Why Does This Work? (4)
A making film.
Video that documents the production process of a movie or drama. While most production crews do create them, they almost never make it to the actual broadcast.
Airing a program on a major channel means, for a brief window, that one show claims the whole frequency. If the ratings flopped, the losses would be devastating.
Unless a program could match the ad revenue of everything it displaced, most PDs wouldn't even dare to dream of pulling out a making film.
If you grandstanded and dragged the entire network down with you, how could any individual person shoulder that damage?
Which meant that reactions like these were, if anything, inevitable.
After all, KSM these days was notorious as the worst drama-maker of the three major broadcasters.
In the old days they'd turned out sweeping epics and even aired the making films after finales — but that was a past glory long since buried under the sediment of the years.
Even back in that golden age, they had never once led the promotion of a drama with a making film the way The Spy and I was doing now.
A broadcaster that couldn't make a decent drama to save its life.
Idols with no acting credentials whatsoever, playing the leads no less.
Viewers already had the formula idol = terrible actor carved into their brains, so expectations could only plummet further and further.
But cutting through all of it was one piece of information so conspicuous it practically glowed.
An actor named Han Seol, a name none of them had ever heard before.
By this point, people couldn't help but take an interest in The Spy and I, the drama KSM was cooking up.
Try as you might, squint as hard as you could, there was no earthly reason for The Spy and I to succeed.
It wasn't riding on a famous actor's name for publicity, and it wasn't an adaptation of a beloved original work.
KSM usually couldn't prop up its dramas with enough mid-tier veteran actors glued on top of each other — and yet here they were, fronting idols and a rookie as leads and throwing the dice on a naked gamble. Ironically, that was exactly what began to pique people's curiosity.
And so began a tiny, tiny trickle of viewers.
But that small stream of arrivals created a far bigger splash than the production team of The Spy and I had ever imagined.
[SLAM—!]
The video opened with the sound of someone bringing their fist down on a desk.
The cleanest, most striking intro that PD Min Byung-dae had agonized over and edited with painstaking care.
Min Byung-dae might have been dismissed as a has-been at the network, but even a rotten fish is a yellowtail still — decades of accumulated broadcast know-how don't vanish overnight.
[♪]
The instant of noise faded, replaced by tense, coiled background music as the screen brightened.
The reactions flooding in as it began were, on the whole, leaning toward not bad.
["Do you even understand what you've just done?!"]
The first face caught on screen was glaring furiously at someone off-camera, script in hand.
Aside from a slice of Bright Kids' fandom, most viewers didn't register at first that the man on screen was an actor.
Part of it was that the framing and the line sounded like something a PD would deliver — but Kim Ji-hyuk's acting being surprisingly natural contributed its fair share too.
["Ha! How utterly pathetic. When did you fall so low that you've become a third-rate mercenary cleaning up after filthy men? Have you no shame?!"]
["Lee Hye-in, is the world that easy for you? Or is it just me you find easy?"]
["The most dangerous ideology in the world isn't evil — it's the twisted sense of justice you're carrying right now. People like you never realize they're walking down the wrong road."]
People left fairly positive evaluations of Kim Ji-hyuk's acting.
The performance itself had a crisp, polished quality, and it was clear he'd rehearsed relentlessly — that visible passion won the audience over.
Following him, Nam Yoo-hee, playing Lee Hye-in, took over the reading.
["I... don't know. Not your justice, not this situation — and not you, saying those words right now."]
["When you're angry, get angry. When you're sad, cry. But when it's all over — smile for me one more time. That's who Kim Ha-jin is."]
Her acting, too, was passable.
It felt a notch below Kim Ji-hyuk's, but the dialogue was strong enough that the awkwardness melted away considerably.
She had cleared the strict viewers' bar of approval — barely.
But those evaluations were aimed at Kim Ji-hyuk and Nam Yoo-hee; they didn't move the needle much for The Spy and I itself.
No matter how these two flapped and flailed, they were still newcomers.
The prevailing verdict was unshakable: they might satisfy a slice of the audience's appetite, but they couldn't carry the atmosphere of an entire production.
And yet.
