Pupils
As evening fell, the cast of Parabola began filtering into the Saebyul Building one after another.
The actors already signed to Saebyeol had arrived first and were chatting among themselves when Dong-ha finally walked into the conference hall with his manager, both arms loaded with shopping bags.
"Dong-ha's here? At this point, aren't you basically one of us?"
At Son Jin-uk's words, Dong-ha smiled and started handing the shopping bags around to the cast.
"Our director said to tell you all that a thank-you was long overdue…"
Come to think of it, the connection that had started with White Blood had carried straight through the Achedae campaign, the smartphone commercial, and now into Parabola. From Dong-ha's agency's perspective, infinite gratitude toward Saebyeol was only natural.
"You didn't have to go this far."
Yeon-woo accepted the shopping bag Dong-ha held out and checked inside. A blue box trimmed in gold sat nestled within.
Hmm. Whiskey.
Yeon-woo gave a simple nod, but Jeong Cheol-min's mouth stretched ear to ear.
"Ohh, a thirty-eight-year-old? Ha! A top idol company really does operate on a different level."
Son Jin-uk was right there with him.
"Wow, Dong-ha, thanks for the gift. Cheol-min hyung, after the screening, you're coming over to my place for a drink, right?"
"You bet. Absolutely."
Watching Son Jin-uk snap his fingers with a sharp click of his tongue and Jeong Cheol-min nod with fierce enthusiasm, Yeon-woo smiled.
I barely drink anyway.
Handing the bottle over in front of the person who'd given it would be a little awkward. Once the screening ended and they were on their way out, he'd just tell the two of them to enjoy it — and their faces would light up all over again.
"Whew. I'm nervous."
Having finished distributing the gifts, Dong-ha dropped into a seat with a sigh. Yeon-woo tilted his head.
"It's not your first project. Why do you seem more tense than you were for White Blood?"
"Ah, back then I was honestly just acting without knowing anything, so I wasn't that nervous. This time my mindset feels different somehow."
Hearing that, Yeon-woo quietly nodded as well.
Thinking back, when Summer's Closet had aired, Yeon-woo had felt less pressure or worry than sheer bewilderment at the sudden popularity he couldn't quite process. By contrast, with the follow-up projects he'd filmed — Master Plan and Star Beyond the River — he'd found himself caring more about ratings and box-office numbers, a sense of responsibility settling in.
And now it's even heavier, if anything.
After all, he was no longer just an actor. As the de facto owner steering both a production company and an agency, he could hardly be free from the pressure of results.
While the actors traded small talk, the commercials finally ended, and someone among the staff called out.
"All right — Parabola Episode One starts now!"
The conference hall fell silent in an instant. The only sound was the soft gulp of people swallowing.
The drama opened on an unreal landscape.
An empty lake reflected a sky steeped in violet, a space where water and sky blurred into one another with no clear boundary. The colors naturally conjured a dreamlike atmosphere. And upon that water, drifting quietly and sending out soft ripples, a small boat carried Yeon-woo lying as still as a corpse, staring up at the sky with vacant eyes.
At that breathtaking visual beauty, everyone widened their eyes and fixed them on the screen. No one had expected a youth sports drama to open with a scene this abstract.
I'd suggested that the opening break audience expectations with a dreamlike, almost fantastical treatment.
Director Kim Han-su had listened carefully to Yeon-woo and poured everything he had into directing the sequence.
The dreamlike lake reflecting violet light soon began to churn violently, the boat carrying Yeon-woo rocking hard. Even so, the Ryu Yeon-woo on screen didn't so much as flinch — he simply kept his eyes wide open like a dead fish, staring only at the sky.
The camera closed in on Yeon-woo's eyes and filled the frame with them. Up close, those pupils held a bottomless emptiness, an abyss with no end in sight. A deep gaze that made the viewer feel as if they might be pulled straight down into that pitch-black void — a dizzying, magnetic pull.
Suction force.
No — add the character for "person" and call it a force that sucked people in, and no one would argue. It literally yanked the audience in.
Whoa… what kind of eyes are those?
Dong-ha, watching the screen, slowly shook his head. It had been a solo shoot, so even Dong-ha, a fellow cast member, was seeing the scene for the first time. Watching Yeon-woo on screen hold a blank expression with nothing but open eyes and still pour emptiness into those pupils, Dong-ha tried to imagine whether he could do the same — then shook his head.
No way. How do you even pull off eye acting that subtle…?
Faced with a gap that felt impossible to close, Dong-ha glanced sideways at Yeon-woo sitting beside him. Yeon-woo was watching the screen and quietly nodding.
If, at the very start of the story, you deliberately create an event that only the audience and the protagonist share, in a space separate from everything else…
By manufacturing a single incident known only to the viewer and the lead, you generate an information gap. The same principle as confessional interviews in a survival game.
When Yeon-woo had first received the script, he'd judged that because the protagonist suffered from a kind of mental disorder, it would be difficult for audiences to fall into the character early on. Viewers often immerse themselves by identifying with the lead — and when that lead is too different from themselves, immersion becomes hard.
