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| Image of the drama’s promotional poster was taken from the drama’s official website (SBS) and reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes. |
In the action comedy The Fiery Priest (열혈사제, SBS, 2019), hot-blooded former NIS agent turned Catholic priest Father Michael fights gangsters with his wits and his fists to uncover the truth about the death of his mentor. The female lead in this drama is a corrupt prosecutor named Park Kyung-sun, who covers up the crimes of her superiors and their patrons on the city council. But Kyung-sun is a good person at heart, and over the course of the drama, she sees the error of her ways and joins Father Michael and the team of other supporting characters he has assembled to take down the true villains and their crooked cronies. Overall, The Fiery Priest is a comedy, but through characters like Kyung-sun, it also achieves a social critique of corruption and the difficulties that the little people face when trying to achieve success. Let us examine Kyung-sun’s motive for becoming corrupt in the first place, her attitude toward her corruption, and the reason she decides to reform and join the good guys.
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| Lee Hanee (Honey Lee) plays Kyung-sun, who, as the caption indicates, initially believes that her behaviour is correct. Photo from the drama’s official website (SBS), reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes. |
Kyung-sun didn’t come from a privileged background. Her father went to prison when she was young, which affected her deeply and which influenced her to pursue a career in the legal field. However, because she broke ties with her father and had to make it on her own, she had no money or connections when she joined the prosecutors’ office, and she found that without them, she couldn’t get ahead. At some point, she just gave up and went along with her superiors’ unethical schemes in order to gain power and wealth like the rest of them. Although Kyung-sun became a prosecutor in order to achieve justice, when faced with a system characterized by widespread corruption, she saw no other way to succeed and ended up compromising her principles. When Father Michael speaks to her about the bad deeds being perpetrated by the people for whom she’s covering, she tells him multiple times that nothing he can do will change anything. Her experience with the system has led to a deep sense of futility.
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| Kyung-sun promises to faithfully serve some powerful patrons in exchange for their support in her career. Photo from the drama’s official website (SBS), reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes. |
Kyung-sun makes excuses when Father Michael, acting as her priest, challenges her about her behaviour. “No one is hurt by me,” she claims. However, she soon realizes that that is not true. When she interferes in cases the way her patrons want her to, actual people get hurt in a way that she can see. One such case is especially egregious, because it involves tainted food served to children. Kyung-sun settles the case in a way that protects the person who was at the top of the operation, a powerful city official who can reward Kyung-sun for helping her avoid punishment. Father Michael accuses Kyung-sun of using a sick child to get a promotion. He doesn’t understand why she acts the way she does, because, as a prosecutor, she’s in a position where she doesn’t have to hurt anyone. Kyung-sun clearly thinks that she needs to play along with the corrupt higher-ups in order to be able to achieve anything, but perhaps this is just another way to justify personal greed.
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| Father Michael (played by Kim Nam-gil) asks Kyung-sun if she ever thinks about the people who are hurt by her behaviour, saying that many bad people go to church and make big donations to make themselves feel better, but the outward appearance of being religious doesn’t make them good people. Photo from the drama’s official website (SBS), reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes. |
Kyung-sun does change her ways over the course of the drama. After she realizes that she is hurting people, she begins struggling with her conscience. More than once, we see her with a troubled expression, looking at photos of her and Father Michael’s mentor who died suspiciously. Eventually, Father Michael bans her from attending church, but she sneaks in anyway, which suggests that she really is a person of faith, and not being allowed to attend church causes her psychological distress. However, the turning point that pushes her to really change her ways is an assassination attempt by the very people she had been protecting. Furious at being targeted, she comedically swears revenge (“bloody revenge, the best revenge of all”) and joins forces with Father Michael.
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| Although she and Father Michael still don’t always see eye to eye, they decide to fight the bad guys together. Photo from the drama’s official website (SBS), reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes. |
There is also another corrupt character in The Fiery Priest whose journey back from the dark side gets significant screen time: the second male lead, police detective Goo Dae-young. We see through flashbacks that after his partner gets beaten to death by a gang, he promises to keep on living and make sure the partner’s widow and child are safe. His trauma leads to apathy and, like Kyung-sun, he ends up going along with the corruption that is widespread in his department. But eventually, with Father Michael and his new partner’s encouragement and support, he chooses to start over fresh and join the team fighting the bad guys.
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| Kim Sung-kyun plays the police detective whose story is similar to Kyung-sun’s. As the caption humorously indicates, he let down his guard because Father Michael was a priest. Then, because of Father Michael’s influence, he realized the error of his ways and decided to reform. Photo from the drama’s official website (SBS), reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes. |
The focus of The Fiery Priest is the comedic action and bickering between the characters, but if we look closely at characters like Kyung-sun, we can see that in between the laughs, the drama is also critiquing corruption and the pressure to play along if one wants to achieve any kind of success. Although at first, the characters have given in, thinking that nothing they can do will change anything, the drama shows us the value of trying, even if victory is not assured, and even if there will always be more bad guys to fight.
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