Another one of my highly-anticipated watches that fell a bit flat for me towards the end. At least it was a happy ending for everyone involved, especially my favorite girl squad.

A Virtuous Business follows Jeong-suk, a young housewife living in early 90s Geumje, a small town (village?) where everyone is everyone else's business. When her dead-beat husband loses his job, Jeong-suk must find a way to make a living, and that's when she's introduced to selling lingerie and sex toys.

It's definitely a crazy business to be involved in in a country as conservative in South Korea during that time period, and in fact Jeong-suk face a lot of backlash as she and her three compatriots and business partners, Yeong-bok, Geum-hui, and Ju-ri, struggle to get their business off the ground.

The show overall was quite fun, and it's such an intriguing concept, but I think the story was much stronger when it focused on the four women running their business amidst all the rejection and being an amazing support system for each other. In just 12 episodes, the show had to squeeze in the business plot PLUS the detective solving a decades-old mystery AND trying to find his birth mother PLUS Yeong-bok's husband's drama PLUS Ju-ri's love interest's drama... it just ended up being too disjointed and too much. So much so that even important conflicts were rushed in their resolution that the whole point was lost. I mean, no one likes a dragged-out plot point, but surely there's a middle ground between that and said plot point being resolved in like half an episode and all the characters moving on like nothing happened.

Also, that time skip at the end is absolutely diabolical, 4 YEARS is simply too much. How did Jeong-suk and co end up with a big boutique store in the middle of town for a business that no-one is seemingly a fan of, as demonstrated by the protest on the street on the day of their opening?

But I think the show's biggest "sin" is wasting important themes that could have made it stand out or not fully committing to them. I'm not saying it had to be a raunch-fest, but the story of a young, newly-divorced mother selling sex toys and sexy lingerie in a deeply conservative rural town seems like an opportunity to explore how women can explore and own their sexuality on their own terms, and not just for the pleasure of men, and how women can just own their lives in general.

And yet the main selling point of the lingerie is for the women to look good for their husbands. Jeong-suk enters a new relationship with a hot, well-adjusted guy (with a JOB, thank God) and the relationship is as chaste as any typical kdrama even though their chemistry was fire. Ju-ri and Yeong-bok are in relationships with man-children that they still have to take care of on tope of everything else going on in their lives. Geum-hui is the only one whose husband turns out to be somewhat normal at the end, but I'm not sure if that was deliberate character development or the writers forgot his characterization. Also we're told Geum-hui didn't want children and wanted to live like a modern woman, and yet it turns out she did have a child and she was a housewife in any case spending her days cooking for her husband and following his every whim.

And I just generally think focusing on the business in general and how it grew plus setbacks would have made the show more interesting. There were scenes of them discussing game plans here and there, but they felt awkward and like they were written by people who didn't know what they were talking about. Why did they never expand their reach to other towns? Just how many vibrators could the butcher possibly buy?

I'm sure having more episodes would have helped give room to fully develop these concepts, but also I'm not even sure the writers would have made good use of the opportunity.

Still, I enjoyed the four women's friendship; I love how they came from different backgrounds and circumstances and found common ground with the business and each other. Even though I wasn't a fan of the ending, I'm glad that they were successful in the end and that everything ended on a good note, and I still think the show was quite good for what it is. The acting was great, the setting and production was great; I just wish it had done more.