Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Queenmaker’ on Netflix, Where A Corporate Fixer Whose Loyalty To Her Job Is About To Be Tested

Netflix’s Korean drama Queenmaker is the story of a corporate fixer who works for a retail giant in Seoul, and for the corrupt, sometimes violent family who owns it. Kim Hee-ae stars as Hwang Do-hee, a PR whiz who spins any negative story positive, but as a result, she becomes tangled in a web of corporate greed, political chess, and, yes, death.

QUEENMAKER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman in black patent leather Jimmy Choo heels walks down a hallway, past a room where another woman is having her makeup done.

The Gist: Kim Hee-ae stars as Hwang Do-hee, the woman in the high heels. She’s an image consultant and fixer for a high-profile department store called Eunsung, and she’s tasked with orchestrating the public apology of Eun Chae-ryung, a woman whose family owns the Eunsung Corporation. Eun is clearly unstable and recently she violently attacked several of her employees, and the story is making national news.

In that first shot, Hwang is marching toward a rack of clothes that have been chosen for Eun to wear in public. She chastises her employees for choosing boring attire, explaining that it’s all in the details, Eun has to wear clothes that the media will be distracted by so that the focus of the media frenzy will be on fashion, rather than her client’s proclivity for violence. Honestly, it’s a play straight out of Gwyneth’s ski trial playbook. Hwang is right, when Eun makes her apology, everyone focuses on her clothes and the fact that protesters viciously hurled eggs at her. Turns out, those protesters were hired by Hwang, too. This woman thinks of everything!

Hwang skillfully manages to spin the story so the public sympathizes with Eun, a new mother. It was post-partum depression! How dare the media come for this poor woman! Hwang has been working for Eun’s family for years and has their implicit trust, and as we see throughout the first several scenes, she can spin anything to work in their favor. As a ploy to boost the family’s power, the matriarch and chairman of Eunsung, Son Young-sim (Seo Yi-sook) decides that she wants Eun’s husband, Baek Jae-min (Ryu Soo-young) to run for mayor of Seoul, and she wants Hwang to run his campaign. Though Hwang realizes this is a conflict in so many ways, she’s unable to say no to Son.

Baek seems like a decent man, he’s been married to the volatile Eun for seven years and puts up with her violent temper, and he’s well-liked by almost everyone. And he has a soft spot for Hwang, which appears to make them allies. Soon though, Baek comes to Hwang telling her he’s being blackmailed by one of their employees who claims Baek sexually assaulted her, but he claimes he never touched her. Hwang fires the woman, Han I-seul, who maintains that she was raped by Baek.

Causing even more tension on the PR front, Eunsung is under scrutiny for firing 500 female employees recently, and a labor rights’ lawyer named Oh Kyung-sook (Moon So-ri) has been staging a strike on the room of one of the Eunsung department stores. Hwang attempts to bribe Oh to leave the premises, but Oh refuses. Hwang tells one of her underlings to employ the nuclear option to get Oh to leave. (We don’t yet see what this entails, but it can’t be great, given the fact that everyone at the Eunsung company has no morals.)

In the show’s final moment, Hwang walks to the company car that’s waiting for her outside her office building, and ignores a text from Han I-seul. As Hwang approaches her car, Han’s body slams on top of it. She has jumped to her death rather than face the humiliation of being fired and not having her story believed. But from her hand falls one of Baek’s cuff links, one that has been missing from his shirt earlier in the episode. Seems Baek, the new mayoral candidate may have lied about his relationship with Han after all, and now that’s one more mess Hwang will have to clean up.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Queenmaker is mainly the story of a corporate fixer who renounces all of their personal scruples in order to serve a master, similar to Ray Donovan. But there are also serious Succession vibes when it comes to the way super wealthy, greedy families manage to manipulate politics and the media.

Our Take: Early in the first episode of Queenmaker, we see a flashback of Hwang as a young, new recruit to the Eunsung company. During an orientation, Son Yi-sook’s scarf flies off her neck and into a pond, and Hwang, fully clothed, runs into the water to retrieve it. This sign of loyalty from a young upstart impressed Son and was the reason that Hwang has gotten to the place she is now. The question is, how much of what Hwang does for Son, Eun, and the rest of the family is done out of blind loyalty, and how much is done out of naivete? The woman has given up her whole self to serve them in unscrupulous ways, and she’s exceptional at her job. But you can tell she feels compromised in doing some of what is asked. That’s the primary conflict at the core of Queenmaker, and the big question is whether Hwang will ever have a change of heart and eventually bit the hand that’s fed her for all these years.

The show layers several stories with fully developed characters right off the bat. Everyone in the show has got some kind of issue, and within seconds of meeting them, you immediately get a sense of exactly what the issues are. The show is well constructed and well-acted, and judging from the first episode alone, the personal, professional, and political hijinks and backstabbing will flow freely.

Sex and Skin: Not much.

Parting Shot: After Han I-seul jumps to her death, Baek’s missing cuff link rolls out of her hand. The camera holds on the cuff link, emblazoned with the letter B, until the credits roll.

Sleeper Star: Seo Yi-sook, who plays Son, the chair of Eunsung, gives off excellent “I’ve been a villain for decades” vibes. Her perfectly coiffed hair and grandmotherly wardrobe belie her true spirit which is made of corporate greed and not much else.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Let me decide what are facts and what aren’t,” Hwang says as one of her employees hands her a dossier full of gossip on the Mayor of Seoul.

Our Call: STREAM IT! Queenmaker is what would happen if Succession was told entirely from Karolina’s point of view. A woman whose entire existence is devoted to spinning one family’s volatile, disastrous PR nightmares into gold? There’s a lot to be mined from that, and we’re excited to see where else it will go.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.