We Are Family: Building Community in The New Employee

Image of the drama’s promotional poster was taken from the drama’s official website (WATCHA) and reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

 

Recently completed BL (Boys’ Love) webseries The New Employee (신입사원, WATCHA, 2022-2023), adapted from the webnovel-turned-webtoon written by Moscareto (모스카레토) and illustrated by Zec (제크), takes the familiar setting of a workplace romance between an employee and their superior and incorporates a number of novel elements, both in terms of content and in terms of style. This proves once again that despite its newness as a genre, its lower profile and its limited budget compared to traditional dramas, BL is a space where innovation is happening. (I have previously written on BL innovations here and here.) Where The New Employee makes a particular contribution to the genre of BL is in the way it shows the existence of a Korean queer community and underlines the importance of the sense of belonging this community provides for its members.

Poster for The New Employee, featuring (from left) Moon Ji-yong as Seung-hyun and Kwon Hyuk as Jong-chan. Photo from the series’ official website (WATCHA), reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

While some other BL series give their main characters female friends who know that they date men and offer support and encouragement in their romantic journeys, the female friends are not often specifically written as members of the queer community themselves. In The New Employee, main character Yoo Seung-hyun’s best friend Ji-yeon is a lesbian, which is a good choice for the story, because it spares the main couple (and the viewers) from having to deal with the possible obstacle of her having romantic feelings for him. It also creates a different sort of dynamic between the main character and his confidante, because she relates to him from a position of shared understanding of what it means to be a sexual minority in Korea.


And while some other BL series take place in story worlds where the characters simply date whomever they like, with the general acceptance of the people around them, this drama specifically makes a point of showing the ways queer people create community. Seung-hyun and Ji-yeon met at their university’s rainbow club, and various flashback scenes show that the club was important to them because it helped them explore and express their identities in a supportive environment. When Seung-hyun’s boss and love interest notices their closeness and asks if they are dating, they quickly correct his misconception by standing up and chanting their rainbow club’s motto while performing a synchronized dance move. Highlighting a friendship between members of the queer community in this way is a novel approach for a BL series.

Jong-chan escorts Seung-hyun and Ji-yeon home after a work dinner where they told him they are best friends from university. Photo from WATCHA’s official Twitter account, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

Another way this series acknowledges the existence of a queer community is through the storyline that provides the main obstacle for Seung-hyun and his love interest Jong-chan. After they have begun dating, Seung-hyun realizes to his dismay that Jong-chan used to date the man that Seung-hyun was in love with all through university (a fellow member of the rainbow club who saw him as a close younger friend but not as a potential boyfriend). While Seung-hyun struggles with the memories of his past heartbreak, Jong-chan explains that he no longer has romantic feelings for his ex, but they have stayed friends. Jong-chan has dated many more men than Seung-hyun, who has never dated before, and he reminds Seung-hyun that the dating pool is small, so it’s not uncommon to find oneself dating someone who is a friend or an ex of a friend or an ex. He then goes on to say that because of the size of the community, it’s normal and good to stay friends with your exes, underlining once again the importance of the sense of community.

Seung-hyun and Jong-chan struggle to understand each other when Jong-chan’s history with Seung-hyun’s unrequited first love is revealed, but neither wants to give up on their relationship. Photo from WATCHA’s official Twitter account, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

The series also acknowledges another sort of community: BL fandom. A few other recent BL series make references to the existence of the BL genre, but The New Employee goes further in two ways. First, at key moments in the story, the images of the live actors dissolve into images that resemble webtoon panels; the end credits also show the characters as drawn in the webtoon, rather than images of the actors from the live action verison. These are clearly nods to viewers who watched the series because they were fans of the webtoon. Second, the series shows its self-awareness in a fun way when Seung-hyun tells one of his fellow interns about his relationship with Jong-chan. She says she already knew everything because it was written in a long-running BL webtoon that she reads. She later finds out that Ji-yeon is a fan of the same webtoon, and they bond over their shared love of BL webtoons–something that I’ll wager is very relatable for the viewers of this series.


The series was directed by Kim-Jho Gwang-soo, an openly gay filmmaker and LGBTQ+ activist who was one of the pioneers of queer cinema in Korea. Perhaps the sense of solidarity among queer people that he brought to this series was influenced by his decades as a leader in the community. One thing is for sure: in the hands of this experienced filmmaker, The New Employee makes some important new contributions to the emerging genre of BL.

Seung-hyun and Jong-chan work things out and get their happy ending. Photo from WATCHA’s official Twitter account, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.