["Why should anyone be ashamed?"]
At a single man's voice that followed, the scattered attention of the viewers snapped into focus in an instant.
It was one sentence, and one sentence only — yet the viewer boards blazed hotter than they had for the previous two.
A clean, low-register baritone — weighty without ever becoming burdensome.
It didn't feel like watching a performance at all. It felt as though someone had asked you the question directly, and the people who felt it began posting about it one after another.
And the highlight came after.
The moment the voice's owner appeared on camera, the number of female viewers spiked violently.
Handsome is handsome, always.
Granted, looks are relative — but the handsomeness of Han Seol in The Spy and I's promo had, through PD Min Byung-dae's herculean efforts, achieved for at least a single moment something close to absoluteness.
People's attention began to gather.
Right about now, the audience was due to grow curious about the show itself, beyond just the actors' performances.
And Min Byung-dae's editing boasted a clean, scalpel-sharp technique — a golden hand ready to scratch that itching curiosity exactly where it prickled.
["Hello, I'm Kim Ji-hyuk of Bright Kids, playing Kim Ha-jin."]
["I'm Nam Yoo-hee, playing Lee Hye-in! I..."]
The cast introductions and audition footage rolled on.
Just as in the script readings before, Kim Ji-hyuk and Nam Yoo-hee came first, while Han Seol — the one who'd stoked everyone's curiosity — was placed dead last.
["The filming? Of course I'm nervous, but honestly, I'm more excited!"]
["Everyone on the production team I'm acting with has been so kind, and all the actors are..."]
The two interviews that came first offered the bright, bubbly energy befitting idols, but compared to the scenes before them, they couldn't help feeling a touch anticlimactic.
Min Byung-dae, however, wasn't worried in the slightest as the audience's reactions began to flatten.
He'd edited it this way for exactly that purpose, and he had a strategy of his own — if anything, it was a reason to look forward to what came next.
Every step of this whole process was nothing but the setup for a single, decisive blow.
And that decisive blow was fully chambered in Han Seol's audition, which followed immediately.
["...My name? You're asking for my name right now?"]
Every time Han Seol appeared on screen, the pace of the comments visibly accelerated.
An audition that had won over the entire production staff in a single breath.
As his performance continued, people went silent, sinking deep into his acting — and then the introduction that followed his finished audition stunned them all over again.
["I'm Han Seol. I'll be playing Muyoung in The Spy and I... honestly, I'm feeling pretty good about it? But this is my first time acting, so the pressure is really..."]
The words of a young man confessing he'd never acted before.
Worse, it was an interview in such stark contrast to the character called Muyoung that he'd just portrayed that the audience couldn't help being thrown completely off balance.
The viewers' evaluations were slowly drifting in a positive direction.
Posts cheering on the rookie actors began to appear, and now and then someone remarked that judging from the dialogue, the drama itself looked promising.
But the people didn't know. They didn't know that a legendary scene — one that would hook every viewer in the country at once — was waiting just after Han Seol's audition.
Click.
People fumbled through their chats, baffled by the sudden blackout. But it lasted only a moment.
Light returned to the screen, and a colossal roar detonated over the making film that, seconds earlier, had been flowing along so gently.
[CRRRAAASH—!!!]
The legendary footage captured on the day the entire production team had gathered to shoot the still cuts.
The scene that Camera Director Jung Deok-jin had filmed by pure chance began to unfold before the viewers' eyes, edited with the polish of a scene straight out of the drama itself.
Atop the hill, a truck came dragging its battered wheels down toward the crosswalk.
People screamed and scattered — but not everyone escaped the truck's path.
["Oh no—"]
There at the crosswalk, frozen where she'd fallen, staring blankly at the oncoming truck, was Nam Yoo-hee... no — Lee Hye-in.
At the end of that trajectory she strained with everything she had to move, but her legs wouldn't answer, and the viewers watching held their breath, eyes stretched wide.
But then.
["Wh-what the—?"]
["Are you insane! STOP!"]
The back of a man appearing amid that desperate, all-is-lost moment drove the perfect final period into the promo — the one meant to make the whole nation hungry for The Spy and I.