Pro Bono

The Gavel and the Mushroom: Justice in the Age of Performance

In the modern judicial landscape, justice is often depicted as blind, but in *Pro Bono* (2025), it is decidedly camera-ready. The series, written by former judge Moon Yoo-seok (*The Devil Judge*, *Miss Hammurabi*), opens not with a legal precedent, but with a social phenomenon: the judge as an influencer. We are introduced to Kang Da-wit (played with frantic, patrician energy by Jung Kyung-ho), a jurist who understands that in the court of public opinion, the verdict matters less than the engagement metrics. His fall from grace—triggered by a farcical bribery scandal involving a fruit crate stuffed with cash—is less a tragedy of ethics than a malfunction of his personal brand.

Director Kim Sung-yoon, shifting gears from the stylized ambition of *Itaewon Class*, constructs a visual binary that is as hilarious as it is telling. The series begins in the sterile, high-contrast halls of the judiciary, where light gleams off marble and robes are worn like superhero capes. But when Da-wit is exiled to the "Pro Bono" team of a corporate law firm, the palette shifts instantly. We descend into a basement office so neglected that mushrooms are literally sprouting in the damp corners. This fungal motif is an inspired touch of set design—a visual gag that doubles as a metaphor. Like the pro bono cases themselves, this office is something the shiny corporate structure above wants to keep in the dark, yet it is teeming with organic, messy life.

Jung Kyung-ho is the perfect vessel for this transition. Few actors can dismantle their own dignity with such surgical precision. As Da-wit, he channels a specific kind of elite fragility; he is a man who treats the loss of his Supreme Court nomination not just as a career failure, but as an aesthetic error. His friction with the Pro Bono team—particularly the earnest, grounded Park Gi-ppeum (So Joo-yeon)—provides the show’s comedic engine. But the humor disguises a sharper critique. Da-wit enters public interest law not out of altruism, but narcissism; he views his indigent clients as props for his redemption arc. The show’s brilliance lies in how it prepares to strip him of this delusion, forcing him to realize that the law is not a tool for his glory, but a shield for the invisible.

The presence of Moon Yoo-seok’s pen is palpable. Unlike generic legal procedural writers who treat cases as puzzles to be solved, Moon treats the law as a flawed language trying to describe human suffering. The premiere episodes suggest that *Pro Bono* will not just be about winning cases, but about the friction between "the law" as a high-minded concept and "justice" as a messy, on-the-ground reality. The team deals with marginalized figures—the poor, the disabled, the foreign laborer—people who usually appear in courtrooms only as statistics.

Ultimately, *Pro Bono* is shaping up to be a satire with a beating heart. It asks a cynical question: Can a man who spent his life looking down from a bench learn to look his clients in the eye? By planting its protagonist in a room where fungi grow on the walls, the show suggests that real growth only happens when you are forced to get your hands dirty. It is a promising, humanist critique of a legal system that often prefers the polished lie to the rotting, honest truth.