebrity: memorising their interviews, defending them in comment sections, building entire evenings around their comeback schedule. You probably even run a fan page about this celebrity. And then, in the wildest dream-come-true scenario, you land a job at his company, walking in on day one convinced the universe has finally rewarded your loyalty.
Except that in real life, it’s very unlikely that you’ll directly report to your internet crush just by joining their business venture. And this is where My Bias, My Boss comes in. Check out the trailer for the K-drama below:
Nam Da-reum has spent more than a decade as a fan of Lee Chan, a member of the now-disbanded K-pop group D.N.X who has since moved into acting. When Chan co-founds a fashion start-up called Appello, Da-reum quits her stable corporate job just to get a chance to work with her celebrity crush.
Plot twist: the bet backfires immediately. The man she actually reports to is Kang Ha-gi, Appello's workaholic CEO and, inconveniently, Chan's childhood friend. Worse still, Da-reum has already made an impression on Ha-gi before her first official day: drunk and furious at a restaurant, she swings an ice block at someone else and hits him instead. He, for his part, spends a good chunk of the season convinced she might be a corporate spy planted by a rival firm.
This is followed by familiar workplace rom-com cliches: misread signals, a near-firing, a CEO who can't work out why his pulse spikes around a junior employee he's supposed to be suspicious of, and a former idol slowly realising his most devoted fan has been standing in his office the whole time.
Only four episodes are out as of now, so maybe we just need to give the love triangle a little more time. But in these four episodes, you clearly find yourself rooting for the male leads to end up together more than you wish the female lead can figure out who she really loves.
Ha-gi and Chan are childhood friends who built Appello together, and they’re the kind of pair who get on each other's nerves on purpose. In fact, the chemistry between these two is so palpable that early on, there is even a gag about them being gay for each other. For a stretch, Da-reum is genuinely convinced her new boss is nursing a one-sided crush on her idol, and that it's a secret she much protect. Of course they clear the air around it in a short time, but somewhere, I wish they had kept it on a little longer.
Part of the charm here is that all three leads are, to varying degrees, bad at being people. Da-reum chokes on a calming pill before her first meeting with her new boss, leaves a streak of her makeup on his shirt after literally colliding with him in her excitement over getting the job, and has her first real encounter with him while drunk.
Ha-gi tries to apologise to her across more than one episode and fails every single time, and when he finally wants to know whether she likes him back, guess who he goes for advice: an AI chatbot.
Chan gets his own excuse: he is great at playing idol and a superstar, but turns visibly clumsy the moment anyone is sincere with him. His ex, who also happens to be his current on-screen co-star, keeps showing up to make things worse.
None of them can say the thing they actually mean. All three of them find that hilarious to watch and mildly exhausting to root for.
Kim Hye-jun plays Da-reum in the same summer she's also two seasons into A Shop for Killers. In the first episode especially, her actions feel a little over the top, but by episode four, you find yourself feeling for her (or maybe it's justg me, it feels good to see her happy and smiling after all the crying in A Shop). Kang Hoon, who most recently starred in Hunter with a Scalpel, plays Ha-gi with the exasperation of a man running a company while hiding a crush. Cha Woo-min plays Chan: an idol-turned-actor who is, by the show's own writing, someone who has spent his whole career being liked by strangers without ever working out how to love anyone back. Rounding out the core is Yuna as Yoon Cho-yi, Chan's ex-girlfriend and current on-screen co-star, who keeps finding new ways to get in the way right as Chan starts to soften.
My Bias, My Boss airs on Prime Video every Monday and Tuesday night. Four are out already, with episodes five and six releasing on August 17th and 18th, respectively.