Cover From impossible bosses to punishing work cultures, these K-dramas understand what career burnout looks like (Photo: Viki)
From impossible bosses to punishing work cultures, these K-dramas understand what career burnout looks like (Photo: Viki)
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Experiencing career burnout? These painfully relatable K-dramas explore workplace stress, office politics, difficult bosses, career dissatisfaction and the search for a life beyond work
You know the feeling: it’s Sunday night, your alarm is already set, and you’re mentally drafting the resignation e-mail you swear you’ll send tomorrow. Maybe the problem is your boss. Maybe it’s the commute, the endless meetings or the creeping suspicion that the promotion you’ve been chasing is simply going to give you more work. Or maybe nothing is technically wrong—you’re just tired of spending the best hours of your day at a job that no longer feels like it belongs to you.
K-dramas have become remarkably good at capturing that kind of career burnout. Their workplace stories understand that professional exhaustion rarely arrives as one spectacular breaking point; more often, it accumulates through long commutes, temporary contracts, office politics and the realisation that being successful and being happy are not necessarily the same thing. From corporate climbers and overworked juniors to people who simply decide they want a different life, these are the K-dramas that understand why sometimes the hardest part of work is figuring out what you are working for.
In case you missed it: K-drama’s most unconventional careers, ranked by how fascinatingly unhinged they are
1. ‘Misaeng’ (2014)
Above The gold standard of office dramas remains devastatingly relatable more than a decade later
For anyone who has ever felt like the least qualified person in the room
Nobody in Misaeng arrives at work looking like they’re about to conquer the world.
Jang Geu-rae (Im Si-wan) enters a trading company with almost no conventional qualifications after spending his youth training to become a professional baduk player. What follows isn’t a glossy underdog story but an extraordinarily observant portrait of corporate life: fluorescent lights, impossible deadlines, passive-aggressive hierarchies and the exhausting art of pretending you know what you’re doing.
The genius of Misaeng is that a single spectacular villain doesn’t cause burnout. It’s systemic. Every employee is carrying something—financial pressure, stalled promotions, impossible clients or the quiet humiliation of being overlooked. Oh Sang-shik (Lee Sung-min), Geu-rae’s long-suffering manager, understands that surviving the office often requires as much emotional intelligence as professional talent.
For anyone who has ever stared at a spreadsheet wondering how everyone else appears so competent, this remains the benchmark.
See more: The success formula behind workplace K-dramas like ‘Misaeng’ and ‘Start-Up’
2. ‘My Liberation Notes’ (2022)
Above Burnout doesn’t always announce itself with a breakdown. Sometimes it sounds like, ‘Is this really it?’
For when your job isn’t terrible, but your life feels small
The most radical thing My Liberation Notes does is refuse to give exhaustion a dramatic explanation.
Yeom Mi-jeong (Kim Ji-won) works an ordinary office job in Seoul while enduring a punishing daily commute back to her family’s home in Sanpo. Her siblings are equally adrift: Yeom Chang-hee (Lee Min-ki) goes through adulthood without much sense of direction, while Yeom Gi-jeong (Lee El) spends her days irritated by both work and the life waiting after it. The series frames its three siblings as searching for liberation from repetitive, joyless routines rather than from one singular catastrophe.
That’s why the drama resonates so deeply with people experiencing career fatigue. Nobody says, “I’m burnt out”, every five minutes. Instead, people miss buses, complain about commutes, avoid mandatory office social clubs and fantasise about living differently. The emotional weight comes from repetition—the sense that every weekday is quietly borrowing from the next.
3. ‘Agency’ (2023)
Above Success looks considerably less glamorous when you’re the first woman expected never to crack
For the person who got the promotion and still isn’t happy
Go Ah-in (Lee Bo-young) has reached executive level at one of South Korea’s most competitive advertising agencies, becoming the first woman to hold such a position at VC Group. The catch is that success doesn’t free her from office politics—it intensifies them. Every presentation becomes a referendum on her authority, every colleague potentially a rival and every mistake ammunition for someone waiting below.
Rather than asking whether women can have ambition, Agency asks a much thornier question: what does ambition cost once you’ve already won?
It’s a satisfying watch for anyone whose burnout comes not from failure, but from the exhausting maintenance of success.
4. ‘Diary of a Prosecutor’ (2019–2020)
Above Prestige professions still have expense reports
For anyone who has discovered their dream job includes paperwork
Television loves making prosecutors look heroic. Diary of a Prosecutor would rather show them eating instant noodles between administrative meetings.
Set inside a regional prosecutors’ office, the series follows everyday legal professionals handling everything from petty neighbourhood disputes to bizarre local fraud cases. Cha Myung-joo (Jung Ryeo-won) arrives from Seoul after being transferred to the district office, where she must adjust to a very different working environment alongside colleagues including Lee Sun-woong (Lee Sun-kyun).
The drama’s charm lies in its refusal to inflate ordinary work into mythology. Even prestigious careers contain bureaucracy, repetitive tasks and co-workers who somehow know exactly when you’ve reheated fish in the microwave.
