Kim Yoo-jung's New tvN Spy Drama Logs 1.54M Teaser Views Before Premiere

100 Days of Lies had cleared 1.54 million teaser views on tvN's official channel by September 11, weeks before its October 10 premiere. That number reflects the kind of pre-release momentum that typically follows a combination of a proven lead actress and a director with two franchise-scale hits on his resume, and this project has both.

The team behind it

Kim Yoo-jung takes the lead role. She is perhaps best known internationally as the child actress in MBC's The Moon That Embraces the Sun, which peaked at 42.2% nationwide ratings in 2012, a figure that belongs in a very short list of Korean drama records. Her own leading role in KBS2's Moonlight Drawn by Clouds reached 23.3% in 2016. She has not done a period drama since, which makes this return to the genre a genuine event.

Director Yoo In-sik helmed all three seasons of SBS's Romantic Doctor, Teacher Kim, the last of which peaked at 27.6%, and ENA's Extraordinary Attorney Woo, which reached 17.5% and became one of the breakout legal dramas of 2022. Screenwriter Ryu Bo-ri, whose SBS drama Do You Like Brahms? was praised for its careful characterization, rounds out the creative team. The combination is deliberate: tvN is positioning this as a prestige Saturday-Sunday slot drama built for sustained ratings, not a quick hit.

What the show is about

Set in Gyeongseong (colonial Seoul) in 1932, the series follows Lee Ga-gyeong (Kim Yoo-jung), the city's most skilled pickpocket, who is recruited by Gugukdan, an anti-Japanese independence organization. She goes undercover inside the Japanese Government-General of Korea, posing as a trainee interpreter named Geum Seo-hee.

Her target, and eventual entanglement, is Kim Tae-woong (played by Park Jin-young, the actor, not the JYP Entertainment founder), the Government-General's elite trilingual interpreter, who is also the adopted son of Political Affairs Director Sato Shin-ichi, played by Jin Seon-kyu. The two meet on a train to Gyeongseong; he begins to suspect her when she keeps appearing in different guises, and she receives orders from Gugukdan sniper Yoo So-ran (Kim Hyun-joo) to win his trust by any means, including a false confession of affection.

The premise layers spy-thriller mechanics onto the romance: the drama's central subject, interpretation, becomes both a plot device and a thematic one, since a skilled interpreter reads what people are not saying as much as what they are. That framing gives the show a structural hook that goes beyond the period costumes.

The supporting cast includes Lee Moo-saeng as a U.S. press correspondent, along with Lee Gi-young, Choi Deok-moon, Seo Jeong-yeon, Kim Do-hyun, and Kim In-kwon, a depth of character actors that signals the production intends to build out the resistance and colonial administration sides of the story with some weight.

Production design recreates Gyeongseong Station and the Government-General interior as they appeared in the early 1930s, a period setting that tvN has used successfully in the past to give historical dramas a visual register distinct from contemporary series.

100 Days of Lies premieres Saturday, October 10 at 9:10 p.m. KST on tvN.