Page 1 of Break Room
CHAPTER
One
Wikipedia
Break RoomUpdated: 202X-XX-XX 20:23:02
Genre: QBS Reality Competition Show / 2023 Release Shows / 2023
This article is about the QBS television series.
For the pantry, seeBreak Room(pantry).
Overview
Break Room (Korean:???) is a South Korean reality competition TV series on QBS created by producer Lee Il-Kwon. The first season aired every Friday from 10 February to 17 March 2023. (There was previously a ten-episode documentary series with the same title that aired in 2022, but it was discontinued midway through due to low ratings and controversies surrounding some participants.)
The reality series went viral for its natural portrayal of the participants, and the way it blurred the line between reality and screen by creating the impression that participants were genuinely in a break room instead of on a TV set. As of July 2023, highlight clips of the first season on YouTube average one million views, with the most-watched video being, unexpectedly, a compilation of the participants eating lunch together – it has been described as ideal company for viewers who are dining alone.
Lee Il-Kwon has been engrossed in documentaries since his youth. He thinks they serve two essential roles. One is to reveal the raw, unvarnished faces of human nature that stand in stark contrast to how society wishes to present itself. The other is to expose the truths around us that are often deemed too trivial or uncomfortable to acknowledge. His role model is John Grierson, a Scottish documentary director renowned for the latter approach.
For the original ten-episode documentary series ofBreak Room, Lee Il-Kwon obsessively filmed office workers in the break rooms of real companies or organisations they worked at, meticulously capturing the occasionally villainous behaviours simmering beneath the calm surface. The observational nature of this raw footage alone provided enough material to weave a compelling narrative.
The show revealed the subtle ways in which busybodies tried to eavesdrop on conversations across the room, especially when those conversations involved juicy secrets or gossip. It also documented how many times an employee would come into the break room just to kill time, and what phrases they would most commonly mutter upon entering around 2pm. That show discovered that in break rooms at banks, government offices and hospitals, the most frequently uttered phrase was, ‘I want to go home,’ while in sales or shipping companies, it was ‘Aigoo, just kill me already.’ These statistics quickly became a trending topic online, especially in forums for office workers.
But trouble arose as soon as the second episode aired. A female employee who had seven years of work experience was shown chatting with a coworker when she learned that a new hire’s salary was nearly the same as hers. In response, she mixed and drank three sachets of instant coffee immediately, grabbed a handful more, and stuffed them into her pants pocket, walking away with the bulge clearly visible. Her act was captured andbroadcast in its entirety, unedited. As a viewer, I loved that scene – it perfectly conveyed how she gave in to her petty feelings when faced with this injustice, and how she couldn’t help but take something, anything, from the office to ‘fill her pocket’.
But that very scene led to the documentary’s downfall. Screenshots of her pocketing the communal office supplies went viral, sparking widespread criticism of the show’s approach. Many argued that the ruthless magnification of individuals’ private actions bordered on privacy infringement, comparable to hidden-camera schemes – even if filming was done with consent. Unsurprisingly, the harshest critics weren’t dedicated viewers like me, but rather people who hadn’t even watched a single episode.
Il-Kwon thought of countless past cases where attempts to counter criticism head-on had failed spectacularly, and without a hint of remorse, he chose to change the series format into a reality show with the same title.
The following year,Break Roomwas reborn – not as a meticulously crafted documentary that took months to shoot and produce, but as a reality show filmed over a single week. It became his most notable work.
I happened to be on that reality show. There, I was referred to as ‘Ice Cube’.
CHAPTER
Two
It was the first Sunday of December 2022. I remember the winter rain pouring relentlessly, cradled in sleet. I arrived at an office in Seoul to start filming the reality showBreak Room. I was starving, either from the mouthwatering aroma of egg tarts wafting from a nearby street stall or from the nerves that had made me skip breakfast. I dragged my languid body and a large, tightly packed suitcase that weighed at least thirty kilograms.
I had met the producer Il-Kwon just once, a month before the first shoot. I remember feeling just as famished that day, too nervous to stomach a thing. I had admired his documentary series, and it had never crossed my mind, even in my wildest dreams, that I would be cast in his show – but he had personally selected me.
Il-Kwon was someone who never hesitated to assert his ideas. He explained that he personally scouted participants, all ordinary people, instead of holding an open call for auditions. His goal was to find the most typical office workers he could – and, apparently, my co-workers had put me forward for the role without my knowledge.
I asked Il-Kwon a series of questions. What exactly had my coworkers said about me in their recommendation? What was the specific concept of the show? But he was quick to avoid all my attempts to grill him, and said that he couldn’t reveal anything until the first day of filming. All he could tell me was that it would be like a game ofMafiaset in an office break room. When he saw the growing reluctance on my face, he made a bold offer: I could decide whether to join the show after the orientation event on the first day of filming, during which I would meet all the other participants. He assured me the show would merely observe the participants’ behaviour, that the rules were simple, and that filming would only take a week. To accommodate all the participants, he had already made an arrangement with their respective companies for them tocontinue working from their temporary office spaces on set.
When I told Il-Kwon that I was a fan of his documentary version ofBreak Room, he seemed pleased, but as he slowly sipped his coffee, I noticed a tinge of melancholy in his expression. After a brief pause, he said, ‘Then I have to warn you – brace yourself for a little surprise on the first day.’
The moment I arrived at the filming space on the nineteenth floor, Il-Kwon’s warning immediately made sense. The participants were four men, including me, and four women. One of the women was someone I immediately recognised from the documentary series – she was the woman who had stuffed her pockets full of instant coffee sachets after finding out the new hire was being paid the same as her.
The woman glanced around at the cameras set up all over the space, her face sullen as she perched stiffly in a corner. When our eyes met, I offered her a polite smile, secretly amused by her presence, but she dismissed it entirely.
In hindsight, what was the point of all this? Il-Kwon’s cryptic comment about me being in for a ‘little surprise’ had been completely off the mark; it was almost rude. It didn’t come close to describing the shock I felt when his production team gathered up all eight of us and announced that they were going to show a presentation based on some surveys they had conducted.
Who is the worst office villain?
A villain who fills the communalIce Cubetray with cola and coffee?
