Star Manager (6)
The drinking crowd sat around the low floor table, tipping their cups over plates of jeon—battered, pan-fried beef and pollock—while the nondrinkers, the quadruplets among them, picked at the fruit and waited for the commercials to end.
Both camps, of course, were talking about me.
"Sunwoo, when something like this happens, don't hide it. Tell us right away. We nearly let the whole thing pass us by. What, did you mess up the shoot? Were you stuttering and shaking on TV?"
"Does he seem like the type to go somewhere and tremble, though?"
"And the weird parts all get edited out anyway, don't they?"
"That's how broadcasts are. You're not about to be cut down to a few seconds, are you?"
I emptied my mind and sank back into the sofa.
The cousin who'd arrived last was the one who spoke.
"Oh, right—that parking space out front, Uncle made that, didn't he? Some shining example of manners wedged a car in there. White minivan, brand new. That's not one of ours, is it?"
"It's mine."
My cousin's eyes went round.
"You drove it here? A company car? So is that a celebrity's car?"
"No. I said it's my car."
This time it wasn't only my cousin. Everyone else's eyes widened too.
"What? How long have you even had the job, and you already bought a car?"
"On installments? This kid's got some nerve. You'll break your back paying that off!"
"He didn't buy it. I heard the company president bought it for him. Said he'd done good work."
Mom tossed that in out of nowhere. Her expression still wasn't good—she clearly hadn't gotten comfortable with me receiving a car. She wasn't the only one, either. My brother and sister-in-law had called it strange too, and told me more than once to look into it carefully.
My cousin scooted over on his backside until he was right beside me.
"The company president bought you a car? This president isn't a woman, is she?"
"What are you even thinking. He's a man. A middle-aged man."
"Then that's even weirder. I don't care how well you did—it's not a bonus, it's not a raise, he just up and buys a new hire a car? What kind of person is the president over there?"
What kind of person was CEO Baek Han-sung?
I answered around a mouthful of the sweet persimmons the quadruplets had brought over.
"The kind a lot of managers think of as a role model."
I'd thought so even before I met him, but after I joined and saw him up close, every part of CEO Baek Han-sung struck me as more impressive still. The ideal image of a president, the one I'd always pictured.
I drifted for a second, and reality came down like a tsunami.
"Quiet! It's starting, it's starting!"
The living room, noisy as a marketplace a moment ago, went dead silent. Even the quadruplets scurried over to sit in front of the TV, eyes round and wider than ever, determined to pick me out of the screen.
The jib camera swept the studio from above.
I seemed to flicker past at one end of the managers' seats—and then a single shot locked clean onto me.
"Oh my, oh my! Sunwoo, Sunwoo! There's Sunwoo!"
"Well, look at that, Jung Sunwoo! You really made it on TV! Did they put makeup on you?"
"How many celebrities is that? Did you talk to all of them?"
Remote clenched in one hand, I answered the questions as they poured in. The broadcast had barely started, and my throat was already dry. I gulped down sikhye, the sweet rice punch.
And promptly choked on it, nearly spraying the whole mouthful back out.
When the MCs' turn came to introduce me, an insert cut slid neatly in.
Me at my desk at the company, diligently reshuffling a schedule. Me chattering alone into a phone with nobody on the other end. Me with my arms folded, nodding in front of a whiteboard.
Profile B-roll, so-called.
"Whoa, Uncle looks so cool! Is that W&U? Is Blackout there too?"
"Sunwoo, you look like a completely different person sitting there. Kind of convincing, actually?"
"Is that the office? Any decent-looking women working in there?"
"Just leave him be. That one might even marry a celebrity."
This, too, shall pass.
Pass. And make it quick.
Everyone else's segments flew by. Why was mine so long?
At the end they even ran what had clearly come from the PR team: a group photo with the Neptune kids, and a shot of Lee Songha plastered to my back. The living room erupted all over again. Louder than a World Cup match.
I kept switching between the TV and my phone, locked on monitoring.
I hadn't wanted to come down to the family house for the holiday and still be thinking about work, but the drive was surging now. If I didn't have the job to hold on to, I wasn't sure I'd survive the next hour.
IBC must have pushed the promotion hard. Quite a few viewers were posting while they watched the live broadcast.
Honestly, in the studio I'd been wondering what to do with that total disaster, but once I saw the broadcast, the worry had been for nothing.
A PD, after all, was a PD for a reason.
They left the celebrities' lines in at a generous length, and the managers flailing in every direction were salvaged one way or another with captions and cuts. Park Tae-pyung grumbling that the whole thing was going to tank. Celebrities struck dumb watching what their own managers were doing. Layer those reaction shots in, and the fun came alive. At this level, viewer response was worth hoping for.
Our house's response, at least, was explosive.
The quadruplets, wound up past all reason, hung off my arms and legs and begged.
"Uncle, when we go to school, can we tell people you were on TV?"
"Me too! Can we say we're the quadruplet nieces and nephews you talked about?"
The adults, of course, weren't much different in their excitement.
"Oh my goodness, look at him, what are we going to do with that boy. Why is this so funny?"
"It's bizarre, someone you know being funny on TV!"
"Sunwoo's on a ton, isn't he? Isn't he on more than the celebrities?"
But that excitement, so full of goodwill, turned on a dime the moment Lee Songha's story began.
They raced through every controversy that had started when she was cast in a drama, and the road she'd walked to overcome them and become an icon of the turnaround, stacking the firewood piece by piece—then, at the very end, they poured on the spark and the oil.
The verbal abuse she'd taken from her lesson teacher.
On the TV screen the cast raged. In our living room the relatives raged. And on the internet page I snuck a look at, a faceless mass of viewers dumped condemnation on him—what kind of lunatic even was this.