The choice to visualize the protagonist's inner world in the opening, to draw the audience in. But eliciting empathy from the inner world of a mentally ill protagonist was a distant hope.
If empathy won't work — then charm. No. Magnetism.
To pack detail into that magnetism, he had needed to express the protagonist's shattered interior and the emptiness it produced. To bewitch people with his eyes alone.
That day, right up until the shoot, I'd been waiting in the car with blackout curtains drawn…
The visual side of a destroyed inner world could be handled by the art team's set and the CG background layered over it. Emptiness as an emotion, though, had to come through micro-acting.
So he had chosen dark adaptation.
The moment Yeon-woo arrived on set, he had drawn the blackout curtains in his car and waited in the dark with his eyes open until just before his scene. When the amount of light reaching the retina drops dramatically in pitch blackness, the pupils naturally expand to take in even a little more light. And so Yeon-woo, with eyes as deep and dark as an abyss, had stared into the camera on screen.
Snap—
And that visual beauty, the close-up of pupils that pulled people in, suddenly cut hard into everyday life. The violet lake and the boat vanished without a trace, replaced by Yeon-woo lying corpse-like on a bed, staring at the ceiling. Then his low voice flowed out in narration.
Lee Jin-ah, manager of the fan cafe Woo's under the handle YeonuJina, watched Yeon-woo's long-awaited drama with her heart pounding.
Jackpot. A youth sports drama…
And Son Jin-uk and Jin Yu-han were in it too. She was full of anticipation for how fresh and green the visuals would be. Word had been circulating quietly among the fans that in a planned follow-up variety show, the five members — including Dong-ha and Jeong Cheol-min — had played a friendly match against the celebrity basketball team Fast. She pictured the actors colliding with pure passion, pouring out blazing competitive fire.
Ahh, this summer energy is everything.
But from the very first scene, Parabola refused to go the way she had expected.
"Huh?"
A violet lake. A boat. Ryu Yeon-woo lying on it. And eyes that defied description. She couldn't know how the rest would unfold, but judged purely as the opening shot of Episode One, this was nothing like the fresh, green youth-sports vibe she had imagined.
"De… decadent beauty…"
Through the narration that followed, she understood that the scene she had just watched was a visual expression of the protagonist Ryu Yeon-woo's wounded inner world.
Meanwhile, Shin Jae-gwon, Drama Director at TVM, drummed his fingers on the desk in agitation, eyes flicking between the large screen airing the drama live and the staff member beside him.
"Still nothing?"
"Director, please wait just a moment. They call it real-time, but the ratings take about ten minutes to come in."
"Those AGC bandits. With what they charge us annually just to check live ratings, you'd think they could make the numbers pop up instantly."
Shin Jae-gwon fumed. Truthfully, the competing show Daytona was a blockbuster-scale drama that a terrestrial network had thrown everything into, and rumors had been rampant that a mysterious deep-pocketed backer — known to those in the industry who knew — had gotten involved. So at first he hadn't expected much. He'd simply figured that with a cast popular among younger viewers, they could make money on VOD and overseas rights.
But recently, TVM's own variety show Survival Island had exploded, and the online response to its follow-up — Parabola, starring the same lead — had been anything but ordinary. Somewhere along the way, expectation had taken root. And that expectation had turned into anxiety, showing itself in the tempo of Director Shin's fingers on the table.
Tap-tap-tap—
Just as the thought crossed someone's mind that drumming that hard and fast might crack a fingernail, the staff member's mouth opened.
"Director. They're up!"
"What? How much?"
The staff member pointed at the numbers on the screen.
"SBC has 16.5 percent. We have 14.1 percent!"
"Okay! That's good!"
He had never expected to win. The production budget alone differed by several times over, not to mention terrestrial versus cable — and with the concrete base of terrestrial viewership, closing the gap this tightly was already a massive win.
Then the staff member tilted his head and spoke again.
"Uh…? Director."
"What? What is it? Did it drop already?"
"No, it's not that…"
Frustrated by the hesitation, the director stood and walked over to the monitor.
"Spit it out. What?"
"The 20–49 target rating is number one across the entire time slot."
At those words, Director Shin's eyes went wide. The 20–49 rating was the metric advertisers watched most closely — viewership calculated only among the high-purchasing-power ages of twenty through forty-nine. Networks had come to treat it as a critical indicator lately, and winning in 20–49 was as good as winning everything.
"You mean overall?"
"Yes!"
"All networks combined — overall?"
"Yes!"
Director Shin quietly pulled the wallet from his back pocket.
"Take the corporate card… This is a celebration. Make the reservation."
The staff member shot to his feet, beaming, and accepted the corporate card with both hands outstretched in respectful gratitude.
"Thank you, Director. And the menu…?"
"Beef."
"Yes, sir! Your generosity knows no bounds."
The director turned his gaze back to the screen. Ryu Yeon-woo's face filled it in close-up.
"Hmm. Saebyeol, was it… I should probably start greasing some palms and find out if they've got any other projects in the works."