Summary: Business Proposal achieves a new standard of how to approach cringey shows to be fresh and lovable: through self-awareness of its cringeyness and cliches. This actually makes the show less cringey, creating a shared understanding with the audience and allowing them to watch without pity or secondhand embarrassment. Instead, they can lap up the delightful romance of a rich boy only having eyes for one girl—amazing, even if it’s never attainable in the real world.
That's so—
Cringe. One of the most damning insults to a story.
Lots of shows are cringey with over-the-top characters, painfully predictable plots, and questionable acting. They cause that familiar recoil away from a screen, the scrunching of our face muscles in ways we didn’t know where possible. At one point or another, all of our necks have retreated into our body so far that our shoulders touched our ears.
It’s bad writing, bad acting, bad everything—so why does it get made?
Perhaps the most practical answer is because people still watch cringe shows. They’re fun, often hitting #1 on charts everywhere. As a creative writing student, cringe is poison to my writing. But on the other hand, I don’t believe cringe always equates to a bad story. It’s a fine line, but it’s all about intention and context.
Which leads me to the k-drama Business Proposal. It’s a rich-boy-poor-girl romance oozing cringe, but the show’s self-awareness of its own cringeyness and cliches removes the painful pity of watching a cringe show. Instead, it’s lovably cringey.
Business Proposal: the guilty pleasure you don’t have to feel so guilty about.
TLDR: Hot rich guy wants to marry her
If you’re new to k-dramas, here’s a quick recap of 90% of them: Girl meets guy. Cue romantic soundtrack. Insert a disapproving parent and/or rivalry and/or social stigma. Twelve to sixteen episodes later, they live happily ever after.
Also, the guy usually likes the girl more.
Business Proposal follows Ha-ri, a food researcher at Go Foods, a major food corporation in Korea. After accidentally ending up on blind date with Tae-moo, Go Food’s CEO, she’s tangled in a fake engagement with him and forced to navigate her very real feelings.
Tae-moo is a Korean chaebol, part of a family that runs major conglomerates. They’re supposed to marry other chaebols, not employees of their own company. But Tae-moo isn’t interested in marriage at all, so to stop his grandfather’s insistence to find a wife, he sets up a fake engagement with the only girl he’s ever felt intrigued by—Ha-ri.
Cringe? Say no more
Cute story. So how does Business Proposal display cringe in action? Here are a few of its top cringeworthy moments.
Ha-ri’s awkward seduction techniques
To ensure Tae-moo gets the ick to avoid an engagement, Ha-ri acts like a self-absorbed, ostentatious rich girl. “My baby!” she coos to her luxury bag after dropping it.
Unrealistic entanglements
Remember that time you accidentally fell on top of someone’s mouth? Or when your shoe flew off your foot and slapped your boss in the face and he chased you around the office? Ha-ri and Tae-moo can relate.
Exaggerated dialogue
Tae-moo is the definition of extra, a self-proclaimed good-at-everything genius. His top extravagant quotes include:
“What kind of woman would reject me?”
“Do you know what my love for you and this credit card have in common? They both have no limit.”
“I get nervous when you’re out of my sight, babe.”
Overused tropes
Cold rich boy whose heart only warms for the middle-class girl. Best guy friend with a jealous girlfriend. Best friends date a pair of hot best friends. Business Proposal has got it all.
Self-awareness is sexy
Despite the fact that nobody would describe Business Proposal as the paragon of 21st century cinema, it was loved all around the globe. The show achieved wide commercial success in Korea and boasted 3 consecutive weeks as #1 in Netflix’s Global Non-English Series Top 10.
I think one of the ways Business Proposal made its cringey tone so lovable is its self-awareness of its cliches. By creating a shared understanding between the show and audience of its unrealism, it makes it less cringey.
I think the heart of this technique lies in the k-drama within the k-drama. One of the show’s running gags is a fictional k-drama of another middle-class girl and chaebol boy romance. While watching this show, the characters in Business Proposal repeatedly make fun of the absurdity of the interclass marriage, even proclaiming that “those kinds of k-dramas deserve to be tanked!” This is a clear commentary on Business Proposal’s own identity and mirrors the audience’s line of thought—that Ha-ri and Tae-moo’s love story is an unrealistic, unattainable ideal.
In fact, this is Business Proposal teasing us for watching it. Like they’re throwing us a knowing smirk and saying, “You love it, don’t you?”
Business Proposal also employs comic book-esque visual elements that accentuate the extravagance of the story. For example, severe wind blowing in Ha-ri’s hair as she’s determined to win a game of dodgeball to ensure no other employee gets the prize of a dinner with Tae-moo.
The show’s title sequence, with its perky music and colourful visuals, clearly states it knows what kind of show this is—one focused less on plausibility and more on fun.
The key is that everything is intentional. Cringeyness often arises out of secondhand embarrassment, the idea that we know something the performer doesn’t—but Business Proposal eliminates that distance and lets the audience peacefully enjoy the delight of cringey and cliche romcoms.
After all, knowing it’s cliche or unattainable doesn’t stop us from lapping up every second of it.
A new standard for cringe
This is the best way to approach cringe, in my opinion. It allows the viewer to focus on the good nuggets of the story rather than its cringey wrapping paper.
This is an odd comparison, but I’m reminded of Tinder’s “It Starts With A Swipe” ad campaign that employs a similar tactic of acknowledging its extravagance to gain a chuckle from the viewer through elements like flashing lights and voicing texts and emojis. Their tagline, “Meet cutes happen every day on Tinder—just not like they do in the movies,” is a clear confession of the stereotypically cringey or unromantic way of meeting partners on dating apps. But instead of hiding it, Tinder embraced poking fun at itself alongside the audience to remove some of the cringe attached to their reputation.
Another comparison is the joy of watching reality TV. Reality TV has such a reputation for trashy dramatic gold that viewers know exactly why they turn to reality TV—to watch it with the intention of revelling the shallow drama just as fondly as a traditionally quality show. They don’t necessarily lower their expectations, but they adjust them.
A “good” vs. popular story
The success of a show like Business Proposal highlights that showbiz is just that—a business, one that often focuses on popularity and viewership over quality craft.
It’s necessary for a writer or producer of creative art to play the game and understand that there are two definitions of a “good” story: one with quality craft, and one that attracts audiences in an enjoyable way. In other words, it sells.
I believe that part of storytelling craft is producing content that is engaging and resonates with an audience, regardless of cringeyness. I don’t want to underestimate the difficulty of this, a skill that encompasses audience analysis and an understanding of trends in addition to basic storytelling abilities. Though there’s esteem in writing a beautiful story that showcases all of your quality craft muscles, it still requires great skill to write an engaging cliche.
Business Proposal achieves exactly that. The story doesn’t lag, chugging along in an engaging, fast-paced way. The characters, despite their cringey moments, are lovable and have clear goals that create riveting conflict. The audience roots for Ha-ri and Tae-moo’s romance, on their side until the very end.
Honestly, there’s no shame in writing something cliche or cringey that’s still fresh and enjoyable. I aspire to that level of talent.
My go-to guilty pleasure
I’ve re-watched Business Proposal a few times now, always drawn to the way it somehow made a cringey show less cringey. Analyzing its techniques has equipped me with many takeaways to improve my own writing and ensure it resonates with a large audience.
I should watch it again soon for some lighthearted laughs and to escape from the fact that boys around me aren’t rich, hot, and possess a high enough IQ to run a mega-corporation.
Maybe in the next life?
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