055 Change of Personnel?

Lately, there did not seem to be much for him to do, so Yoon Yoon-hwi went back to school.

Since graduate-school admissions at Yonsei University began opening in October, Yoon Yoon-hwi decided to apply as well and submitted his materials first.

He simply wanted to find something to occupy himself. Once a person had too much free time, it was all too easy to become useless. He still had plenty of room for improvement.

So Yoon Yoon-hwi applied to the Social and Cultural Studies program at his university’s Graduate School of Public Administration, a professional master’s program that covered a little of everything in the social sciences.

These days, he had also been working through practice questions for the national Level-Two Social Worker certification exam. Over the course of his university years, he had already completed all the prerequisites needed to obtain the certificate.

Once he had it, he would be able to officially start working at his family’s Songdo Memorial Foundation...

Of course, being a director of the memorial foundation did not count as a proper job. In theory, directors received no salary, and in practice, they really did not. At most, a few expenses were reimbursed.

According to his grandfather’s will, the living allowance Yoon Yoon-hwi could draw from the foundation was divided into several tiers, as though he were leveling up by completing missions.

He had inherited a great deal of property, most of it held by the Songdo Memorial Foundation and the rest under his own name. The one thing they all had in common was that none of it was cash.

Other people saw only the glamour on the surface of Yoon Yoon-hwi’s life. They never saw him quietly pinching pennies at home.

Damn it, he could barely afford to fill the tank anymore.

Did actors really make money? Yoon Yoon-hwi looked over his recent earnings and wondered whether it was still possible to quit the industry.

It was too late!

After more than half a year of sunk costs, he had no choice but to keep muddling through.

Yoon Yoon-hwi had never harbored any reckless dreams of becoming an overnight sensation, but if even a newcomer like him was having such a miserable time, what were ordinary actors without connections or talent supposed to do?

Well, the truth was that the projects Yoon Yoon-hwi had appeared in were only now beginning to air officially. Independent films did not count; those were made purely for people within the industry.

In October, the first season of The Penthouse began airing. The premiere drew a 6.7 percent rating, but by the end of the second episode, the number had shot up to 10.1 percent.

Without a doubt, that was a passing grade.

For miniseries broadcast on the three major networks—in other words, Korean dramas—a ten-percent rating was considered acceptable, while anything above twenty percent was regarded as excellent.

With so many forms of entertainment now available, television audiences had dwindled, making it increasingly difficult for a show to break thirty percent.

For paid cable channels, the standard was cut in half: five percent was enough to count as a success. Anything above ten percent was considered a runaway hit.

The first season of The Penthouse was performing extremely well, and Yoon Yoon-hwi returned to the set to complete filming for the latter half of the season.

Unfortunately, screenwriter Kim Soon-ok had changed the script yet again. And again. And again. What had happened to the production while he was away?

“You didn’t know?”

Producer Joo’s seemingly brutish face filled with surprise. Yoon Yoon-hwi was utterly bewildered.

“I... was I supposed to?”

“The production division cut The Penthouse’s budget. It was originally supposed to run for three seasons, but now they’re planning to cut around ten episodes and compress it into two.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

No one else had arrived when Yoon Yoon-hwi reached the set, so he tossed out the remark casually. Producer Joo immediately fell silent.

After a long while, the ill-tempered-looking producer finally said, “Director, do you really think this is a good thing? We opened with a ten-percent rating. If we keep it steady, we’re bound to break twenty percent later on.”

“Producer, think about it. How many times has the writer already revised the script? If we filmed three seasons, what would the last two even be about? How would the story ever tie itself together?”

Yoon Yoon-hwi truly had not known that the series was being shortened, but he knew the track record of Kim Soon-ok, the godmother of melodrama. None of her productions ever ended well. Some simply ended worse than others.

And the Producer Joo standing before him was not the sort of man capable of filming a long-running production. He lacked the ability to see things through from beginning to end. Putting the two of them together...

All he could say was that the production division was right to cut the number of episodes.

The first season had been planned for twenty-one episodes. If they really filmed it that way, two seasons would mean forty-two episodes, and three would mean sixty-three—all shot continuously. Could the writer even keep up?

The original plan had not assigned quite so many episodes to the latter seasons, but it would still have been an enormous challenge for the entire production team.

So compressing the story into two seasons was the right decision. A polished ending would be better for everyone.

Who knew? The nationwide rating for a single episode might even break thirty percent.

The last miniseries to achieve a peak nationwide rating above thirty percent had been Descendants of the Sun, back in 2016.

Only four years had passed, yet the world had changed beyond recognition. It was as though people had abandoned their television sets overnight.

Indeed, 2020 was the year streaming OTT platforms began rising across the peninsula. Giants such as Netflix swept through the local film and television industry with enormous sums of capital, ushering in an era of exclusive original Korean dramas.

Producer Joo’s lips trembled, his entire face declaring his unwillingness to accept reality. Even after Yoon Yoon-hwi carefully analyzed the situation for him in the gentlest terms possible, he still believed the production division was deliberately targeting him.

Was it?

Who was targeting him?

Yoon Yoon-hwi was dumbfounded. Had everything he just said gone in one ear and out the other?

“Director, you may not be a good person, but you’re not a bad one either. You take acting seriously, so I don’t hold it against you.”

Producer Joo’s words left Yoon Yoon-hwi baffled. Then the producer’s next sentence instantly made everything clear.

“I’m planning to resign once we finish the first season.”

Right.

Yoon Yoon-hwi admitted that the disparaging remarks from Choi, the two-faced chief producer, had given him a preconceived dislike of Producer Joo. But was it possible that Producer Joo really did have a great many unpleasant habits?

He seemed impossible to understand through the lens of ordinary human thought.

“Are you sure? If you are, then I won’t bother trying to persuade you to stay.”

Yoon Yoon-hwi thought it over. Producer Joo’s foul temper was not entirely unbearable. In any case, the old fellow was quite courteous toward him.

As far as he knew, the drama division at SBS was suffering from a shortage of fresh talent. After the second-generation heir of the Taeyoung Group took power, several directors with distinctly left-leaning views had jumped ship.

Producer Joo was among the handful of directors the network could still be proud of.

“No need, Director. You’re actually a pretty good guy.”

A moment ago, he had said Yoon Yoon-hwi was not a good person. Now he was calling him a good guy. Yoon Yoon-hwi had no idea what to say.

It was understandable. Regardless of the political leanings of the directors who had already fled—or those preparing to do so—Netflix offered salaries far higher than SBS. That was the one indisputable fact.

It even made Yoon Yoon-hwi want to work on a Netflix drama.

Judging by production budgets and salaries alone, the three major networks occupied the bottom rung. Above them were the limited-pay channels and general programming channels. At the very top, the most willing to spend were overseas giants such as Netflix.

The situation had already come to this. What else could anyone do? People naturally followed the money.

Fortunately, Producer Joo did not slack off on filming The Penthouse simply because he intended to leave. The higher The Penthouse’s ratings climbed, the better his next offer would be.

The cast and crew gathered together, throwing themselves into the tense filming schedule while digesting the latest revisions to the script.

In between shoots, they filmed behind-the-scenes clips and promotional material. The leads gradually began appearing on various variety programs. Before the premiere, promotion relied mainly on television commercials and the internet; once the show was on the air, they had to appear on programs in person.

Yoon Yoon-hwi also received his first variety-show invitation.

Unfortunately, he once again ran into something difficult to evaluate.

His partner among the hosts of Popular Songs had been replaced.