NHK's new drama series The Employee has set Japanese viewers talking about the "double bind" women encounter as they climb the career ladder, according to Akiko Ueda, a senior producer in the public broadcaster's content production team. The show launched a fortnight ago and stars Yoh Yoshida and Sara Minami. It is the second Japanese drama to come out of NHK's Writers' Development Room (WDR), following 30,000,000 Yen, which was featured in Deadline's Global Breakouts column last year.
Ueda told Deadline that the creative team was drawn to the question of whether someone who has internalized an organization's values can ever truly free themselves from them. In Japan, she said, women at work can find themselves in what amounts to a double bind: even when they have strong abilities and ambitions, they may be expected not to assert those qualities too forcefully. In such an environment, people can easily begin tying their sense of self-worth to how their organization evaluates them, creating a powerful need for recognition and approval. Ueda described this as a restrictive and unreasonable situation, and said the writers set out to pull it apart through a character who has let her value be defined by her organization and ultimately fights against that system to reclaim herself.
The series follows Eriko, a 50-year-old executive hopeful who has spent her career battling to succeed in a male-dominated corporate world. She is leading a major project that promises to secure her a place on the board and believes she has done everything right. Just before the project launches, however, an anonymous threatening letter arrives, shaking both her career and the organization to which she has devoted herself.
According to Ueda, NHK wanted to tackle big societal questions head-on and faced a major challenge in approaching subjects including harassment, the relationship between perpetrators and victims, and gender dynamics in the workplace. She said the cast helped the production team meet that challenge. She praised Yoshida's earnestness in playing Eriko as a character swaying between corporate righteousness and human righteousness, while Minami, as Ruri, constantly introduces new dynamics to Eriko's situation through a character with an underlying vulnerability. Led by the two, Ueda said, the cast played their characters as multifaceted people who cannot be neatly categorized as simply good or bad, giving the story depth and credibility.
The project might have turned out very differently. Ueda explained that it began as a three-line logline and was originally set in a community of mothers connected through their children rather than in an office. Whatever the setting, NHK saw potential in a story about women with different values and life experiences meeting and influencing one another. Shifting the setting to a corporate environment later allowed the team to explore not only interpersonal relationships but also structural issues within organizations and power dynamics, giving the story greater social relevance.
The Employee won the WDR's second edition after beating eight other scripts shortlisted last summer. WDR program director Keita Hosaka previously told Deadline that the writers room programme was created out of fears that the best young Japanese drama writing talent was flooding toward manga, video games and comedy. Ueda said the first show, 30,000,000 Yen, a similarly winding thriller, was widely praised for its fast-paced plot and unpredictability. NHK hopes to run a third WDR, but no timing has been announced.
The Employee is written by Tomomi Naka, Shu Matsui, Tomoe Asaka and Sou Tateya. It is directed by Keita Hosaka, Keisuke Oshima and Yuki Nishio, and produced by Ueda with Shouta Ishimura.
Sources: Deadline.