If your career burnout comes from discovering that your dream industry is, in fact, still an office, this one’s for you.
5. ‘Radiant Office’ (2017)
Above Sometimes an existential crisis arrives before the employee handbook
For anyone who has ever wondered why they’re working this hard
Few K-dramas tackle workplace exhaustion from such an unusual angle.
Eun Ho-won (Go Ah-sung) has endured years of rejection while searching for stable employment. Just when she finally lands a corporate job, she receives life-changing news that completely alters how she sees work—and how much of herself she’s willing to sacrifice for it.
That premise could easily become melodrama. Instead, Radiant Office gradually becomes a story about dignity in the workplace: probationary employees fighting to be taken seriously, bosses learning to recognise invisible labour and young professionals discovering that being grateful for employment doesn’t mean accepting mistreatment.
It understands something many people learn too late: having a job and having a healthy working life are not the same achievement.
6. ‘Be Melodramatic’ (2019)
Above Nobody warned us that following your passion still involved invoices
For burnout in the creative industry
Creative careers are often sold as an antidote to corporate life. Be Melodramatic knows better, presenting a harrowing reflection of art-related professions.
The series follows three women in their 30s navigating careers in television production, documentary filmmaking and entertainment while friendship becomes the one thing keeping their increasingly chaotic lives from tipping over completely. Lim Jin-joo (Chun Woo-hee), in particular, turns writing scripts into its own form of emotional archaeology.
What makes the drama so funny is also what makes it painfully accurate: creative people still answer e-mails, negotiate budgets, survive impossible deadlines and occasionally discover that making art is mostly scheduling meetings about making art.
Burnout has never sounded quite so witty.
7. ‘Search: WWW’ (2019)
Above The corner office comes with better views and significantly sharper knives
For women who are brilliant and bone-tired
If Agency is about reaching the summit, Search: WWW is about fighting to stay there.
Bae Ta-mi (Im Soo-jung), Cha Hyeon (Lee Da-hee) and Song Ga-gyeong (Jeon Hye-jin) occupy senior positions in Korea’s fiercely competitive web portal industry, where search rankings can move markets and office rivalries are conducted with extraordinary elegance. Beneath the immaculate tailoring, however, is something recognisable: women who are exceptional at their jobs and increasingly aware that excellence demands an endless performance of composure.
This isn’t career burnout as collapse. It’s burnout as constantly being the smartest person expected to keep proving it.
8. ‘Summer Strike’ (2022)
Above One of the quietest rebellions in K-drama history begins with a resignation letter
For anyone fantasising about leaving it all behind
Not every burnout fantasy involves moving to another company.
Lee Yeo-reum (Kim Seol-hyun) does something far more dramatic: she quits her job, leaves Seoul and relocates to a sleepy seaside village where absolutely nobody expects her to optimise anything. There she meets Ahn Dae-beom (Im Si-wan), a quiet librarian whose own relationship with achievement is considerably more complicated than it first appears.
Summer Strike isn’t really about escaping responsibility. It’s about discovering how much of your identity was built around productivity in the first place.
For anyone who has ever opened a property website during lunch and searched “small town”, this drama understands the assignment.
See more: Nature-focused K-dramas: 6 must-watch shows that trade neon cities for the outdoors
9. ‘Black Dog’ (2019–2020)
Above Job insecurity can be just as exhausting as overwork
For anyone who is good at their job but still feels temporary
Corporate workers don’t have a monopoly on burnout.
Go Ha-neul (Seo Hyun-jin) begins her career as a temporary contract teacher at a prestigious high school. Her new workplace is, unfortunately, shaped by hierarchy, staff politics and the constant anxiety of whether she’ll still have a job next semester.
Rather than turning education into inspirational fantasy, Black Dog spends its time inside faculty meetings, administrative disputes and the invisible labour teachers perform long after students have gone home.
It’s one of television’s most compassionate depictions of professional uncertainty—and a reminder that career burnout often comes from instability as much as workload.
10. ‘My Mister’ (2018)
Above Sometimes the job isn’t the problem. It’s everything the job has swallowed
For anyone whose workplace has become the entire world
Park Dong-hoon (Lee Sun-kyun) is the kind of employee every company quietly depends on: reliable, ethical and permanently carrying more than anyone notices.
Inside his structural engineering firm, stalled promotions, executive politics and financial pressure slowly erode whatever remains of his private life. Then he meets Lee Ji-an (IU), a young temporary worker carrying an entirely different kind of exhaustion, and the drama begins building one of Korean television’s most moving portraits of workplace solidarity.
Calling My Mister a burnout drama almost feels reductive. It’s really about emotional labour—how much people absorb simply because they’re decent and how rarely corporate workplaces reward that decency.
For exhausted professionals, it’s less comforting than cathartic.
Sasha Lim Uy Mariposa is a lifestyle journalist who is known for her food writing. Based in Manila and currently a marketing content specialist, she still dabbles in entertainment, beauty and dining coverage. She was the former managing editor of Esquire Philippines and was the food editor at SPOT.ph. She also edited several best-selling books about food.
She now writes for the different Tatler Asia markets as a contributing writer for T-Labs.
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