Right on cue, the reporters who'd received the press release and been forced to wait out the embargo posted their articles all at once. With firepower like this, it would clearly be the talk of the entire holiday.
Teacher Shim Kyung-taek would be with his family for the holiday too, wouldn't he?
Picturing the look on that bastard's face if he was watching the broadcast felt like standing under a shower of carbonation.
I was grinning wide enough to split both corners of my mouth when a prickling sense of being watched crept over me from somewhere. I turned. It was my father. How to put it. He was looking at me with a face that seemed rather pleased, and the moment our eyes met he cleared his throat and looked away.
It wasn't only my father. Mom, my brother, the relatives—every one of them was looking at me with eyes gone suddenly new.
The second I looked at the TV, I understood why.
On the screen, Songha was talking about me, eyes shining.
"You won't have to worry about your second boy anymore. Seems he's doing well."
At my aunt's words, my father gave no answer and only tipped his glass.
And Mom fixed her gaze on the TV with a brighter face than I had ever seen on her. Every time I was caught on screen, every time the Neptune kids talked about me, she grabbed my brother and sister-in-law beside her and launched into one conversation or another.
Watching her like that, I thought it wasn't so bad.
I'd gone on the broadcast for all sorts of reasons, but, well. It didn't seem bad.
When the segment shifted to a quiz on the managers' personal details, the living room grew rowdy all over again. On set that corner had been an unhinged solo showcase belonging to Lee Songha and me, and the edited broadcast was exactly the same.
Every time Songha shot her hand into the air, the relatives practically shrieked.
A glance at my phone showed the viewers reacting better than they had all night.
An explosive response was all well and good, but it was awkward seeing the word manager brought up right alongside the Neptune kids' names. I just wanted to burn bright for the length of the broadcast and, once it ended, be left as ash and go quiet.
It nagged at me even more because everyone imaginable was getting in touch, my friends included—apparently watching live. Messages from broadcast PDs and reporters I actually knew were pouring in too.
I was deliberately not checking, planning to look once I had a little mental room after the broadcast, but one message caught my eye. PD Go Joon-tae. He hadn't contacted me personally since the Seo Ji-joon booking fell through.
I thought I glimpsed an emoji, and curiosity got the better of me.
I read that far and turned the phone off. This man really did get up to everything.
Anyway, if PD Go Joon-tae was acting like this, today's broadcast must have been a success. I was thinking how nice it would be to catch both at once—ratings and buzz—and send Neptune's name recognition climbing straight up, when the mood in the living room suddenly stirred hard.
I snapped my eyes to the TV. I'd had a feeling, and sure enough, the MCs were asking the celebrity guests for their managers' most mortifying old stories. Off in one corner of the room, the quadruplets were chattering an explanation to Mom, who'd asked what on earth those were supposed to be.
"Even if it's variety, do they really have to go asking things like that?"
The uncle who said so had already turned half his torso toward the TV. The other relatives were pretending they weren't all that interested, but I could see every one of them with both ears wide open, ready to listen.
At last, on the screen, LJ opened her mouth.
I secretly hit the mute button.
A last thrash, maybe, to dodge a public humiliation.
"What? Why isn't there any sound? What's that girl saying right now?"
"I think it's on mute. Where's the remote—the remote!"
The people turning the living room upside down in search of the remote quickly named me the culprit. Quick on the uptake. I narrowed my eyes at them, and every one of them raised their voice, insisting they would never listen to my embarrassing stories just to laugh.
Faces already finished getting ready to laugh, and they say that.
Fortunately no one was taller than me, so I held out with the remote lifted high. A few clamored that they at least wanted to hear what it was. A few were too busy laughing at the spectacle to function.
And my cousin suddenly pulled out his phone.
"I bet someone's already mentioned it online."
He tapped the screen a few times, then his eyes went wide.
Damn it. He saw it.
My uncle's wife, who'd been eyeing the remote at every chance, pressed him.
"What? What is it? What's this embarrassing story that you're that shocked?"
"No—that's not even the problem right now."
My cousin looked at me, voice gone blank.
"He's number one on real-time search."
Star Manager recorded an 11 percent nationwide rating.
It was the best result among the Lunar New Year special variety shows each channel had put on. The program in second place had only just scraped past 8 percent, so first place stood alone. Reporters and critics agreed as one: if this had been a pilot instead of a one-off special, a regular slot would have been a certainty.
The real-time search chart lined up behind it as well. It was a terrestrial special, and the broadcast itself seemed well made, so I'd quietly hoped—but the ripple effect was truly beyond anything I'd imagined.
Lee Songha drawing attention was something I'd expected. The interest pouring onto Lim Seoyoung was enormous too. The day after the broadcast, once she'd checked the internet and the reactions around her, she called me saying it didn't feel real. Bawling.
And more important than any of that: Neptune's recognition had shot up.
If on the competition show Next K-Star they had built, step by step, an image as skilled performers, this time they had properly shown the charm of Neptune the girl group—the charm they'd never had a chance to show until now.
Something that hadn't come easily even when you wrung every drop of planning power out of the company staff had been done with a single variety show. So this was why celebrities fought so hard to get on terrestrial variety.
Once their name value rose, the change arrived all at once.
Events came in like mad. Broadcast offers arrived by the handful, too.
Centered on places looking for Lee Songha or Lim Seoyoung, there were quite a few that wanted to book Neptune's full lineup. And among them were major terrestrial weekend variety shows, the kind we hadn't even dared to dream of until now.
That was the happy news from over the holiday.
On the other hand, there were headaches.
At the very top of the real-time search chart Star Manager had lined up, my name was hanging.
Of the heavyweight variety programs that had reached out to us, most wanted me on the air together with the Neptune kids—as if they were picking up a buy-one-get-one deal.
And damn it.
Now people recognized me.