Eunhyuk, Dongjun, Inseong and Hyunjae Turn Into Office Workers… ENA’s New Variety Show ‘Idol Dispatch Work’

Top-tier K-pop idols who once ruled South Korea’s K-pop scene shed their glamorous stage outfits and hang their employee badges around their necks. ‘ENA’’s ambitious new ‘real variety show’ ‘Idol Dispatch Work’ is set to air on June 10, ready to deliver a fresh shock to living-room viewers.

“I’ll fill in for the deputy who’s on vacation”… A 100% real office survival tale

‘Idol Dispatch Work’ steps out of the usual box for career experience programming. It is so-called ‘hyper-close office survival’, in which idols are sent to fill the gaps left by office workers who have actually taken vacation, taking over their real jobs. For this project, ‘Super Junior’s Eunhyuk’, ‘Empire of the Children’s Dongjun’, ‘SF9’s Inseong’ and ‘The Boyz’s Hyunjae’ were urgently pulled in. Each episode places them in unfamiliar companies and jobs, and the show lays bare their raw, no-filter office life as they bump into real company employees and run headlong into mishaps.

In particular, viewers are expected to zero in on a ‘no-mercy performance evaluation system’. After the workday ends, ruthless performance measurements are carried out, and harsh penalties are given to the member marked last, at the bottom. A slice of cold-blooded work life disguised as entertainment is expected to spark a strange kind of catharsis among viewers.

The curtain on the broadcast has already risen. On the 3rd, a video that was suddenly pre-released through ‘ENA’’s official YouTube channel showed the members writing their own handwritten resumes and the full ‘real-world interview’ process in which they sweat through pressure questions from actual corporate interviewers, drawing explosive responses.

With them set to battle it out in front of an Excel spreadsheet and a copier machine instead of performing precision choreography onstage, expectations are high for what kind of ‘new paradigm’ they might present amid a flood of run-of-the-mill observational variety shows.